Steve Jobs - By Walter Isaacson
05 Oct 2021 |
Date Finished: 3rd October 2021 How strongly I recommend it: 10/10 |
This books takes us on a fascinating and one-of-a-kind life journey - the life of Steve Jobs - who started with the goal of building great products that we want to use and built the world’s most valuable company. Walter Isaacson has done a phenomenal job of portraying this charismatic yet quirky genius. His writing keeps us glued to the book just like how Jobs sucked people into his Reality Distortion Field (read the book, you’ll know what this means!)
Today, as I publish this article, it is 5th October 2021. This day exactly a decade ago, Steve Jobs breathed his last. For the legacy he has built, he will always be remembered as the greatest business executive of our era. He put wonderful products in our hands that we never knew we wanted and changed the world. “Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do”.
Details and review: Amazon Page
My Notes:
The main thing in our (product’s) design is that we have to make things intuitively obvious.
A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of the cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.
People do judge a book by its cover, so the product and the packaging look and feel does matter.
On the day Jobs unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, “Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?”
Think different.
“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 crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world and the ones who do.”
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.
The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.
Motivation matters. Some products are crappy because they don’t really believe in it the way we do. The iPod was successful because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you are doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you are not going to cheese out. If you don’t love something, you are not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.
Steve Jobs to Larry Page on how to be a good CEO: “We talked a lot about focus. And choosing people. How to know who to trust, and how to build a team of lieutenants he can count on. I described the blocking and tackling he would have to do to keep the company from getting flabby or being larded with B players. The main thing I stressed was focus. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they are dragging you down. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.”
Steve Jobs didn’t invent many things outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas, art, and technology in ways that invented the future.
People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
Products, not the profits, were the motivation. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything: the people you hire, who gets promoted, what you discuss in meetings.
I hate it when people call themselves “entrepreneurs” when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. That’s how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before. You build a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now. That’s what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That’s what I want Apple to be.
You’ve got to be able to be super honest (Telling people to their face if their product sucks).
You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.
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