Becoming Steve Jobs

✅ The failures, stinging reversals, miscommunications, bad judgment calls, emphases on wrong values were necessary prerequisites to the clarity, moderation, reflection, and steadiness he would display in later years. ✅ Having a grand, bold goal was useless if you didn’t have the ability to tell a compelling story about how you’d get there. Steve: “What’s the point in looking back? I’d rather look forward to all the good things to come.” One of Steve's favorite books was Be Here Now, a bestselling guide to meditation, yoga, and spiritual seeking. He was part of the Explorers Club who went into HP and learned about computers from the HP engineers. Storytelling is leverage. He asked Bill Hewlett for parts for an Explorers project and persuaded him with his storytelling skills. Selling can be theater. He sold Blue Boxes by going door-to-door asking if this was George's room, a fictional "expert" phone phreak. They made $6,000. Build your own basics if you need to. Steve and Woz built their own version of BASIC and their own computer. Start scrappy and ship. They built at Steve’s house with his sister and neighborhood kids soldering. They made $25,000. Steve didn’t obsess over computers for their own sake. He was obsessed with what happens when powerful technology gets into the hands of many, many people. Mentors shape the myth. Mike Markkula shaped Apple’s public image and became an early mentor. “Adult supervision” changes a startup. Markkula hired Michael Scott as Chief Executive. Apple was now under adult supervision. Move from garage mode to corporation mode. They moved to offices in Cupertino and started hiring people and setting up the basics of a corporation. Call the people above you and learn from them. Steve would give CEOs a phone call and ask them out for lunch. He learned so much from doing this. Money doesn’t have to change what you care about. After Apple’s IPO, many bought cars and talked vacations, but not Steve. A great individual contributor can fail at scale management. He got kicked off Lisa because he wasn’t good at managing a large group of people. Hype fades fast if the specs are weak. Macintosh had a lot of hype, but not for long because it didn’t have the best specs. Losing your seat can force a new table. He got kicked out of Apple by Scully and started NeXT. Go ask customers what they actually want. For NeXT, he went to colleges to learn what professors and researchers really wanted. Perfection can be a failure mode. NeXT failed because he wanted everything perfect and spent too much on unnecessary things like the logo and the inside looks instead of the product itself. Indecision is expensive. He also wasn’t a decisive decision maker. Focus can save a company. His four quadrant idea saved Apple by shutting down every project that wasn't an iMac or MacBook, even though some killed projects had potential. Bluntness as a time-saving philosophy. He’d tell people “That’s shit” because he thought most people are nice because they care what others think, and he didn’t want to waste time on that.