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![The lessons of Steve Jobs’ life and career that most impacted me are from his own words about simplicity, intuition, trust, curiosity and teamwork.
BRIDGE BUILDER/SIMPLICITY: “That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”— BusinessWeek interview, May 1998
Jobs was a bridge. A bridge between engineers and investors and programmers and the public and all the other constituencies he served. Without him, no one could have understood the work and its importance. He wasn’t the smartest guy in the group, but he hired the smartest people and was able to translate their work, which is true brilliance.
INTUITION: “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”— BusinessWeek interview, May 1998
Jobs wasn’t a politician. He didn’t poll people to find out if his ideas were acceptable, he just had the confidence to deliver what he believed was right.
TRUST YOURSELF: ”[Y]ou can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”— Stanford University commencement address, June 2005.
This mirrors my favorite quote from Rainier Maria Rilke which asks you to be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart and, “try to love the questions themselves … and to live everything, live the questions now and someday, without even knowing it, you’ll live your way into the answer.”
CURIOSITY: “Picasso had a saying: ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal.’ We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas…I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, artists, zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”— 1994
In this life we don’t have to be experts at one thing. What makes us great is curiosity about all facets of life and drawing from all of life’s experiences to make us good at any particular thing.
TEAMWORK: “My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.”— Interview with 60 Minutes, 2003
Even the most successful man knew that he couldn’t do it alone.
ROLE MODEL?
Ken Auletta in the New Yorker brought up an interesting point that Jobs was never known for his kindness towards people, but rather his hard-driving personality. His cruelty won’t be remembered but his great products will. As the New Yorker puts it:
“Ideally what you want to have is a greater balance between being nice and being effective than he achieved. But one of the questions is whether he could have achieved what he achieved if he were nice.”
Interesting question, indeed, but his legacy isn’t in question.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lsnjsegZj61qcpk01o1_500.jpg)
The lessons of Steve Jobs’ life and career that most impacted me are from his own words about simplicity, intuition, trust, curiosity and teamwork.
BRIDGE BUILDER/SIMPLICITY: “That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
— BusinessWeek interview, May 1998- Jobs was a bridge. A bridge between engineers and investors and programmers and the public and all the other constituencies he served. Without him, no one could have understood the work and its importance. He wasn’t the smartest guy in the group, but he hired the smartest people and was able to translate their work, which is true brilliance.
INTUITION: “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
— BusinessWeek interview, May 1998- Jobs wasn’t a politician. He didn’t poll people to find out if his ideas were acceptable, he just had the confidence to deliver what he believed was right.
TRUST YOURSELF: ”[Y]ou can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
— Stanford University commencement address, June 2005.- This mirrors my favorite quote from Rainier Maria Rilke which asks you to be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart and, “try to love the questions themselves … and to live everything, live the questions now and someday, without even knowing it, you’ll live your way into the answer.”
CURIOSITY: “Picasso had a saying: ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal.’ We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas…I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, artists, zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”
— 1994- In this life we don’t have to be experts at one thing. What makes us great is curiosity about all facets of life and drawing from all of life’s experiences to make us good at any particular thing.
TEAMWORK: “My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.”
— Interview with 60 Minutes, 2003- Even the most successful man knew that he couldn’t do it alone.
“Ideally what you want to have is a greater balance between being nice and being effective than he achieved. But one of the questions is whether he could have achieved what he achieved if he were nice.”
Interesting question, indeed, but his legacy isn’t in question.
Thoughts and inspiration while attempting to figure it all out.
![The lessons of Steve Jobs’ life and career that most impacted me are from his own words about simplicity, intuition, trust, curiosity and teamwork.
BRIDGE BUILDER/SIMPLICITY: “That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”— BusinessWeek interview, May 1998
Jobs was a bridge. A bridge between engineers and investors and programmers and the public and all the other constituencies he served. Without him, no one could have understood the work and its importance. He wasn’t the smartest guy in the group, but he hired the smartest people and was able to translate their work, which is true brilliance.
INTUITION: “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”— BusinessWeek interview, May 1998
Jobs wasn’t a politician. He didn’t poll people to find out if his ideas were acceptable, he just had the confidence to deliver what he believed was right.
TRUST YOURSELF: ”[Y]ou can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”— Stanford University commencement address, June 2005.
This mirrors my favorite quote from Rainier Maria Rilke which asks you to be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart and, “try to love the questions themselves … and to live everything, live the questions now and someday, without even knowing it, you’ll live your way into the answer.”
CURIOSITY: “Picasso had a saying: ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal.’ We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas…I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, artists, zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”— 1994
In this life we don’t have to be experts at one thing. What makes us great is curiosity about all facets of life and drawing from all of life’s experiences to make us good at any particular thing.
TEAMWORK: “My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.”— Interview with 60 Minutes, 2003
Even the most successful man knew that he couldn’t do it alone.
ROLE MODEL?
Ken Auletta in the New Yorker brought up an interesting point that Jobs was never known for his kindness towards people, but rather his hard-driving personality. His cruelty won’t be remembered but his great products will. As the New Yorker puts it:
“Ideally what you want to have is a greater balance between being nice and being effective than he achieved. But one of the questions is whether he could have achieved what he achieved if he were nice.”
Interesting question, indeed, but his legacy isn’t in question.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lsnjsegZj61qcpk01o1_1280.jpg)
