Steve Jobs on making things with care, building Apple, and using death as a compass

Executive overview

Steve Jobs believed the highest expression of human appreciation is making something wonderful and putting it out into the world. He was relentlessly product-focused — not because of the money, but because making great things was inseparable from who he was.

His career split into two acts: building Apple from a garage to a Fortune 500 company, leaving in disgrace at 30, then returning to rescue it and invent the iPhone. A decade of struggle between those two acts taught him more than either act of success.

The thread running through everything: love what you make, hold yourself to a higher standard than anyone else ever could, and use the certainty of your death to cut through everything that doesn't matter.

The core philosophy on making things

• Make something with a great deal of care and love — it will show
• Products with no spirit, no taste, no humanity are just McDonald's
• "The feelings and the passion that people put into it were completely indistinguishable from a poet or a painter" — calling their work a form of love
• Products matter in proportion to the time people spend with them — a more important market than automobiles
• One of his greatest talents: spotting markets full of second-rate products and believing he could do better

On standards and self-imposed rigor

• "Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected."
• You cannot impose high standards on others unless you impose them first and most strenuously on yourself
• Kobe Bryant: "Their expectations will never be higher than my own. Never, never, never, never, never."
• Excellence is not an act but a habit — Aristotle, emailed to all Apple employees in 2002
• "If you do something and it turns out pretty good, just go do something else wonderful. Don't dwell on it."

On learning from history and mentors

• Build at the intersection of arts and technology — an idea Steve took from Edwin Land and used for his entire career
• He constantly placed his products in historical perspective: Macintosh is a telephone, not a telegraph — people already know how to talk
• Went back to Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, and Edwin Land when designing Macintosh marketing
• Called up Bob Noyce, Andy Grove, Jerry Sanders, Bill Hewlett, and David Packard when in his early 20s — everyone said yes
• "Asking for help is a superpower no one uses"
• He changed his position 180 degrees when Andy Grove corrected him — "I don't care about being right. I care about being excellent."

On Apple's near-death and the return

• Apple's differentiation had evaporated — "Differentiation is survival"
• Slashed 70% of the product roadmap: "Focus on the gems, get rid of all the crap"
• Went from 17 products to 4 — so you can put the A team on every single one
• Marketing is about values, not speeds and feeds: Apple at its core believes people with passion can change the world
• "There isn't a hierarchy of ideas that maps onto the hierarchy of the organization" — great ideas come from anywhere
• Hierarchy of skepticism: every time you solve one level of doubt, people move to the next — treat it as confirmation you're making progress

On people and recruiting

• "The dynamic range of people dramatically exceeds things you encounter in the rest of our normal life"
• Spend 20% of your time recruiting — one day a week, even as CEO
• Look for results first; for young candidates, look for intelligence, the ability to learn quickly, drive, and passion
• In interviews, purposely criticise their prior work — the worst answer is agreement; the best is "you're dead wrong, and here's why"
• Find missionaries, not mercenaries — "we bleed six colors"
• Management by values: first agree on where you want to go; then you can argue about how to get there

On building Next and Pixar through a decade of difficulty

• Invested $60M of his own money in Pixar over a decade, writing checks from his personal account
• Both Next and Pixar ran into serious trouble — the entire Next founding team resigned
• Learned to hone a company to its essence: closed the Next factory, laid off more than 200, shifted to software
• Pixar stripped to one mission: fully computer-animated feature films, never done before
• "If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time" — he said all of them
• Character is built not in good times, but in bad times

On time, death, and how to live

• "Think of your life as a rainbow arcing across the horizon. You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, and then you disappear."
• Looked in the mirror every morning and asked: if today were my last day, would I want to do what I'm about to do?
• Regrets are things you didn't do. Mistakes are things you did.
• Your life is a story in the making — decisions look different when you imagine yourself as an old person looking back
• "Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking"
• He cancelled dinner with important customers to chase a woman in a parking lot — they married 18 months later
• "Your time is limited. Do not waste it living someone else's life."

On putting something back

• His final email to himself, a year before he died: a meditation on total dependence on other humans — their inventions, their language, their mathematics, their music, their laws
• "The ability to put something back into the pool of human experience is extremely neat"
• That is why the book is called Make Something Wonderful — you say: I was here, my life mattered, I made things that made other lives better
• His resignation letter, weeks before he died: "I believe Apple's brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it"