By expecting them to do great things, you can get them to do great things.
God is in the details and Less is more.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
People do judge a book by its cover, so for the box of the Macintosh, Jobs chose a full-colour design and kept trying to make it look better.
Unlike other product developers, Jobs did not believe the customer was always right; if they wanted to resist using a mouse, they were wrong
because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.
the work fifty people are doing here is going to send a giant ripple through the universe
As Markkula had taught him, a great company must be able to impute its values from the first impression it makes.
Getting IBM to permit Paul Rand to do work for NeXT was a small miracle willed into existence by Jobs’s belief that reality can be distorted.
Jobs had always indulged his obsession that the unseen parts of a product should be crafted as beautifully as its façade
It’s kind of fun to do the impossible, Walt Disney once said.
There’s no yacht in my future, he said. I’ve never done this for the money.
From when I first met him as a young guy, he’s had the greatest intuition of the impact he wants his brand to have on people, said Clow.
I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organise a company, he recalled.
Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep.
Design once again dictated the engineering, not just vice versa.
Early on, Mike Markkula had taught Jobs to impute— to understand that people do judge a book by its cover— and therefore to make sure all the trappings and packaging of Apple signalled that there was a beautiful gem inside.
He believed that Apple’s great advantage was its integration of the whole widget— from design to hardware to software to content— he wanted all departments at the company to work together in parallel. The phrases he used were deep collaboration and concurrent engineering.
If something isn’t right, you can’t just ignore it and say you’ll fix it later, he said.
matured into something boring,
One of Jobs’s business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalising yourself. If you don’t cannibalise yourself, someone else will, he said.
The best way to begin a speech is Let me tell you a story. Nobody is eager for a lecture, but everybody loves a story.
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. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
What I learned about Steve was that people mistook some of his comments as ranting or negativism, but it was really just the way he showed passion. So that’s how I processed it, and I never took issues personally.
There is no one better at turning off the noise that is going on around him, Cook said. That allows him to focus on a few things and say no to many things. Few people are really good at that.
Memento mori: Remember you will die. A reminder of mortality would help the hero keep things in perspective, instil some humility.
I’d see Steve make the decision based on a sense of people and product that, you know, is hard for me to explain. The way he does things is just different and I think it’s magical. And in that case, wow.
We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot. And frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company
The iPad commercials were not about the device, but about what you could do with it
But as soon as the context is changed to ‘all smartphones have problems,’ the humour opportunity is gone.
What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft.
If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’ People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
Dylan says, if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.
It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.