Career lessons from Steve Jobs

Care about the users, tell stories, solve impossible problems and make something wonderful

Apple has published a collection of Steve Jobs’ speeches and emails as a book named Make Something Wonderful. It is a fantastic read. All of it is golden, but below are some of my favorites.

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Care about the users

Jobs cares about the user experience a lot. He wanted to bring cutting-edge technologies to the masses, most importantly to express their creativity. For example, below is an excerpt where Jobs is confident about computers becoming ubiquitous, but cares about making it great.

“If you’ve looked at computers, they look like garbage. All the great product designers are off designing automobiles or buildings. But hardly any of them are designing computers. If we take a look, we’re going to sell 3 million computers this year, 10 million in ’86, whether they look like a piece of shit or they look great. 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. 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.”

“Some people are saying we need to put an IBM PC on every desk in America to improve productivity. But it won’t work. The special incantations you have to learn this time are slash-qz’s and things like that. Most people are not going to learn slash-qz’s any more than they’re going to learn Morse code.

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.”

Leadership

Per Jobs, a CEO or leader had 3 responsibilities.

1. Recruit

2. Set the Vision

3. Inspire and cajole and persuade

He thought of management as a necessary evil.

“But the only good reason to be a manager is so some other bozo doesn’t be the manager—and ruin the group you care about.”

“We always tell people, “You work for Apple first and your boss second.” We feel pretty strongly about that.”

He was a proponent of management by values - where the team agrees on the goal but iterates on the how.

“But if we all want to go to San Diego, that’s the key. Then we can argue about how to get there. [Pointing] You think it’s better to walk. You think it’s better to take a plane. You think it’s better to take a train. We’ll figure that [part] out. Because if I say, “I want to take a train to San Diego,” and somebody goes, “That’s really stupid! It will take three days! We can fly and be there in an hour,” I’ll go, “Oh. OK.” Because, actually, I want to go to San Diego. So if I can get there in an hour [flying], I’ll ditch my idea about the train.”

Storytelling

Jobs is a phenomenal storyteller. He uses interesting familiar examples to drive his idea home. Below is his comment on Apple’s new marketing strategy.

“Who is Apple, and what is it that we stand for? Where do we fit in this world?”

And the Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect in this area in the last few years. And we need to bring it back. The way to do that is not to talk about speeds and feeds. It’s not to talk about MIPS and megahertz. It’s not to talk about why we are better than Windows. The dairy industry tried for twenty years to convince you that milk was good for you. It’s a lie, but they tried anyway. And the sales were going like this [hand mimics a line running down and to the right]. And then they tried “Got Milk?” and the sales started going like this [hand goes up and to the right]. “Got Milk?” doesn’t even talk about the product! As a matter of fact, the focus is on the absence of the product.

But the best example of all, and one of the greatest jobs of marketing that the universe has ever seen, is Nike. Remember: Nike sells a commodity! They sell shoes! And yet when you think of Nike, you feel something different than a shoe company. In their ads, as you know, they don’t ever talk about the products. They don’t ever tell you about their air soles, and why they are better than Reebok’s air soles. What does Nike do in their advertising? They honor great athletes, and they honor great athletics. That’s who they are. That’s what they are about.”

Telling a great story or giving a fantastic presentation takes a lot of practice. For example, Jobs had been preparing for 6 months, from Jan through June, for the Stanford ‘Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish’ commencement speech.

Another example of Jobs using a familiar example to frame Apple’s new strategy.

“And I thought this(Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) was a good model, so I borrowed it today to construct … Steve Jobs’s version of this [audience laughs], which I call the Apple Hierarchy of Skepticism.”

Product and people

This is a recurring theme across various leaders - they talk about how they love to build great things with great people. Jobs’ primary reason for returning to Apple was Apple’s employees.

“What I’m best at doing is finding a group of talented people and making things with them.”

Self-awareness

Jobs is aware of his strengths and weaknesses. And most importantly likes himself.

“Q: You’ve talked about being tough to get along with, having a rough-edge personality. Did you contribute in some way to your own downfall?

SJ: You know, I’m not a sixty-two-year-old statesman that’s traveled around the world all his life. So I’m sure that there was a situation when I was twenty-five that if I could go back, knowing what I know now, I could have handled much better. And I’m sure I’ll be able to say the same thing when I’m thirty-five about the situation in 1985. I can be very intense in my convictions. And I don’t know—all in all, I kind of like myself, and I’m not that anxious to change.”

Solve impossible problems

Jobs talks about the possibilities of the Internet. But most importantly recognizes that what he is up to is impossible. There is a claim around how Jobs was able to use his charisma to create a reality distortion field - where people will get inspired to undertake impossible feats. He was able to do that because he was ready to take on impossible problems.

“And we’re about five years away from really solving the problems of hooking these computers together in the office. And we’re about ten to fifteen years away from solving the problems of hooking them together in the home. A lot of people are working on it, but it’s a pretty fierce problem.

Now, Apple’s strategy is really simple. What we want to do is put an incredibly great computer in a book that you carry around with you, that you can learn how to use in twenty minutes. That’s what we want to do. And we want to do it this decade. And we really want to do it with a radio link in it so you don’t have to hook up to anything—you’re in communication with all these larger databases and other computers. We don’t know how to do that now. It’s impossible technically.”

Why should I buy a computer in my home?

I find it very surprising and insightful that Jobs, a visionary, struggled to see the use cases of computers in a home setting. It showcases the infinite possibilities of how technology and the world can evolve.

“I can’t tell you why you need a home computer right now. I mean, people ask me, “Why should I buy a computer in my home?”

And I say, “Well, to learn about it, to run some fun simulations. If you’ve got some kids, they should probably know about it in terms of literacy. They can probably get some good educational software, especially if they’re younger.

“You can hook up to the source and, you know, do whatever you’re going to do. Meet women, I don’t know. But other than that, there’s no good reason to buy one for your house right now. But there will be.”

Great things take time and perseverance

“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.”

On startups - new and creative mistakes

Jobs started NeXT which had its ups and downs before eventually selling to Apple. And Pixar was not initially focused on making films.

“If you really look closely,” Steve liked to say, “most overnight successes took a long time.”

Determined to build a new great computer company, he started NeXT with several members of the Macintosh team. “We’ll make a whole bunch of mistakes, but at least they’ll be new and creative ones,” he predicted.

But the films were, as Steve put it, “in the background,” not the company’s focus. He described Pixar’s early business strategy as “find a way to pay the bills,” and he later speculated that the only reason the company didn’t fall apart then was that the leadership team “would all get depressed … but not all of us at once.”

Talking to people

The Idea for NeXT came out of a lunch conversation

“I had been reading some biochemistry, recombinant DNA literature. [I had recently met] Paul Berg, the inventor of some of the recombinant techniques. I called him up, and I said, “You remember me. I’m ignorant about this stuff, but I’ve got a bunch of questions about how it works, and I’d love to have lunch with you.” So we had lunch at Stanford. He was showing me how they were doing gene repairing. Actually, it’s straightforward, it’s kind of neat. It smells a lot like some of the concepts you find in computer science. So he was explaining how he does experiments in a wet laboratory and they take a week or two or three to run. I asked him, “Why don’t you simulate these on a computer? Not only will it allow you to run your experiments faster, but someday every freshman microbiology student in the country can play with the Paul Berg recombinant software.” So his eyes lit up. And that was sort of a landmark lunch.”

Jobs had also reached out to Robert Noyce(Intel cofounder), Andy Grove(Intel CEO), Jerry Sanders(AMD cofounder), etc for mentoring on running a company.

on Failure

“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.”

on LLM(Large Language Models like ChatGPT)

Of course, Jobs did not comment about LLMs. :) But it was one of the use cases that he foresaw for computers.

“When I was going to school, I had a few great teachers and a lot of mediocre teachers. And the thing that probably kept me out of jail was the books. I could go and read what Aristotle or Plato wrote without an intermediary in the way. And a book was a phenomenal thing.

The problem was, you can’t ask Aristotle a question. And I think, as we look towards the next fifty to one hundred years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit, or an underlying set of principles, or an underlying way of looking at the world, then, when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life—his or her whole life—and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday, after this person’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, “Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?” And maybe we won’t get the right answer, but maybe we will.”

Let us go make something wonderful!