Steve Jobs References

Steve's still my references of livin' forward - rq

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You’ve got to have a problem that you want to solve; a wrong that you want to right. Finish it, or never.

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Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.

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In your life you only get to do so many things and right now we’ve chosen to do this, so let’s make it great.

Is everything you do as great as it could be? This could very well be the most important question you ask yourself as a leader. Your customers deserve nothing less. Don’t just make it; make it great.

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We’ve got to make the small things unforgettable.

The devil’s in the details and few people were more obsessed with details than Jobs. We’ve all heard stories of Jobs driving his engineers crazy because he didn’t like the aesthetic of something inside the computer that nobody would ever see. Everything mattered. I recall visiting a cardboard box manufacturing facility in Modesto, California, to prepare for a keynote speech to industry executives. This company made boxes for Apple products. One factory manager said out of the thousands of brands they made boxes for, none were more particular than Apple. Steve Jobs demanded that the details of the box, the tactile design, had to be just right. The edges had to look and even feel a certain way. When customers opened an iPhone box, it had to set the tone for the experience. Far too many people and businesses overlook the details and the customer experience with the brand inevitably suffers. Details matter.

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I would rather gamble on our vision than make a ‘me, too’ product.

Steve Jobs believed in dreaming big. In the 1970s personal computers were relegated to the hobbyist market. Jobs had the vision of ‘putting a computer in the hands of everyday people.’ He once said that Xerox could have dominated the entire computer industry because Xerox scientists in Palo Alto’s PARC research facility were developing the first graphical user interface. Jobs said Xerox failed because its “vision” was limited to making another copy machine. Never underestimate the power of a bold vision to move your career and the world forward.

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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.

“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 and try not to bash into the walls too much…that’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact—everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you…shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just going to live in it versus make your mark upon it. Once you learn that, you will never be the same again.” Don’t just live a life; build one.

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How does somebody know what they want if they haven’t even seen it?

Steve Jobs didn’t believe in focus groups. Actually, he avoided them like the plague. Jobs believed in building great products that he would want to use himself. To a large extent he had a point. For example, in 2010 how many of us would have asked for a third device in between a laptop and a smartphone? Most people would never have asked for an iPad, but once millions of consumers saw it, they couldn’t live without it, and it opened up entirely new categories of business applications. When I spent one year researching a book on the Apple Store, I learned that Jobs revolutionized the retail business because he asked better questions. For example, Jobs did not ask, “How do we build a better store than our competitors?” Instead he asked, “How do we reinvent the store?” Don’t do things better; do things differently.

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“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.”

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That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.

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You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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