I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes.
It’s very easy to take credit for the thinking. The doing
is more concrete. But somebody, it’s very easy to say “Oh, I thought of
these three years ago”. But usually when you dig a little deeper, you
find that the people that really did it were also the people that really
worked through the hard intellectual problems as well.
Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D
dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at
least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the
people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.
I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the
company, the way you organize a company. The whole notion of how you
build a company is fascinating.
Leonardo [da Vinci] was the artist but he also mixed all
his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist. He knew about
pigments, knew about human anatomy. And combining all of those skills together, the art and the science, the thinking and the doing, was what resulted in the exceptional result.
When companies get bigger they try to replicate their success. But they assume their magic came from process.
The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers.
Actually, making an insanely great product has a lot to
do with the process of making the product, how you learn things and
adopt new ideas and throw out old ideas.
People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of
electrochemical computers. Your thoughts construct patterns like
scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In
most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a
record, and they never get out of them. It’s a rare person who etches
grooves that are other than a specific way of looking at things, a
specific way of questioning things.
You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could
have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he
didn’t. He had to move on, and when he did, by going electric in 1965,
he alienated a lot of people. His 1966 Europe tour was his greatest.
The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving,
moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do – keep
moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you are not busy being born, you’re
busy dying.
I don’t think that my role in life is to run big organizations and do incremental improvements.
I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and
I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted
to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re
harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go
through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely
failed.
The people who go to see our movies are trusting us with
something very important – their time and their imagination. So in order
to respect that trust, we have to keep changing; we have to challenge
ourselves and try to surprise our audiences with something new every
time.
Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways
or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they
realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a
problem.
It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who
thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to
know what other people think of his idea.
You can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next
big thing is. There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If
I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A
faster horse’.
My philosophy is that everything starts with a great
product. So, you know, I obviously believed in listening to customers,
but customers can’t tell you about the next breakthrough that’s going to
happen next year that’s going the change the whole industry. So you
have to listen very carefully. But then you have to go and sort of stow
away – you have to go hide away with people that really understand the
technology, but also really care about the customers, and dream up this next breakthrough.
Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is
best to admit them quickly and get on with improving your other
innovations.
Steve Jobs Words On Thinking Differently
The theme of the campaign is ‘Think different’. It’s honoring the people who think different, and who move this world forward.
Apple is built on refugees from other companies. These
are the extremely bright individual contributors who were troublemakers
at other companies.
The people who made Mac are sort of on the edge.
On if he is a nerd or a hippie: If I had to pick one of
those two I’m clearly a hippie. All the people that I worked with were
clearly in that category too.
I think the artistry is in having an insight into what
one sees around them. Generally putting things together in a way no one
else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who
don’t have that insight.
5 quotes on thinking differently
I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking. Albert Einstein
If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old. Peter Drucker
Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness. Michel de Montaigne
Be yourself, everyone else is already taken. Oscar Wilde
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect). Mark Twain
Steve Jobs Words On Creativity
Creativity is just connecting things.
When you ask creative people how they did something, they
feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw
something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they
were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.
And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
The way to ratchet up our species is to get better things to more people -products with spirit and creativity.
I don’t think that most of the really best people that
I’ve worked with worked with computers for the sake of working with
computers. They worked with computers because they are the medium that
is best capable of transmitting some feeling that you have, that you
want to share with other people.
What I do see is a small group of people who are artists
and care more about their art than they do about almost anything else.
It’s more important than finding a girlfriend, it’s more important… than
cooking a meal, it’s more important than joining the Marines, it’s more
important than whatever.
Look at the way artists work. They’re not typically the
most ‘balanced’ people in the world. Now, yes, we have a few workaholics
here who are trying to escape other things, of course. But the majority
of people out here have made very conscious decisions; they really
have.
One of my role models is Bob Dylan. As I grew up, I
learned the lyrics to all his songs and watched him never stand still.
If you look at the artists, if they get really good, it always occurs to
them at some point that they can do this one thing for the rest of
their lives, and they can be really successful to the outside world but
not really be successful to themselves. That’s the moment that an artist
really decides who he or she is. If they keep on risking failure,
they’re still artists.
It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able
to really contribute something amazing. Of course, there are some people
who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but
they’re rare.
As you are growing and changing, the more the outside
world tries to reinforce an image of you that it thinks you are, the
harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times,
artists have to go, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting
out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.
3 simple ways to improve your creativity like Steve
- Walk.
Steve was famous for his walking meetings. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
too, Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Charles Dickens, and Beethoven.
- Travel. Steve visited India in 1974 searching new experiences and a deeper meaning of life.
- Meditate.
After his trip to India, Steve became a practitioner of Zen Buddhism
and meditation. He even went to meditation retreats every few months.
Try it yourself, you could improve your creativity, clarity, and focus.
Steve Jobs Words On Design And User Experience (UX)
We are very careful about what features we add because we can’t take them away.
You’ve baked a really lovely cake, but then you’ve used dog shit for frosting.
Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation
that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product
or service.
I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s
inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the
back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.
To design something really well,
you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It
takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something,
chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the
time to do that.
Many companies forget what it means to make great
products. After initial success, sales and marketing people take over
and the product people eventually make their way out.
When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of
drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even
though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s
there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back.
I love it when you can bring really great design and
simple capability to something that doesn’t cost much. It was the
original vision for Apple. That’s what we tried to do with the first
Mac. That’s what we did with the iPod.
For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
It takes a lot of hard work,” Jobs said, “to make
something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come
up with elegant solutions.
A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse
experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up
with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.
We will make them bright and pure and honest about being
high-tech, rather than a heavy industrial look of black, black, black,
black, like Sony.
We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the
trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but
also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our
wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most
about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care
about using a quarter of the water?
We spent two weeks talking about this every night at the
dinner table. We’d get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And
the talk was about design.
People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are
handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think
design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
You’re asking, where does aesthetic judgment come from?
With many things: high-performance automobiles, for example, the
aesthetic comes right from the function, and I suppose electronics is no
different.
I’ve also found that the best companies pay attention to
aesthetics. They take the extra time to lay out grids and proportion
things appropriately, and it seems to pay off for them. I mean, beyond
the functional benefits, the aesthetic communicates something about how
they think of themselves, their sense of discipline in engineering, how
they run their company, stuff like that.
It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
The products suck! There’s no sex in them anymore!
Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in
your brain, these concepts and fitting them all together in kind of
continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get
what you want.
Every day you discover something new that is a new
problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little
differently.
I have always found Buddhism – Japanese Zen Buddhism in
particular – to be aesthetically sublime. The most sublime thing I’ve
ever seen are the gardens around Kyoto.
Look at the Mercedes design, the proportion of sharp
detail to flowing lines. Over the years, they have made the design
softer but the details starker. That’s what we have to do with the
Macintosh.
You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology.
What we’re trying to do is remove the barrier of having to learn how to use a computer.
This is what customers pay us for – to sweat all these
details so it’s easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We’re
supposed to be really good at this. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to
customers.
It’s hard for them to tell you what they want when
they’ve never seen anything remotely like it. Take desktop video
editing. I never got one request from someone who wanted to edit movies
on his computer. Yet now that people see it, they say, ‘Oh my God,
that’s great!’.
What we’re going to do is make the products high-tech,
and we’re going to package them cleanly so that you know they’re
high-tech. We will fit them in a small package, and then we can make
them beautiful and white, just like Braun does with its electronics.
On making simple designs:
It’s insane: We all have busy lives, we have jobs, we have interests,
and some of us have children. Everyone’s lives are just getting busier,
not less busy, in this busy society. You just don’t have time to learn
this stuff, and everything’s getting more complicated… We both don’t
have a lot of time to learn how to use a washing machine or a phone.
Our DNA is as a consumer company – for that individual
customer who’s voting thumbs up or thumbs down. That’s who we think
about.
We think that our job is to take responsibility for the complete user experience.
3 great quotes on user experience:
Customer service is the new marketing. Derek Sivers
Customer service shouldn’t just be a department, it should be the entire company. Tony Hsieh
The single most important thing is to make people happy.
If you are making people happy, as a side effect, they will be happy to
open up their wallets and pay you. Derek Sivers
Steve Jobs Words On Culture, Arts And Music
We want to stand at the intersection of computers and humanism.
Besides Dylan, I was interested in Eastern mysticism, which hit the shores at about the same time.
Woz and I very much liked Bob Dylan’s poetry, and we spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of that stuff.
I started to listen to music a whole lot and I started to
read more outside of just science and technology, Shakespeare, Plato. I
loved ‘King Lear’.
Apple is about something more than that, Apple, at the
core, its core value, is that we believe that people with passion can
change the world for the better.
Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to
trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and
then try to bring those things into what you’re doing.
Learning to program teaches you how to think. Computer science is a liberal art.
Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists
steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and
I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people
working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and
historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the
world.
On why he made everybody sign the Mac cases: Because the
people that worked on it consider themselves and I certainly consider
them artists. These are the people that under different circumstances
would be painters and poets but because of that time that we live in
this new medium has appeared in which to express oneself to one’s fellow
species and that’s a medium of computing.
How do you know the direction to head with products? It
boils down to taste. Emerge yourself with the best ideas from the
humanities. And integrate them. Pull interests from diverse areas.
A lot of people that would have been artists and
scientists have gone into this field to express their feeling and so it
seemed like the right thing to do.
The finest dozen computer scientists I know are all musicians.
The key thing that comes true is that they had a variety
of experiences which they could draw upon, in order to try to solve a
problem or to attack a particular dilemma in a kind of unique way.
Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist and a great scientist.
Michelangelo knew a tremendous amount about how to cut stone at the quarry.
The finest dozen computer scientists I know are all
musicians. Some are better than others, but they all consider that an
important part of their life. I don’t believe that the best people in
any of these fields see themselves as one branch of a forked tree. I
just don’t see that. People bring these things together a lot.
Anyway, one of our biggest challenges, and the one I
think John Sculley and I should be judged on in five to ten years, is
making Apple an incredibly great 10 or 20 billion-dollar company. ‘Will
it still have the spirit it does today?’ We’re charting new territory.
If Apple becomes a place where computers are a commodity
item, where the romance is done, and where people forget that computers
are the most incredible invention that man has ever invented, I’ll feel I
have lost Apple. But if I’m a million miles away, and all those people
still feel those things… then I will feel that my genes are still there.
You know, Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid.
On Dr. Edwin Land: Not only was he one of the great
inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of
art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that.
You need a very product-oriented culture, even in a
technology company. Lots of companies have tons of great engineers and
smart people. But ultimately, there needs to be some gravitational force
that pulls it all together. Otherwise, you can get great pieces of
technology all floating around the universe. But it doesn’t add up to
much.
We did iTunes because we all love music. We made what we
thought was the best jukebox in iTunes. Then we all wanted to carry our
whole music libraries around with us. The team worked really hard. And
the reason that they worked so hard is because we all wanted one. You
know? I mean, the first few hundred customers were us.
What are we, anyway? Most of what we think we are is just
a collection of likes and dislikes, habits, patterns. At the core of
what we are is our values, and what decisions and actions we make
reflect those values.
Steve Jobs Words On Learning, Education, Meditation
Well, I was thrown out of school a few times.
I think all of us need to be on guard against arrogance which knocks at the door whenever you’re successful.
Invest time in yourself to have great experiences that are going to enrich you.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting
fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.
The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of
being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter
one of the most creative periods of my life.
Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.
The key thing to remember about me is that I’m still a student. I’m still in boot camp. If anyone is reading any of my thoughts, I’d keep that in mind.
I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good,
then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too
long. Just figure out what’s next.
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best
calligraphy instruction in the country… I decided to take a calligraphy
class to learn how to do this. It was beautiful, historical,
artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it
fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application
in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first
Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.
We wanted to more richly experience why were we were
alive, not just make a better life, and so people went in search of
things. The great thing that came from that time was to realize that
there was definitely more to life than the materialism of the late 50’s
and early sixties. We were going in search of something deeper.
Between my sophomore and junior years, I got stoned for
the first time; I discovered Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, and all that
classic stuff. I read Moby Dick and went back as a junior taking
creative-writing classes.
You could get LSD fresh made from Stanford. You could
sleep on the beach at night with your girlfriend. California has a sense
of experimentation and a sense of openness – openness to new
possibilities.
Human minds settle into fixed ways of looking at the
world and that’s always been true and it’s probably always going to be
true.
There’s a phrase in Buddhism, ‘Beginner’s mind’. It’s wonderful to have a beginner’s mind.
I’m completely stunned. I’m 19 years old, in a foreign
country, up in the Himalayas, and here is this bizarre Indian baba who
has just dragged me away from the rest of the crowd, shaving my head
atop this mountain peak. I’m still not sure why he did it.
I bought an apartment in New York, but it’s because I
love that city. I’m trying to educate myself, being from a small town in
California, not having grown up with the sophistication and culture of a
large city. I consider it part of my education.
I used to think that technology could help education.
I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools
than anybody else on the planet. But I’ve had to come to the inevitable
conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to
solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No
amount of technology will make a dent.
The most important thing is a person. A person who
incites and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the
same way that people can.
One of the saints in my life is this woman named Imogene
Hill, who was a fourth-grade teacher who taught this advanced class. She
got hip to my whole situation in about a month and kindled a passion in
me for learning things. I learned more that year than I think I learned
in any year in school.
I was pretty bored in school, and I turned into a little
terror. You should have seen us in third grade. We basically destroyed
our teacher. We would let snakes loose in the classroom and explode
bombs.
School was pretty hard for me at the beginning.
My mother taught me how to read before I got to school
and so when I got there I really just wanted to do two things. I wanted
to read books because I loved reading books and I wanted to go outside
and chase butterflies. You know, do the things that five-year-olds like
to do. I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever
encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got
me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.
Obviously, one of the great challenges of an education is to teach us how to think.
What we’re finding is that computers are actually going to affect the
quality of thinking as more and more of our children have these tools
available to them.
I know from my own education that if I hadn’t encountered
two or three individuals that spent extra time with me, I’m sure I
would have been in jail.
When you’re young, a little bit of course correction goes a long way. I think it takes pretty talented people to do that.
