Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs’s Vision for the World

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Today marks two months since the death of Steve Jobs. You’ve read incredible eulogies, countless personal remembrances, and perhaps have finished reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of the man. I wanted to share the video below, a brief 46-second clip featured in a recent PBS documentary. It vividly captures Steve Jobs’s spirit and his vision for the world:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvEiSa6_EPA

When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is…and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact: and that is that 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. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

The above edited footage comes from a 1995 interview conducted by the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association, while Jobs was still at NeXT, without the dramatic music. See the full video here.

While I sympathize with Jobs’s vision, I must admit that I haven’t acted upon his message. Not yet. But I will.

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(via A Photo Editor and Brain Pickings)

Steve Jobs as a Modern-Day Jules Verne

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I’m a bit late to this, but Maria Popova, editor of Brain Pickings, has a wonderful personal post reflecting on the life and legacy of Steve Jobs:

I grew up in Bulgaria in the 1980s. Before the fall of the communist regime in 1989, scarcity underpinned the status quo — of commodities, of information, of opportunity. So limited were Western imports that once a year, around New Year’s, a handful of grocery stores would make available “exotic” produce like tropical fruit. The supply-demand ratio was so skewed that the store had to ration these exorbitantly priced annual luxuries — one banana and two oranges per person — and people would line up around the block to get them. (Meanwhile, the unworthy apple, Bulgaria’s most ample fruit crop, would sit neglected in the produce aisle at 50 stotinki a kilogram, roughly $0.15 per pound.) The most ambitious parents would camp out in front of the store overnight to make sure they got the bananas and oranges first thing in the morning as they went on sale.

In my lifetime, I’ve only seen such lines twice since — first in front of the Apple Store on June 29, 2007, when the iPhone was released, and then again in April of last year, when the iPad became semi-available. Under Steve Jobs, Apple became the bananas of the West.

In the 1990s, my mother joined Bulgarian Business Systems — Bulgaria’s first and, for over a decade, only official Apple dealer. I had grown up reading Jules Verne, so when we got our first Macintosh, I remember thinking that the man behind it — because, let’s face it, such was the cultural conditioning that I wouldn’t have expected a woman — must be some modern-day Jules Verne, having just handed me a portal for curiosity and exploration that helped me lean into knowledge in a way that has since become the fundamental driving force of my intellectual life.

Definitely worth reading. In the post, Maria touches upon networked knowledge and combinatorial creativity, the subject of her Creative Mornings talk earlier this year.

The Fragility of Ideas

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On October 19, Apple held an event to honor Steve Jobs. Featured appearances include the newly-appointed CEO Tim Cook and the legendary designer Jony Ive, who goes on to talk about the fragility of ideas (as proposed by Steve Jobs):

Steve used to say to me — and he used to say this a lot — “Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea.”

And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet simple ones, which in their subtlety, their detail, they were utterly profound.

And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.

So eloquently said. I’m reminded of this quote from Inception:

What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient… highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed—fully understood—that sticks; right in there somewhere. 

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(Hat Tip: Fortune)

Jony Ive and Freedom

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I’ve pre-ordered Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, and I can’t wait to read it. In the meantime, I’ve been following some news outlets reporting snippets from the book. This bit about the iconic designer at Apple, Jonathan (Jony) Ive, and his independence at the company, struck a chord with me:

In talking with author Walter Isaacson for the book, Jobs revealed that he viewed Ive as his “spiritual partner” at Apple. Showing his trust in Ive, the company co-founder left him more freedom than anyone else in the company — a perk that remains even after Jobs’s death.

“He [Steve Jobs] told Isaacson that Ive had ‘more operational power’ at Apple than anyone else besides Jobs himself — that there’s no one at the company who can tell Ive what to do,” the report said. “That, says Jobs, is ‘the way I set it up.'”

Ive and Jobs became close at Apple, working directly together on designing a number of the company’s core products, including the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. Ive, a 44-year-old native of London, joined Apple in 1996 and has held his current job since 1997.

After I finish reading the book sometime next week, I will post a comprehensive review of my own. Stay tuned.

R.I.P. Steve Jobs

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Today, Steve Jobs has passed away at the age of 56. I am so sad.

Tonight, I watch, again, Steve Jobs’s commencement speech from Stanford.

This is some of the best advice you’ll ever hear:

Sometimes life hits 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 until you find it. Don’t settle.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

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.

R.I.P. Steve Jobs. You were a visionary. The world is a better place for everything you have done. Thank you.

Steve Jobs Resigns as Apple’s CEO

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Wow. Steve Jobs just resigned as Apple’s CEO. Biggest news of the day, by far. That earthquake on the East Coast yesterday? This is an earthquake for the West Coast. Tim Cook becomes Apple’s new CEO while Jobs transitions his role as Chairman of Apple’s Board.

The WSJ has a nice list of the best Steve Jobs quotes over the years, such as this one:

These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that.

But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light — that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have to change the world to be important.

And oh, this is my favourite Steve Jobs video. A must-watch, if you’ve never seen it.

Apple at the core…Its core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. That’s what we believe. 

Think Different.

Apple and the Legacy of Steve Jobs

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You might have heard that the CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, has taken an indefinite medical leave. This is the third time in the last ten years that Steve Jobs has stepped aside from the biggest technology company in the United States.

If you don’t know much about the company or Steve Jobs’s nature, then there is one article that is an absolute must-read. It is this Esquire piece, written by Tom Junod in 2008. It may appear dated, but it’s as every bit as relevant today as when it was first published. I highlight a few quotes which grabbed my attention

On Steve Jobs’s health and perseverance:

Steve Jobs has been saying that Steve Jobs is dying for years. From the beginning, death has been the hellhound on his trail; from the beginning, he has based his claim on immortality on the knowledge that he isn’t going to make it. In the commencement speech he gave to the graduates of Stanford University a year after his cancer surgery, he diagnosed himself as “fine now,” and hopeful to live “a few more decades.” At the same time, he spoke of death as though it were a new Apple product — that is, as “very likely the single best invention of life.” He said that since he was seventeen, “I’ve 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’m about to do today?”

I love this passage on the bravado and Jobs’s stubborn demeanor. Must he always win?

Nobody wants to be the guy who points out that Jobs is “an obnoxious asshole” or “just a horrifying human being” — because then Jobs has already won, simply on the basis of scale. Better to be the ex-Apple-employee who says, “The question is not whether he’s an asshole. That’s beside the point. The question is whether he [Steve Jobs] can be an asshole and a good Buddhist.” Now, that’s a good one, because it concedes the obvious and moves on to the question of whether Jobs’s epic simplifications hide, well, inconsistencies. How can the Buddhist — the strict vegetarian — squash so many people like bugs? How can the Apollonian artist of our technological moment also be the Machiavellian corporate executive? How can the guy who implicitly put himself in league with Gandhi, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Martin Luther King while urging us to “think different” think, in fact, only of winning? “For most people, he’ll go down in history as the guy who made technology user-friendly,” says one executive. “But to people in business, he’ll be remembered as the guy who only did deals where he had all the leverage — and used every bit of it. It’s not enough that he wins. You have to lose. He’s completely unreasonable.”

That part about you having to lose, that’s gladiatorial. I was immediately reminded of Derek Sivers’s post “The Day Steve Jobs Dissed Me in a Keynote.” I highly recommend reading it.

An excellent paragraph about Jobs’s ruthlessness (if you weren’t getting the picture just yet). But also: why are Apple products something the consumers desire so much?

Now they start with what makes an existing experience crappy. And that’s where Jobs is a genius. That’s where his ruthlessness comes in. He’s ruthless with himself, ruthless with other people — he’s also ruthless with technology. He knows exactly what makes it work, and what makes it suck. There were MP3 players before the iPod, but they sucked. So he’s like, Okay, what do we have to do so that they don’t suck? Same with the iPhone. A lot of phones had Web browsers before the iPhone, but nobody used them. Why? Because they sucked. Now even people without iPhones are using the Web browsers on their cell phones. But that’s because of the iPhone. And that’s what he does. He makes the experience of technology better.”

Lastly, I love this wisdom from Steve Jobs: shortly after he showed off the iPad last year, Steve Jobs was asked what consumer and market research guided its creation. Steve Jobs’s response was illuminating:

None.  It isn’t the consumer’s job to know what they want.

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There’s a lot more in the Esquire piece which I didn’t highlight here. If you have a half hour, I highly recommend reading the entire piece. It paints a portrait of Steve Jobs better than any I’ve ever read.


Links of the Day (01/31/10)

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Here are three articles which I’ve read over the last few days:

(1) “Steve Jobs and the Economics of Elitism” [New York Times] – A brief look into how Apple represents the “auteur model of innovation,” not to mention a model of restraint in product design.

(2) “The Lessons of Lady Gaga” [Wall Street Journal] – an interesting article that takes a glimpse into the business-savvy singer who opened the 2010 Grammy Awards. Lady Gaga affectionately dubs her fans “little monsters.”

(3) “In Tough Economic Times, Shoppers Take Haggling to New Heights” [Washington Post] – what average consumers are doing (or should be doing) in these tough economic times. Great read.