Chapter 10 - Make Something Wonderful
Today’s Chapter is based on the book “Make Something Wonderful” which is a curated collection of Steve Jobs’ speeches, interviews, and correspondences.
You can read it for free here:
https://stevejobsarchive.com/book
Life is short, don’t waste it
“Don’t do anything someone else can do. Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.” — Edwin Land
As discussed in our previous Chapter on Edwin Land, Steve Jobs was greatly inspired by his life and business philosophy. Similarly to Land, he was convinced that life is too short to not be doing something important and to change the world even if it seems nearly impossible:
“Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact—and that is: everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. And the minute you can understand that you can poke life, and if you push in, then something will pop out the other side; that you can change it, you can mold it—that’s maybe the most important thing: to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there, and you’re just going to live in it versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it. I think that’s very important, and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better.”
— Steve Jobs
More importantly, Jobs explains that it was important to chase your dreams. Life is too short to be wasting time living someone else’s life and to be working in a career that one is not in love with. This is eerily similar to Warren Buffett’s principle of tap dancing to work. As Buffett would say, it is very difficult to succeed in a career that you are not passionate about.
“Find your passion. I was very, very lucky to find it when I was seven or eight years old... You’re lucky in life when you find it. And you can’t guarantee you’ll find it in your first job out. But I always tell college students that come out (to Omaha), ‘Take the job you would take if you were independently wealthy. You’re going to do well at it.’”
— Warren Buffett
“The only thing one can do is to believe that some of what you follow with your heart will indeed come back to make your life much richer. And it will. And you will gain an ever firmer trust in your instincts and intuition. Don’t be a career. The enemy of most dreams and intuitions, and one of the most dangerous and stifling concepts ever invented by humans, is the “Career.” A career is a concept for how one is supposed to progress through stages during the training for and practicing of your working life. There are some big problems here. First and foremost is the notion that your work is different and separate from the rest of your life. If you are passionate about your life and your work, this can’t be so. They will become more or less one. This is a much better way to live one’s life.”
— Steve Jobs
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
— Steve Jobs
“Sometime life’s gonna hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.”
— Steve Jobs
Furthermore, Jobs mentions that having a creative mindset is the key to achieving the impossible. As a matter of fact, he mentions that Apple was a group of misfits, crazy ones, and troublemakers which allowed them to think differently. It is by staying hungry and by staying foolish that you can change the world.
“If you don’t have any of these feelings, called dreams, then you’re in trouble. Before you “spend” four or more years of your life going in a direction your heart may or may not want you to go, you need to recapture them. Be a creative person. Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights that others don’t see. You have to have them to connect them. Creative people feel guilty that they are simply relaying what they “see.” How do you get a more diverse set of experiences? Not by traveling the same path as everyone else …”
— Steve Jobs
““Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
— Steve Jobs
Technology Enhancing Human Creativity
“And what our competence is, is making complex technology easy to use and self-discoverable.“
— Steve Jobs
Jobs believed in the principle that technology should allow individuals to enhance not only their productivity but also their creativity and artistic sense. But to do so, it was primordial to make it accessible to the general public. As such, Apple’s main philosophy has always been to close the gap between sophisticated technology and mere mortals by building products that are easy to learn and use.
“While I am not normally one to look back, today is a good day to remember Apple’s legacy, which is to bridge the gap between sophisticated technology and “the rest of us” who make up most of humanity. It’s our job to make complex technology easy to use and fun to use.”
— Steve Jobs
“Apple is the world’s premier company at building high technology products that are easy to learn and use by mere mortals. Beginning over 20 years ago, Apple has consistently set the standard for easy to use computer systems and software. Why do we do this? Because we are in love with the potential for personal computers to enhance and enrich the lives of regular people.”
— Steve Jobs
“Apple marries state of the art technology with Apple’s legendary ease-of-use to create products that enable users to do more Apple is the world’s premier bridge builder between mere mortals and the exploding world of high technology. Apple enables mere mortals around the world to grasp by making it easy to learn and use Apple is the premier company in the world at making the exploding world of high technology easy to learn and use, thereby enabling mere mortals to enrich their lives using it.”
— Steve Jobs
For Jobs, the Macintosh was the perfect technology product. It was a tool to enhance human creativity while being practical and simple. And this was only made possible by bringing a liberal arts point of view to the use of computers. As a matter of fact, he once said that the people on the Macintosh team would have been great writers, musicians or artists and the Macintosh was their masterpiece.
“And that’s what Macintosh is all about. It’s the first “telephone” of our industry. But the neatest thing about it to me is, the same as the telephone to the telegraph, Macintosh lets you sing. It lets you use special fonts. It lets you make drawings and pictures or incorporate other people’s drawings or pictures into your documents.“
— Steve Jobs
“What I mean by that is that if you really look at the ease of use of the Macintosh, the driving motivation behind that was to bring—not only ease of use to people so that many, many more people could use computers for nontraditional things at that time—but it was to bring beautiful fonts and typography to people. It was to bring graphics to people, not for plotting laminar flow calculations, but so that they could see beautiful photographs, or pictures, or artwork, et cetera, to help them communicate what they were doing, potentially. Our goal was to bring a liberal arts perspective and a liberal arts audience to what had traditionally been a very geeky technology and a very geeky audience.”
— Steve Jobs
“So if we can again inject that liberal-arts spirit into this very serious realm of business, I think it would be a worthwhile contribution.”
— Steve Jobs
“Because in my perspective, and the way I was raised, was that science and computer science is a liberal art. It’s something that everyone should know how to use, at least, and harness in their life. It’s not something that should be relegated to 5 percent of the population over in the corner. It’s something that everybody should be exposed to, everyone should have a mastery of, to some extent, and that’s how we viewed computation, or these computation devices.”
— Steve Jobs
Beauty matters. Details matter.
“Simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance”
— Coco Chanel
Jobs built his first computer with his friend Steve Wozniak because they wanted to use one, but they could not afford one at that time. And that’s what led them to start Apple as no other companies were interested in building personal computers:
“The reason we [Wozniak and I] built a computer was that we wanted one, and we couldn’t afford to buy one. They were thousands of dollars at that time. We were just two teenagers. We started trying to build them and scrounging parts around Silicon Valley where we could. After a few attempts, we managed to put together something that was the Apple I.”
— Steve Jobs
“That’s how we got in the business. We took our idea [for the computer] to a few companies, one where Woz worked [Hewlett-Packard] and one where I worked at the time [Atari]. Neither one was interested in pursuing it, so we started our own company.”
— Steve Jobs
Therefore, Steve Jobs built Apple with one principle in mind: to build products that they would want to use themselves. As a matter of fact, this is how the iPhone got to be created; it was driven by the fact that they all hated their phones and wanted to build a phone that they could use.
“Steve gave a speech once, which is one of my favorites, where he talked about, in a certain sense, “We build the products that we want to use ourselves.” And so he’s really pursued that with incredible taste and elegance that has had a huge impact on the industry.“
— Bill Gates
“You know, one of the reasons we started doing this [was] we could see that we were getting better and better at iPods, and we could see that there was an opportunity to maybe do the next thing—and what should it be? And it wasn’t driven by a bunch of market research or financial spreadsheets about how big certain markets were. It wasn’t driven by that at all. It was driven by the fact that we all hated our phones. We talked to all of our friends and all the people we knew, and they all hated their phones. And we thought, “This is a really important device, and everybody hates it. They don’t know how to use even 10 percent of the features that are on these phones!””
— Steve Jobs
As such, it was important for Jobs for the product to be beautiful if he was going to use it, perhaps, due to his background in liberal art. He believed that it didn’t take that much more to put out a well-designed product except a little more time. In fact, even if he knew it was going to sell well as it is, he was not willing to put out a product that looked like garbage.
“People are just going to suck this stuff up so fast no matter what it looks like. And it doesn’t cost any more money to make them look great. They are going to be these new objects that are going to be in everyone’s working environment, everyone’s educational environment, and everyone’s home environment. We have a shot [at] putting a great object there—and if we don’t, we’re going to put one more piece-of-junk object there.”
— Steve Jobs
“But the real big thing is: if you’re going to make something, it doesn’t take any more energy—and rarely does it take more money—to make it really great. All it takes is a little more time. Not that much more. And a willingness to do so, a willingness to persevere until it’s really great.”
— Steve Jobs
By consequence, it is clear for Jobs that technology and art are inseparable. As Edwin Land famously said: “Industry at its best is the intersection of science and art.” This is also eerily similar to James Dyson’s ideology that design and engineering should be worked along, instead of designing an engineered machine at the end.
Making Mistakes is Fine
“You never achieve what you want without falling on your face a few times.”
— Steve Jobs
It is fair too say that Steve Jobs, like all individuals, has made his fair amount of mistakes. As a matter of fact, Jobs faced various challenges during his business career. Notably, in 1985, he was forced out of Apple by the Board of Directors and this led to him building Pixar and NeXT, a computer platform computer that was later acquired by Apple.
And yet, despite all his adversities, Jobs was never afraid of failures. As a matter of fact, character is built during challenging times and one learns more through mistakes than through success:
“Character is built not in good times, but in bad times; not in a time of plenty, but in a time of adversity—and this school seems to manage to nurture that spirit of adversity, and I think does build some character.”
— Steve Jobs
“One of the things I always tried to coach myself on was not being afraid to fail. When you have something that doesn’t work out, a lot of times, people’s reaction is to get very protective about never wanting to fall on their face again. I think that’s a big mistake, because you never achieve what you want without falling on your face a few times in the process of getting there. I’ve tried to not be afraid to fail, and, matter of fact, I’ve failed quite a bit since leaving Apple.”
— Steve Jobs
To overcome his fear of failure, Jobs would often question himself every morning by asking what would he do if today were the last day of his life. It may sound cynical, but it is consistent with his belief that life is too short to be filled with regret. Another way of doing it was to forget about the past and to focus on what was in front of him.
“For the past thirty-three years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”
— Steve Jobs
“Now, as you live your arc across the sky, you want to have as few regrets as possible. Remember, regrets are different from mistakes. Mistakes are those things that you did and wish you could do over again. In some you were a fool (usually concerning women). In others you were scared. In others you hurt someone else. Some mistakes are deep, others not. But if your intent was pure, they are almost always enriching in some way. So mistakes are things that you did and wish you could do over again. Regrets are most often things you didn’t do, and wish you did. I still regret not kissing Nancy Kinniman in high school. Who knows what might have happened? Maybe she regrets it too …”
— Steve Jobs
““Let’s stop looking backwards here. It’s all about what happens tomorrow.” Because you can’t look back and say, “Well, gosh, you know, I wish I hadn’t have gotten fired, I wish I was there, I wish this, I wish that.” It doesn’t matter. And so let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.”
— Steve Jobs
This idea of stop looking backwards and focusing on what happens tomorrow reminds of the single most important practice in stoicism philosophy: to differentiate what you can control and what you cannot. While you cannot change your previous mistakes, it is much more important to focus on having as few regrets as possible in the future.
“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own…”
— Epictetus
Beyond the Book
Read “Control and Choice” by The Daily Stoic
Listen to “#299: A New Book on Steve Jobs! Make Something Wonderful” by Founders Podcast