Steve Jobs in 13 Mindsets
Extracted from Walter Isaacson’s book “The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs”
🔑 Main idea
What Steve would do
🔥 Action item
- Extra fact
1. focus
🔑 Deciding what not to do is just as important as deciding what to do
When he came back in 1997, Apple was developing over a dozen computers. He saved the company by focusing only on 4: quadrants with consumer and professional and laptops and desktop computers
🔥 Try whiteboards. Steve liked whiteboards because they gave him full control and attention
2. simplify
🔑 Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Making things simple is hard. You need to understand them at their core
When working at Atari, Jobs would just get rid of every unnecessary detail
🔥 Use first principles to understand something, list its components, and what each does in the system. Cross out the unnecessary elements.
3. take extreme ownership end to end
🔑 Each step in a product pipeline will affect the final outcome. Therefore, take responsibility for all of it
🔥 Look at the whole pipeline of your product and how you can make each step the best possible. Grow vertically in this sense, to take responsibility for all of it
Apple isn’t only an ecosystem of products. They take responsibility over the whole customer experience, from the chips to the experience at the stores
- From a business perspective, Google and Microsoft may have taken a better path by letting other companies use their software and hardware. Jobs thought that that was the perfect receipt for shitty products
4. when behind, leapfrog
🔑 If you don’t eat yourself, someone else will
Instead of just celebrating the iPod’s success, Jobs was concerned about competitors. He invented the iPhone although that meant eating the sales of the iPod
🔥 Celebrate your victories while keeping in mind that they can and should be even better. Then start doing that; evolve.
- The secret to an innovative company is not only in the first-movers advantage, but also in catching up when they’re behind
5. put products before profits
🔑 Focus on creating something insanely great and the profits will arrive
Jobs wouldn’t care much about the cost of their products. Quality was everything.
🔥 Give your best in every situation, don’t settle down for mediocre. That will always give you the best returns possible
- Seems like a chicken-egg problem. the answer is: insanely great products come first
6. don’t be a slave to focus groups
🔑 People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. If Henry Ford had asked people what they wanted, they would’ve answered “a faster horse”
Jobs wouldn’t do market research, basically. Empathy + intuition were key to him and he thought that intuition > intelligence
🔥 Create something that you and your friends constantly desire but doesn’t exist. Then you won’t settle down for mediocre products
- It’s about having an intuition about desires that haven’t taken shape yet. In Sofi’s words, intuition in the context of innovation is like fishing desires in the lake of the subconscious mind
7. blend reality
🔑 You do the impossible because you don’t recognize it as such, and it’s important to you
At Atari, Jobs would ask Wozniak to create a videogame in weeks instead of months. Jobs was convinced that it was possible, and Wozniak was convinced it was not. It turned out it was.
🔥 Challenge yourself to do things 10x faster or better than you think you can. Worst-case scenario is you stay the same. Best-case is improving, even by 1%
- They called Steve’s ability after Star Trek alien’s superpower to create an alternate reality w their minds
8. impute
🔑 People do judge a book by its cover, so you should make things look insanely great from the outside
He created an experience for the moment of unboxing an Apple product
🔥 Become great at design
- Mike Markkula, Jobs’ first mentor, wrote him a note where he highlighted 3 principles: empathy, focus, and impute
9. tolerate only A players
🔑 If you’re soft with them, the mediocre will feel comfortable doing nothing
If something sucked, he just said it straight up to the face. his job consisted of being honest
🔥 If you just try to emulate his style without understanding his ability to generate loyalty with others, you’ll be doing things wrong. There should be a purpose behind the harshness.
- His harshness came with a talent to inspire others and he thought that the best wouldn’t need so much pressure, and when it was applied, they would recognize it was worth it
10. engage face-to-face
🔑 Jobs didn’t believe that great ideas could pop out even when using apple’s digital services. He thought they’d rather appear in spontaneous meetings and unexpected encounters
He designed the Pixar building to promote these serendipitous encounters, and it worked. Plus, he hated it when people used slides for the meetings. If you know you know, don’t use PowerPoint.
🔥 Only do online meetings when it’s necessary
11. keep the big picture in mind w/o forgetting the details
🔑 Mind the details of the products as well as the long-term vision of the company
He could envision the future of the cloud and the Apple ecosystem while thinking about what color and shape the nails on the iMac should be
12. merge humanities and science
🔑 It’s “applied imagination”. Both science and art are needed in the world and it’ll be an unfair advantage in the XXI century
Steve intersected humanities with science, creativity with technology, art with engineering. More skilled technologists, and better artists lived, but no one was better than him at the intersection of both worlds
🔥 Work at this intersection and develop your own style in it
13. stay hungry, stay foolish
🔑 Think differently, for people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do
Steve was a hippy, a hacker, and a zen. A rebel too
🔥 Know what you want, want it badly (put in the work), and BELIEVE you can get it.
