Steve Jobs in his own words: core principles from a lifetime of building

Executive overview

Jobs returned to the same handful of ideas across four decades: love the work, recruit only exceptional people, own the whole product, and simplify everything ruthlessly. The principles are simple; the discipline to hold them under pressure is not.

Passion is not a personality trait — it is the mechanism that keeps you going when any rational person would quit.

Passion and perseverance

• Without genuine love for the work, any rational person quits when things get hard.
• About half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from unsuccessful ones is pure perseverance.
• The journey is the reward — a phrase Jobs repeated from his 20s through his final years.
• "You've got to find what you love... the only way to do great work is to love what you do. Don't settle."

Recruiting and talent density

• The founder's most important job is assembling the greatest concentration of talent possible.
• Build an environment where people feel surrounded by equally talented peers and their work is bigger than themselves.
• Collaborative recruiting: current employees can veto candidates, which maintains the standard.
• In interviews, Jobs deliberately criticized prior work to see if candidates would fold or hold firm conviction.
• Innovation has nothing to do with R&D budget — Apple out-innovated IBM while working from a garage.
• Bigness and greatness are usually in conflict: Pixar at 450 people had the highest concentration of remarkable talent Jobs had ever seen; that wouldn't survive growth to 2,000.

Simplicity as a discipline

• First solutions to any problem are complex; most people stop there.
• Keep going, peel the layers, and elegant solutions become possible — most people don't put in the time.
• Apple's product line in 1997 was so confusing that after three weeks Jobs still couldn't explain one model over another; he cut the line.
• Simplicity applies to the organisation too: clean structure, clear accountability.
• Products should need no instruction manual — everyone's life is getting busier, not less busy.

Focus

• Focus means saying no to a hundred other good ideas, not yes to the one you've chosen.
• Jobs was as proud of what Apple hadn't done as what it had done.
• Innovation is saying no to a thousand things.
• When netbooks captured 25–30% of the laptop market, Jobs refused to make one — they were not better than anything, just cheap — and directed those resources to the iPad instead.
• Start with the product and the customer experience; commercial sense is a constraint, not the starting point.

Design

• Design is not veneer — it is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation expressing itself through successive outer layers.
• Design is primarily how something works, not how it looks.
• To design something well you have to truly understand it — chew it up, not just swallow it.
• The Lisa team wanted to do something great; the Mac team wanted to do something insanely great. The difference shows.
• Quality must carry all the way through: a carpenter uses beautiful wood on the back of a chest even though no one will ever see it.

Building a great company

• There needs to be a gravitational force that pulls great technology together — otherwise brilliant pieces float around without adding up to much.
• The founder forces the important issues: when engineers gave 38 reasons the iPhone design was impossible, Jobs said "we're doing this" — it became a hit.
• Bureaucracy grows constantly; the founder's job is to create space for the people doing the work and keep the rest of the organisation at bay.
• Fire people who don't measure up — humanely, but without hesitation.

Owning the whole product

• Apple's structural advantage: the only company that owns hardware, software, and operating system — and therefore can take full responsibility for the user experience.
• Edwin Land's motto became Jobs's own: don't do anything that someone else can do.
• The same principle applied at Pixar — the only studio with that specific combination of technical and artistic capability.
• Customers can't tell you about the next breakthrough; you have to go away and dream it up with people who understand the technology and care about the customer.
• Post-PC devices need hardware, software, and applications interwoven more seamlessly than on a PC — a level of integration only possible when one company controls all of it.

Branding and marketing

• Advertising with features, specs, and charts doesn't work — the only chance to communicate is with a feeling.
• Apple in 1997 had an incredible brand asset it wasn't using; great brands stand for something about the people who use them.
• If you truly believe your product makes someone's life better, you have a moral obligation to get good at marketing.
• The Think Different campaign showed people who Apple admired — your heroes tell people who you are.

Mortality and priorities

• Jobs met his wife by stopping mid-departure and asking: if this is my last night on earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting or with this woman? He ran back across the parking lot.
• He applied the same mortality framework to major work decisions — years before his cancer diagnosis.
• "Your time is limited. Don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice."

Studying great ideas and staying open

• Expose yourself to the best things humans have done, then bring those things into your work.
• Good artists copy; great artists steal — Jobs learned from Edwin Land and Sony, then improved on their mistakes.
• The iPod was the digital Walkman done right: the Japanese consumer electronics companies owned portable music but couldn't write the software; Apple could.
• Being a beginner again after a major setback replaced the heaviness of success with lightness and opened one of the most creative periods of his life.
• In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.