Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words

Highlights

Steve Jobs: You’d better have great people, or you won’t get your product to market as fast as possible. Or you might get a product to market really fast, but it will be really clunky and nobody will buy it. There are no shortcuts around quality, and quality starts with people. Maybe shortcuts exist, but I’m not smart enough to have ever found any.

If people can’t stand up and argue well under pressure, they may not do well in such an environment.

want to see what people are like under pressure. I want to see if they just fold or if they have firm conviction, belief, and pride in what they did.

back and say, “You’re dead wrong and here’s why.” I want to see what people are like under pressure. I want to see if they just fold or if they have firm conviction, belief, and pride in what they did.

I want to see what people are like under pressure. I want to see if they just fold or if they have firm conviction, belief, and pride in what they did.

The engine driving these transformations was a remarkably consistent set of values that Steve held dear: Life is short; don’t waste it. Tell the truth. Technology should enhance human creativity. Process matters. Beauty matters. Details matter. The world we know is a human creation—and we can push it forward.

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for

[Goes upstairs, grabs Schopenhauer’s On the Suffering of the World, and then reads from it on the stairs.] “He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer’s booth at a fair and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once; and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.”

And everyone says they are all prima donnas. But it turns out that when they work with each other, they’re not prima donnas. They really like it. The first time I tried to build that organization—that was the Mac team. And it really worked. I saw a team of fifty people do something that literally hundreds, or thousands, of people at other companies

He called it management by values. What that means is you find people that want the same things you want, and then just get the hell out of their way.

And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don’t settle.

And what our competence is, is making complex technology easy to use and self-discoverable.

Transit Gloria. (All glory is fleeting.)

Sic Transit Gloria. (All glory is fleeting.)