#299 Steve Jobs (Make Something Wonderful)

0:00 The best way to understand a person is to listen to that person directly. And the best way to understand Steve Is to listen to what he said. And wrote. over the course of his life.

0:10 His words in speeches Interviews and emails. Offer a window. Into how he thought. And he was an exquisite thinker.

0:19 Much of what's in these pages reflects Guiding themes of Steve's life. His sense of the worlds that would emerge from marrying the arts and technology. His unbelievable rigor. Which he imposed first and most strenuously on himself.

0:33 His tenacity in pursuit of assembling and leading great teams. And perhaps above all His insights Into what it meant to be human. Steve once total group of students.

0:44 You appear. Have a chance to blaze in the sky. And then you disappear. He gave an extraordinary amount Of thought.

0:52 To how best to use our fleeting time. He was compelled by the notion of being part of the arc of human existence. Animated. By the thought that he А не в вас.

1:03 Might elevate or expedite. Human progress. It is hard to see what is already there. To gain a clear view. Steve's gift was greater still.

1:13 He saw clearly What was not there. What could be there? What had to be there. His mind was never a captive of reality.

1:23 Quite the contrary. He imagined what reality lacked. And set out to remedy it. His ideas were not arguments. But intuitions.

1:32 Born of a true inner freedom. and an epic sense of possibility. In these pages. Steve drafts and refines. He stumbles.

1:42 grows and changes. But always. Always. He retains that sense of possibility. I hope these selections ignite in you.

1:51 The understanding that drove him. That everything. That everything That makes up what we call life. Was made by people no smarter and no more capable than we are.

2:02 That our world is not fixed. And so we can change it. For the better. That was the introduction written by Steve's wife, Lorreen Powell Jobs. of the book that I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is available for free.

2:15 The Steve Jobs Archive put this book available for free. You can read it online at their website for free. I'll link all this down below. You can read on uh Apple Books. Or you can download the file and send it to your Kindle, which is what I did. It is make something wonderful, Steve Jobs in his own words.

2:31 And so I'm gonna go back through that introduction to'cause I took a bunch of notes. One, I think it's one of the most beautifully written. Introductions that I've read. And not only that, like it hits you if you think about it, like You know, that was that was her husband.

2:43 the father of her children, somebody she was building her life with, and to have him gone so early. And such an exquisite person so early. It's just absolutely devastating when you think about it. And so I I I thought her introduction was really touching. I thought there was a lot of ideas that are that are tied into that. But what's interesting is the book actually starts out right before the introduction.

3:01 There's a quote from Steve in two thousand seven. I'm gonna read this whole thing to you. And a lot of this what I what I love about this book And I'm so glad they put this together. And then not only they put it together, but y anybody can read it for free all over the world. It's just absolutely incredible. Um it it really is like a gift to the to the next generation of entrepreneurs. Is the fact that a lot of this is just Steve in his own words, and so it's like Steve Jobs speaking directly to you.

3:23 And so it's already obvious that this is gonna book a book I'm gonna reference and read over and over again throughout my life. So here's Steve in two thousand seven. There's a there's a lot of ways to be a as a person. And some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful.

3:42 And put it out there. And you never meet the people. You never shake their hands. You never hear their story or tell yours. But somehow

3:50 In the act of making something. With a great deal of care and love. Something's transmitted there. And it is a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation. So we need to be true to who we are and remember.

4:04 What's really important to us. So this idea It's the act of making something with a great deal of care and love. And so in addition to reading this book I went back through and and deep into the Steve Jobs rabbit hole. There's this interview of him that was lost and then found after he died.

4:23 And it he it was an interview given about a year before he came back to Apple. It's called Steve Jobs, The Lost Interview. I have never found it anywhere else except on YouTube. And you have to buy it. So I think I paid like, you know, ten or fifteen bucks for this or something. But it's just Steve unfiltered talking for I don't know, an hour and twenty minutes. I'll leave the link in case you want to buy buy it, but I also took a bunch of notes on it. And you can read through my notes as well.

4:44 And so there's something he says in the interview that is Very similar. And that interview was given about eleven years twelve years before he this quote. Where he's like it's the act of making something with a great deal of care and love. So that is Steve's implicit advice to you and I, right? Actually care. Do you actually care about what you're putting out to the world? And if you do.

5:03 It'll show. Are you just doing it just to make money? And what I love about Steve Is No one's ever gonna say that this guy was motivated by money. Right. There's no reading of his career where that's possible.

5:13 And obviously became incredibly wealthy, but It's The idea of hey I'm gonna make something people w make something.

5:21 Uh that people love. something that's wonderful and you'll see how much I care for the product that I make. And so in that talk, the opposite of this It's something stief hated. Stів hated where there was like no spirit, no taste. No humanity in the products.

5:35 And so he was talking about in nineteen ninety six. Is it missing Microsoft? You have to admire what they've built. You know, they're they're extremely aggressive. He's like they just keep coming. They're great opportunists. And he he said in the interview, he's like, That's not an insult. But he goes, I have no problem with their success.

5:49 I have a problem that they make really third rate products. Their products have no spirit to them. They are very pedestrian. They are McDonald's. That's the quote from Steve Jobs. And I'm glad I re listened to that after I had read this because I'm like, Oh, it's the exact same idea. He's just saying the opposite.

6:06 Make something with a great deal of care and love. from the product that you're making to the company that you're building. It it'll be obvious if you actually care. I think that's the advice that he would give us. So let's go back to the introduction written by Uh his wife

6:19 I just wanna pull out a couple of things when I was reading this that that popped my mind. So one of the uh one of uh the lines that she says is Much of what's in these pages reflect guiding themes of Steve's life. His sens of the world. That would emerge from marrying the arts and technology. So

6:36 The reason this is so important to you and I, it's something you and I have discussed over and over again. Is there's ideas are extremely powerful, right? Your mind is a powerful place, what you feed it affects you in a powerful way. And there's an idea. That one idea Steve learned when he was in his early twenties. Idea is that you should build a company at the intersection of arts and technology.

6:54 That is Edwin Land's idea. That is an idea that Steve Jobs learned from Edwin Lan that Steve used when he was in his twenties, his thirties, his forties, his f till he died. And the reason I want to resurface that is because if Steve was here today, he would tell you to study Edwin Lan. That is why some that that's why I repeat it so much. I I actually heard this hilarious tweet the other day where Uh somebody said.

7:16 That uh A lot of people's alarm clocks are David Goggins telling them to to get after it. And mine is David Senra yelling at me to be more like Edwin Lant. So I thought that was hilarious. And that's not even my idea. That's just an idea I learned from Steve because Steve was so effusive in his praise of Edmund Land to the point where he built a company. So, hey, that's a really good idea. Let me take that idea that Edwin Land used for Polaroid and I'm gonna use it for Apple and then

7:37 as obviously ideas are immortal. So Edwin Lann passed away, Steve Jobs carried that torch, and then now we're gonna hopefully preach that that lesson to people And that that idea will outlive And out last both you and I.

7:50 To go back to another uh thing that she said. His unbelievable rigor. Which he imposed. And most strenuously. On himself.

8:00 That made me think of a quote that I read from Steve. It's one of my favorite ones. I don't think it's in this book. It was unapologetic unapologetically extreme in the sense that hey The work has to come first. And he so he says, Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment. Where excellence is expected. Excellence is expected.

8:17 And that only works if You can't lead other people to do that unless you impose that strict like high quality standards on yourself. So she says his unbelievable rigor. which he imposed first and most strenuously on himself. Steve is not alone with other high performers and extreme winners that do this. I was listening to this interview.

8:32 Uh that that line made me think of this This interview with Kobe Bryant that I save and I watch all the time and it's something I try to to adapt to my own life. Where he's being interviewed by a Kobe Bryant is being interviewed by Ahmad Rashad. And T they're reflecting on this very difficult part of

8:47 Kobe's career. And Ahmad's like, you know, how did you deal with all this? Like This external pressure And he goes, But the pressures is Amad Rashad. asking Kobe's like but the pressures from fans expecting Kobe to

8:59 And then Kobe immediately First of all, he makes a stanky face. Like he smelled something bad. It's like oh. Yeah, in immediately interrupts. Uh a mod and this is what Kobe says.

9:10 Their expectations Will never Be higher than my own. Never, never Never

9:16 Never, never. He says never. That's not an exaggeration. He says never like ten Times. And I think that's the exact right to way to approach your work. There's nobody in the world that held Steve Jobs to a higher standard than Steve Jobs did. There's nobody that held it's nobody should be capable of holding you a higher standard. Than you are.

9:33 There's nobody like you said, they're but but the pressures from fans expecting you to be uh and Kobe's like no, their expectations will never be higher than my own. Never, never, never, never, never, never. Saying it over and over again, only when you impose such strict standards on yourself can then you impose them on others. And it's unlikely there's anybody else that knew Steve Jobs as well as his wife didn't she says his unbelievable rigor which he imposed most first and most strenuously on himself. And then she references

9:58 This line that he said, I'm pretty sure He says it to a group of graduating uh high school seniors at Palo Alto High School, if I'm not if I remember this correctly. This is the full quote quote though. This is so important. This is a quote I think I'll remember for the rest of my life and this is a f I've never come across

10:15 you know, I've done I don't know, ten podcasts on on Steve. I've read every single book I could find on him, man many of them multiple, multiple times. And I don't think I've ever come across this. This is excellent. And he says, think of your life as a rainbow arcing across the horizon of this world. You appear Have a chance to blaze in the sky.

10:33 And then you disappear. And then another line that she said that made me think of something else, he gave an extraordinary amount of thought To how best to use our fleeting time. I wrote Steve was intolerant of slowness. This is a theme that has been reappearing over and over again. On the podcast.

10:49 And then when she wrote, his mind was never a captive of reality. Quite the contrary. He imagined what reality lacked and set out to remedy it. His ideas were not arguments but intuitions, born of a true inner freedom. And an epic sense of possibility. That last line is So important, an epic sense of possibility. When I got to that part made me think of D Hawk, the founder of Visa.

11:07 He would give he just passed away. Uh a few months ago. And I think if he was alive, he would give us this advice. It's advice that's in his autobiography and a lot of his writing, that you need to design your product not for how things are. But how they ought to be. That's like that's uh such a simple

11:21 Ought to be three words. Design your product for th how things ought to be. And I think Steve would agree with that as well. And then finally the last paragraph of the introduction. Where she's saying in these pages, Steve drafts and refines, he stumbles, grows, and changes. That is why you need to be reading biographies, as many of them as you possibly can, because Wh everybody's focus on the outcome.

11:39 Where when you're reading, you see them stumble. They're editing, they're growing, they're changing. And then she wraps up with this, you know, one of the most important things that he ever said that everything around you, everything that makes up life was made by other people and that you can do that. that the world is not fixed and you can change it for the better. This is one of my all time favorite quotes comes from Mark Andreessen. The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion.

12:03 The world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think. Okay, so now the book begins. You gotta download the book just for the pictures. Like I think I'm gonna have the pictures printed out and framed. They're just absolutely excellent. Especially the pictures of young Steve. But

12:18 There they're it's separated into three parts. goes in chronological order usually about a decade. uh of his career. And so Leslie Boleyn is writing here. She goes, Steve typically kept his private life, his personal life private, but he did occasionally talk about growing up in the San Francisco Bay area.

12:33 And so then This is where th why this this book is so valuable. It's gonna remind you if you bought uh invent and wander. the collected writings of Jeff Bezos, which I think are excellent because the first half of that book

12:45 Is all of Jeff Bezos' shareholder letters, which I've read I don't know, three times. I think I've done two podcasts on it. two or three podcasts on it. I'll do'em more in in the future as well. But then a collected like edited transcripts of of like his important speeches. So that book, you pick it up, it's like Jeff Bezos speaking directly to you. This book is hey, Steve Jobs speaking directly to you.

13:04 And a lot of this is spread over multiple decades. So I'm gonna read you From he's giving this talk. Uh in nineteen ninety five. And he's rec recording an oral history. on the early history of Silicon Valley and what was like growing up there.

13:17 For the Smithsonian. uh institute. So it says I was very lucky. I had a father who was a pretty remarkable man. He never graduated from high school. He joined the coast guard in World War Two and ferried troops around the world for General Patton.

13:29 And I think he was always getting into trouble and getting busted down. He was a machinist by trade. And worked very hard and was a kind of genius with his hands. And actually read this next paragraph to my daughter. This is something I uh we've been talking about and trying to feature as well.

13:44 And so my note on this section is one of the best things a parent can do for a child. Teach them to make things. Teach them that they have agency and that they create and they they can create things. That other people can use and benefit from. He had a w and this is now Steve talking about one of the most important lessons that his father taught him.

14:01 He had a workbench. out in the garage. When I was about five or six, he sectioned off a little piece of it and said, Steve, this is your workbench now. And he gave me some of his smaller tools and showed me how to use a hammer and a saw. And how to build things.

14:14 It was really very good for me. He spent a lot of time with me. Teaching me how to build things, how to take things apart. and put them back together. And so then Steve talked about this energy that was in the place that he that was well what it was like growing up in early Silicon Valley. And he says, There was a man that moved down the street from me.

14:30 He was an engineer at Hewlett Packard. And he was a ham radio operator. So yesterday I was going over my all my highlights with my daughter. I was reading some of these aloud to her. And she was asking us like well what's a ham radio operator? I was like, Well, you gotta Google, like figure out what it is. And she's like, This is very confusing. I go, Well one way to think about this is That a ham radio

14:49 was it's amateur radio, right? It was essentially podcasting before a c few decades. before podcasting was invented. Somebody just sent me Uh this this fantastic note where he's like I love the vibe of founders. It's it has an underground pirate radio vibe. And I just love that because one of my favorite Steve Jobs quotes.

15:07 is it's more fun to be a pirate than it is to join a navy. And so he's learning at this age, young age, he's learning from an engineer. uh ham radio operator. And this guy's name is Larry Lang and he taught Steve a lot about electronics. And so Larry Lang would buy these things, he'd buy and build these things called health kits.

15:25 their products that you'd buy in kit for them, right? So you have to actually put them together. They have detailed manuals on how to put things together. But you have to actually put them together and then when you're done You actually one, you're building something yourself with your hands and your mind, right? And then it also f like when you're done, it's gives you this like finished product.

15:42 And he says, uh this experience gave me several things. It gave me an understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked. But maybe even more importantly, what a line that this is gonna end with here. Wait what wait till you see this. But maybe even more importantly, it gave one the sense that one could build things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore. That's an excellent, excellent excellent line. Things became much more clear. That they were the result of human creation.

16:09 Not these magical things that just appeared in your environment. And then he talks about why school was so difficult for him. And we're gonna see. This is something that this is a ever present. And History's greatest entrepreneurs, an early love for reading. So he says my mother taught me how to read before I got to school.

16:24 And so when I got there All I really wanted to do was just two things. I wanted to read books because I love reading books and I wanted to go outside and chase Butterflies. And then we're gonna see this is w I talked about this I think last week as well and the week before. maybe the all time greatest quote.

16:39 on understanding the mindset of an entrepreneur is comes from Ivan Chenard. The founder and owner of Patagonia. You wanna understand. Uh the entrepreneur study the juvenile delinquent. And so we see this in Steve's early childhood.

16:52 He gets to school and he says, I encountered authority of a different kind Than I had ever encountered before. And I did not like it. And they all really almost got me. They came this close.

17:02 To really beating any curiosity out of me. And then he describes his difficulty with college. This is Steve Jobs at nineteen. This is so important to To like pierce this myth. that you can only start a company when you're young or you have you know your twenty year old, twenty two year old, you have it all figured out. Well One of the greatest entrepreneurs, maybe the greatest entrepreneur to ever do it. At nineteen, he says

17:23 I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. And so Steve's gonna drop out of school. He's gonna drop into school, which means he's just taking classes for free that he was actually interested in. that weren't part of his his normal curriculum. Uh, he's going to get a job at Atari, he's gonna travel. uh to Europe, spends a bunch of time in India, comes back.

17:40 And then eventually they start What's gonna wind up being the the beginning of Apple. This is from nineteen seventy six to nineteen eighty five. Nineteen eighty five is when uh he actually gets expelled from Apple. The first time. And so now we have Leslie Berlin giving us like this overview of this point of his life in nineteen seventy six when Steve and his friend Steve Wozniak began assembling what would become be known as the Apple One in the family garage.

18:01 The word computer Conjured up inj images. Of hulking machines. A single company, IBM

18:09 dominated the industry. But Steve and Waz were part of a new gen this is the most important sentence in this entire paragraph. But Steve and Waz were part of a new generation of creative thinkers. engineers and hobbyists. Trying to build small chip machines.

18:24 That they could program themselves. And the reason that is so important is because think about this, like there was no such thing as a personal computer at this time. the the only thing the company that was dominating what was known as computers at the time That company was founded fifty five years. Before Apple.

18:39 And yet the two Steve saw something. They're like, No, we can actually improve on this. We can actually make something. that other people can use. Make we can make something wonderful. That other people can use. And so this idea is like Steve and Waz are part of a new generation of creative thinkers, engineers, and hobbyists, right? Trying to build something. You and I can play this role today, just in a different industry. So it says when Apple launched Steve was twenty one.

18:59 He was precocious but inexperienced and unpolished. At all's first board meeting he put his bare feet He put his bare feet on a conference room table, earning a quick rebuke. From the board chairman. The company's breakthrough came with the introduction of the Apple Two.

19:14 Apple was one of the fastest growing companies in America, and by the time Steve turned thirty, he was a public face. of a fortune five hundred company inside Apple his ideas and passion were inspiring But Steve's management style was to visit. Right before Steve gets kicked out in nineteen eighty four, he's working on the Macintosh. And I love what he said.

19:31 right here. It was he he believed with everything. And he also says this in in in the interview I watched In addition to reading this book. He believed with everything in his bones. That no matter what. No matter what, every computer will be like this.

19:43 To Steve Mac to Steve Macintosh was everything technology should be. It was streamlined and practical, simple and sophisticated. A tool for enhancing creativity as much as productivity. In another age Steve believed The people on the Macintosh team

19:56 Would have been writers. Musicians are artists. The feel listen to how he talks. This is This is what he was talking about, where he's like you could tell people put on a tremendous amount of love.

20:07 into what they're doing and he really disdained people that did like they made a product that was just so pedestrian, had no taste, had no judgment. He just did it just to put something together so you can make a quick buck. He hated that, right? This is something Steve shares with like Enzo Ferrari. You go back and r and listen and read the biographies uh of Enzo Ferrari. Or listen to the podcast I've done on Enter Ferrari.

20:26 Ferrari would describe his products the way you would describe your lover. And Steve s to me speaks very similarly. The feelings and the passion that this is now Steve Direct quote from Steve. The feelings and the passion that people put into it were completely indistinguishable

20:40 From a poet or a painter. He called their work a form of love. And so when you study Steve Jobs and the way he approached product design building his company. This is not spreadsheet thinking. He's not trying to make a product just so you can turn a pile of money.

20:53 into an even bigger pile of money. Right? There is an irrational love for the pro the way Like he approached the product that he made and the company That he built. And then ironically These type of craftsmen.

21:06 Usually wind up with the money anyways. And then this is what I meant about to him, it was just absolutely inevitable. uh that the innovation they made with the the Macintosh is gonna change the way other people made computers. And he said, I remember the week before we launched the Mac, we all got together and we said, Every computer is going to work this way. You cannot argue about that anymore. You can argue about how long it will take But you can't argue about it anymore.

21:30 It is inevitable. So that was the introduction by Leslie Berlin, then we get into Steve in his own words, right? And he's recounting What the beginning of Apple was like. After a few attempts we managed to put together something that was the Apple one. So he's talking about him. and Wozniak and a a small group of friends, all of our friends wanted them too.

21:46 It turned out that it took maybe fifty hours. to build one of these things by hand. So that's gonna take too long. So like, Okay, how do we do this faster? We thought if we could get what's called a printed circuit board. Well you could just plug in the parts instead of having to hand wire the whole thing. We could cut the assembly time down from maybe fifty hours to more like an hour. Now listen to how

22:05 They funded Their primitive operation are you willing to sell your car? And put that money into your company,'cause that's what Steve Jobs did. Waz sold his HP calculator, which were very expensive things at the time, and I sold my VW bus. And so they have this idea, they show it to like the homebrew computer pr uh club. This isn't in the book.

22:24 But it's from in in uh in other biographies of of Steve. There's a guy named Paul, I think his name's Paul Terrell. He owns a bite shop. He says, Hey, come and you know, c let's stay in touch. I might be interested in buying these. I'm pretty sure the next day or like very soon after Steve walks in.

22:37 And so one of my favorite pieces of early Apple hi uh like history trivia is the fact that their their first major sale was made barefoot'cause Steve walked into this guy's Computer shop barefoot. And so he's he's recounting this now.

22:50 And he says the first computer store in the world, which was in Mountain View at the time Uh he walked in, he says, Well I'll take fifty of these computers, but I want them fully assembled. Which is a twist that we had never thought of. We so we went and bought the parts to build one hundred computers. We built fifty of them.

23:04 And delivered them and in the talk that I listened to, Steve talks about how he got the money to do this that he had cold called. A bunch of part suppliers. And wind up getting them. on like thirty day credit. And then

23:16 using the money from the bite shop. To pay off the parts. And so he says we got paid in cash or so we built fifty of them and delivered them. We got paid in cash and then ran back and paid the people that sold us the parts. We had this classic Marxian profit realisation crisis.

23:31 Which was that our profit wasn't liquid. It was in fifty computers sitting on the floor,'cause they had made a hundred of them. sold fifty and they're like, Okay. Now If we sell this other fifty, this is w where our profit is, right?

23:41 So then We did And this was fascinating. they went up pitching the idea, which is gonna wind up being Apple, to two other companies to see if they wanted to do it Like in their company or to invest.

23:51 They both said no. We took our idea for the computer to a few companies. One was H P where WAS was working. And one was Atari where Steve was working. Nolan Bush now, the founder of Atari. recounts in his book. And a bunch of other interviews I've seen with them.

24:06 uh biggest regret in his life he was offered thirty percent of Apple, I think for like fifty thousand or a hundred thousand, it w something like that. And he said he said no. Uh, so he says uh no one was interested in pursuing it, so we started our own company. And so this is a very important part. Like we can't gloss over this. This is absolutely fascinating. If you actually slow down and thinking the story he just told. This is the very beginning. This is what

24:30 A trillion dollar company looks like. fifty years before it's a trillion dollar company. No one else wanted to do this, so guess what? I guess we'll have to do it ourselves. And it just starts out with two hobbyists building something that they want them and their friends want to use. And they're willing to fund it by selling their car and their calculator.

24:47 Fast forward a few years. Steve is now twenty two years old. This is his first appearance in a national publication. It is actually the the the magazine The New Yorker. sent a reporter down to the first annual Personal Computing Expo And most of the

25:01 people at the time alive had never seen a personal computer, and so the reporter stumbles across A young Steve Jobs and we see this verbal mastery that he had. He is the clearest communicator. I have clearest thinker. and the clearest communicator I have ever come across in my entire life. This is he was

25:18 Twenty two. It I don't think he knew this reporter was coming. And so they're just saying, Hey, tell us about what what this Apple thing is, w tell us what you're doing. And listen to Steve here. I wish we had these personal machines when I was growing up.

25:29 People have been hearing all sorts of things about computing the past ten years through the media. Supposedly computers have been controlling various aspects of their lives. Yeah, and in spite of that, most adults have no idea what a computer really is. Or what it can or can't do. Now for the first time people can actually buy a computer for the price of a good stereo.

25:46 Interact with it. And find out all about it. It's analogous to the camera. Shout out to Edwin Lan. There are thousands of people across the country taking photography courses. They'll never be professional photographers. They just want to understand what the photographic process is all about. Same with computers.

26:02 We started a little personal computing manufacturing company in a garage in Los Altos in nineteen seventy six. Now we're the largest personal computer company in the world. We make what we think of as the Rolls Royce of personal computers. It's a domesticated computer. People expect blinking lights.

26:18 But what they find is that it looks like a portable typewriter. Which connected to a suitable readout screen. is able to display in color. There's a feedback it gives to people, and the enthusiasm of the users is tremendous. And so then in the book is something I don't think I've ever seen before. It's a transcript of this speech that Steve gives

26:36 He would be around twenty eight years old. This is nineteen eighty three. So he's around twenty eight years old. It's at the International Design Conference in Aspen. And the theme of The speech is that computers are out on a first date. And so listen to what he does. He says if you looked at computers, they look like garbage.

26:53 All the great product designers are off designing automobiles or buildings. Hardly any of them are or designing computers. So something that appears over and over again. And something I cannot stop thinking about. And I just read it randomly. I think it was in Isaacson's biography of Steve. Where it says one of his great talents was spotting markets full of second rate products.

27:12 Steve is a world class product designer. Right, even at this age. And he's saying this is kinda weird, like that I think this industry is gonna be extremely important. Other people don't seem to agree with me. And we know that because all the talent is out doing other things, right?

27:24 They're designing automobiles, or they're designing buildings. Like that's where the money is. None of them were designing computers. So I've just spotted this market full of second rate products, surely I can do better than that. And so it says we have a shot at putting a great object out there. And then he has an incredibly interesting idea.

27:40 Like how important A product is I don't think I've ever heard this before. How important a product is based on the time that you spend interacting with it, he is comparing and contrasting the opportunity in automobiles and architecture to computers, right? All the great designers are off doing this other stuff. Why aren't any great designers doing this? People are going to spend more time interacting with these machines than they do interacting with automobiles today. People are gonna spend

28:03 Two, three hours a day interacting with these machines. Think about And he even undershot, right? Between The MacBook that you probably have. And your iPhone, you're probably spending six, seven hours a day on this.

28:13 He's saying people are gonna be spending two to three hours a day interacting with these machines. That's longer than they spend in their car. And so the industrial design The software design and how people interact with these things. Certainly must be given the consideration that we give automobiles today. If not a lot more.

28:29 And then he goes into the fact that he thinks he has this giant opportunity'cause it's still early. that most people if they were in their thirties when he's giving his speech They lived. most of her life without a computer at all. And his whole point was like well

28:41 that that you're gonna be the last generation that ever happens to. And he was saying that nineteen eighty three, it's even more true now. And so he says in the eighties, the fact is that the computer that computers and society are out on a first date. We have a chance to make these things beautiful. We can actually make a dent in the universe, right? Is what he's saying. We can change the trajectory of this industry. We can hold it to a higher standard. We c they don't have to be these ugly faceless You know, blinking

29:04 Machines like make them look beautiful. When I was going to school, I had oh, and this is such a fascinating idea, too. And something I personally identify with books kept me out of jail. This is what Steve said. That's crazy. So he says uh When I was going to school, I had a few great teachers and a lot of mediocre teachers. And the thing that pee that probably kept me out of jail was the books. I could go read with Aristotle or Plot or Plato.

29:26 I almost said plateau. Oh come on, man. I could go read with Aristotle or Plato Wrote without an intermediary in the way. And a book was a phenomenal thing. It got right from the source of the destination without anything in

29:42 the middle. So books are phenomenal things. And this is interesting'cause w for the first time we might be able to do this. I mean you could pick up a book And it's definitely what we do. It's like You read enough books about like I have an idea of how Steve Jobs start because I've spent an insane insane amount of time ingesting his talks.

29:57 His reading. Uh his biographies, his own writing. And so I have like a you know After a while. You can have like a little

30:04 you know, Steve Jobs on your shoulders. Like, what would Steve do in this situation? I've done this with a handful of other people. You'll you'll see it in the podcast'cause I'll read every single thing That I can find on them. And so that's like the tell, but he what he's saying is like one day we should we we can just put all this information into a computer and ask what Aristotle would say or or Plato would say. And then this is fasting. Again, it goes back to the power this the uh how powerful ideas can be.

30:26 And the fact you can hear one line, read one book. And it just stays with you forever. He sang this in nineteen eighty three. the book is going to end with this email that he sends I himself A year or maybe a few months before he dies. And it's how

30:40 He says we at Apple feel. that for some crazy reason we're in the right place at the right time to put something back. And what I mean by that is Most of us didn't make the clothes we're wearing. And we didn't cook or grow the food that we eat.

30:52 And we're speaking a language that was developed by other people. And we use mathematics that was developed by other people. We are constantly taking. And the ability to put something back. Into the pool.

31:03 of human expair is extremely neat. That is why the book is named Make something wonderful. When you make something wonderful. You put it back into the stream of humanity. You say, I was here. My life mattered and I wanted to make something.

31:18 They made the the the lives of other people better. And so not only is Steve telling us that with his words. Бо ви сам із акцію дедів із лиф. to making something wonderful, these tools and these products that you and I use to this day. A dec more than a decade.

31:34 After he's gone. And so then we go into Steve talking about the Macintosh. This is a year before he gets kicked out of Apple. And what we're gonna see here. It's something again I deeply admire about him. He had this deep historical knowledge. He had it when he was a young man. He could talk like this when he was twenty one, twenty two years old.

31:50 He still had it at thirty, he was still talking about it. you know, when he was in his fifties. This is a quote from uh Steve Jobs the Lost Interview that I'm gonna read. that really sets up this section of the book. I really think the book and this interview go so well together.

32:03 And so he's asked the question, how do you know what is the right direction to move in. And this is what Steve said that gives me goosebumps. It comes down to exposing yourself to the best things that humans have done. Then try to bring those things into what you are doing.

32:16 Picasso had a saying, good artist copy, great artist steal. And we've always been shameless. About stealing great ideas. He goes back and thinks about the the the construction and the invention of the Macintosh and the marketing and sales of the Mac Macintosh.

32:29 went back and looked at how Alexander Graham Bell invented and marketed the telephone and he talks about Henry Ford as well. Edwin Land did the same thing. When Edwin Land went and invented the instant uh the polar camera, right? Invented not only the the camera, but the entire in uh in the entire intimate photography industry. He went back and said, Okay, well how do you market a product that is like never existed. No one asked Alexander Grumbell to make the telephone, right?

32:54 And so we see Steve right here. Calling all the study he had done up to this point, now he brings it back and he talks about how it influences and in uh na influence his work. So he says, Now he's talking about the Macintosh, right? But he's gonna use this historical analogy.

33:08 It's sort of like in eighteen forty four, when the telegraph was invented. And it was amazing breakthrough in communications. And you can actually send messages from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon. And some people talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity. So we'll pause right there. Again, main point here. Steve was constantly placing the products he was making in a historical perspective.

33:28 You can't do that. Unless you studied and learn from history. So he talks about uh this is kinda like eighteen forty four with the telegraph. But here's the problem. He's not gonna compare the Macintosh.

33:39 to the telegraph. He's like, Oh, it's actually not a telegraph and I'll tell why it's not a telegraph. It's a telephone. And so he says, But it wouldn't have worked. And what is he talking about? Some people talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity. And so Steve says, But it wouldn't have worked.

33:53 It wouldn't have worked. And the reason it wouldn't have worked. Now think about that. He does this a lot. If a line is important. He repeats it.

34:01 It is a way of communicating to other people. that it is important. I've seen this over and over again. Repetition is persuasive. So go back to this. And the reason it wouldn't have worked was because you had to learn this whole sequence of strange incantations. which is Morse code, right? You can't send telegraphs at this time.

34:18 without learning Morse code. What's the problem with that? It takes about forty hours to learn Morse code. How many humans are willing to invest forty hours? Every you're gonna put a telegraph on Every desk, so it means every single human that has a telegraph.

34:32 has to invest forty hours to learn how to use this thing. Come on. We know humans aren't doing that. a very small percentage of humans are willing to do that. And so this leads to Steve's next point. So fortunately in the eighteen seventies, Alexander Grimbell File the patents for the telephone.

34:45 another radical breakthrough in communication. That perform basically the same function. But people already knew how to use it. And why do you know how to use it?'Cause you knew how to talk. You don't have to teach people how to speak. There you do it.

34:56 The neatest thing was About it was that in addition to allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing. It allows you to intone your words with meaning beyond the simple linguistics. We are in the exact

35:07 parallel situation today. That is Steve's quote. We're in the exact same The exact The same I can't even speak. I apparently I somebody has to teach me how to speak.

35:17 We're in the same exact parallel situation today. And that is what Macintosh is all about. It's the first telephone of our industry. Before I move on, let's go back to that note at the top. Sty was constantly placing the products he was making in historical perspective. You can't do that. Unless you studied and learned from history.

35:37 So then the book has An interview with Michael Moritz. At this time, Michael Moritz's got a I w there should be a biography on this guy. Not only he's a greater. But uh he was a h a journalist, then turned uh venture capitalist for Sequoia, now is like a multi billionaire. But

35:51 There's this interview that's taking place in May nineteen eighty four. And Michael actually wrote this excellent like uh history of the early days of Apple. Uh I got the updated version of the book. It's episode seventy six, if you want to go back and listen to it. I'm gonna reread the book soon. It's actually been on my table for a while.

36:07 So it's return to the little kingdom, Steve Jobs and the creation from Apple. And I just wanna read two quotes from that book before I jump back into this interview that's in Make Something Wonderful. And so Michael is talking about founders and he says Found. At least the very best of them.

36:22 Are unstoppable irrepressible forces of nature. Of the many founders I've encountered, Steve is the most captivating. And then maybe even more importantly, he talks about Steve's career There is no other parallel. It's only Steve.

36:37 Many are familiar with the reemergence of Apple. They may not be as familiar with the fact that it has few, if any, parallels. When did a founder ever returned to the company from which he had been rudely rejected to engineer a turnaround as complete and spectacular as Apple's. While turnarounds are difficult in any circumstances.

36:56 They are doubly difficult in a technology company. It is not too much of a stretch. To say that Steve found it Apple. Not once. But twice.

37:05 And the second time he was alone. Now we go back to the book. This is happening in May nineteen eighty four. Uh Michael and Steve covered a wide range of topics including Steve thought Steve's thoughts on product design. And during this interview Steve made this fantastic

37:18 Point. He just had more time to make mistakes. And then to learn. And so what he's saying is like You know what it takes to make something great?

37:26 Time. And so Steve says, I don't think my taste in aesthetics Is that much different than a lot of other people's The difference is that I just get to be really stubborn about making things as good as we all know they can be. That is the only difference.

37:40 And so Michael Moritz interjects, he's like, Yeah, but I think you're just being modest and so Steve respond responds. Well, things get more refined as you make mistakes. I've had a chance to make a lot of mistakes. Your aesthetics get better. As you make mistakes.

37:54 But the real big thing is if you're gonna make something It doesn't take any more energy. And rarely does it take more money. To make it really great. All it takes is a little more time.

38:05 And a willingness to do so. A willingness to persevere until it's really great. And so then there's this interview with Newsweek that happens right after Uh Steve gets kicked out of Apple. And so we get an idea of what Steve thought about his life.

38:20 When he was thirty years old. And he says, In my wildest imagination, I could not have come up with such a wild ending to all this. I had hoped that my life would take on a quality of an interesting tapestry. Where I would have weaved in and out of Apple. I would have been there for a period of time.

38:33 And maybe it would have gone off and done something else to contribute. But connected with Apple. And then maybe come back and stay for a lengthy period of time. He had no idea. How right. He is gonna wind up being

38:45 It's just gonna take what another thirteen years, fourteen years from where we are in the story. And then he talks about what's next for him. And this is I think one of the most admirable things about Steve,'cause think about it. Let me read this to you first. I want to build things. What I'm best at doing is finding a group of talented people and making things with them.

39:02 I want to make things. And why this is so amazing is because At this point. Uh the the number the numbers I've seen have been varied, but Th they're somewhere in this range.

39:12 He had about seventy million dollars at that time. Okay, so if you adjust for inflation in our present day That's like being thirty years old. And having two hundred million dollars today. He could have

39:25 Stayed retired. could have been a become an investor. He could have taken it easy. And he didn't go. He couldn't. You could argue

39:33 And I would argue this is the argument I would make. Not that he didn't. He couldn't. He could not go that route because at his core. All he wanted to do was make great products. That is all he ever cared about.

39:45 He cared about it when he was a young person, when he was five or six years old. On that workbench with his dad they was talking about us earlier. Cared about it when he started Apple when he was twenty. Cared about it when He was still making great products. Up until the day he died.

39:59 And you see that idea right here. In the text. He's thirty years old. He could go off into the sunset. Never hear from like Be a wealthy man for the rest of his life.

40:08 Live a life of leisure. No. I wanna build things. I wanna make things. What I'm best at is finding a group of talented people and making great things with them. And then he talks about why. The outside world looks at success from a numerical point of view. My yardstick might be quite different than that.

40:23 My yardstick may be how every computer that's designed from here on out Will have to be at least as good. as a Macintosh. In other words, he's saying, I want to put a dent in the universe. I already did it once. I'm going to do it again. And so that's when the book goes into part two.

40:40 The night from nineteen eighty five to nineteen ninety six, Leslie Berlin gives us this really quick and fantastic overview. About this point in his life, the years after Steve left Apple were among the toughest of his career and the most formative. Determined to build a gr a new great computer company, he started next with several members of the Macintosh team. We'll make a whole bunch of mistakes, he said, but at least there'll be new and creative ones. At the same time, uh he bougar, which was spun off from filmmaker George Lucas's Empire.

41:06 The technical expertise at Pixar attracted Steve. Its initial product was a high end graphics computer that cost more than a hundred thousand dollars. That is the computer he thought. Oh, excuse me, the the the company he thought he was gonna buy. We obviously know how that ends, right? But this is a crazy. But both picks are

41:24 And next. quickly trouble. Imagine running Not one. But two failing companies

41:33 Simultaneously. And then The the outcome. Right, obviously selling uh next And then Pixar becoming you know, the the greatest uh animation studio

41:44 Uh, first of all, the first computer animation studio ever, but the greatest animation studio since Disney. Like that's insane. But back to this, both Next and Pixar quickly ran into trouble. Within six years of next launch, the entire founding team other than Steve had resigned. And Pixar, meanwhile, was eking out an existence. And so not only is Steve one of the greatest

42:03 founders to ever do it. He's one of the greatest investors to ever do it. This is insane. I'm gonna reread Creativity Inc. 'Cause I haven't read. I read it like two hundred seventy books ago or something like that. And just this idea, it's like okay, uh he bought it from George Lucas for five million dollars with the agreement that he's gonna give George Lucas five million and then commit to investing at least a f another five million. So that's ten million total. And then Before they wind up

42:25 doing the deal and actually becoming profitable. He dumps another sixty million dollars into it. Steve's enthusiasm kept him writing check after check to Pixar, ultimately investing some sixty million dollars of his own money.

42:40 And he talks about that, he did that for a decade. Uh Ed Catmull, the his co founder and the guy that wrote Creativity Inc. talks about this. in a few books that I've read on Pixar where it's like, Oh, well how did you know how do you pay the bills? Like, oh we have you know a couple of things that we're doing and then whatever the deficit is I go and meet Steve every month and he just writes me a check from his personal checking account. How insane is this? Uh back to what Leslie Berlin is telling us. Steve learned how to hone a company to its essence.

43:04 Even when it was painful. He shifne's focus to selling software. That shift meant closing a factory and laying off more than two hundred of Nexus five hundred and thirty employees. Meanwhile, Pixar stripped away its advertising and hardware businesses and entered into agreement with Disney. All to pursue with something. What sometimes seemed an impossible dream.

43:21 To make fully computer animated feature films which had never been done. before Toy Story was obviously the first one in history. goes on to be a massive success. After nearly a decade of difficulty. the streamlined next and pics are both transformed into unlikely success stories.

43:35 At the end of nineteen ninety five Pixar Premier Toy Story. in the same month it held its initial public offering. A year later, Apple in a need of an operating system bought next for four hundred twenty seven million. Quote from Steve, if you really look closely. Most overnight successes took a long time.

43:51 I would say all of them. I can't think of an an exception to that. Uh at the moment. If you really look closely, most I overnight successes took a long time. What I wrote to myself when I got through these few paragraphs. How many people are willing to go through it?

44:03 Decade. of difficulty without quitting. And so the in the book there's this picture of this excellent memo. that he sent uh to the team at next in nineteen eighty six. It's about making sure that you're you're running an efficient company.

44:17 And what Steve says here it reminds me of what Sam Walton said in his autobiography. uh that he always ran a real tight organization that he had no excess people. And so Steve says in revising our headcount requirements Downwards. I encourage you to remember that there is a very subtle line when crossed

44:34 An increased headcount. causes you to be a manager Instead of a contributor. I believe that if we turn ourselves into managers instead of doers Both our schedule and the greatness of our product will suffer.

44:46 Let's Not let this happen. It is better to have fewer people, even if it means doing less. Let's build our company. Slowly and carefully.

44:56 And so it's during this time of struggle. In nineteen ninety one, he's actually asked to give a a speech to the freshman, the incoming freshman of his alma mater. Which I don't know, do you call it an alma mater if you never graduated? So from Reed College. He's asked to give this this uh speech. And the reason this is important and you'll see what

45:14 W at which point I p I I chose to highlight. Is because next is computers, they're not selling and Pixar just had a did a round of layoffs. So he's saying this like

45:24 Or the main idea behind the speech is that character is built not in good times, but in bad times. And if you think about it in the context of where Steve's at in his life, it's almost like he's giving advice to himself. So it says the last experience I wanted to recount for you. There's a man, and I think he's here today. His name is Jack Dunman. He used to be the dean of the school.

45:41 He was one of my the heroes of my life while I was here because Jack. Look the other way. When I was staying on campus without paying. He looked the other way when I was taking classes without being a formal student and paying the tuition. And oftentimes when I was at the end of my rope, because Steve was flat broke at this point in his life.

45:59 Uh, when I was at the end of my rope, Jack would go for a walk with me. And I would discover a twenty dollar bill in my coat pocket after the walk. With no mention of it from Jack. Before During

46:10 Or after. I learn more about generas generosity from Jack. And all the people here at the school than I learned anywhere else in my life. The things I learned here stayed with me. Character is built not in good times. But in bad times.

46:25 Not in a time of plenty. But in a time of adversity. So I thank you. For teaching me how to be hungry. And how to keep that

46:34 With me my entire life. And so one thing I love what the Steve Jobs Archive is doing is they're organizing Steve's emails. And a few of his emails. show up in the book and they're just absolutely fantastic. And so this

46:49 This This is an email exchange between Steve. Intel CO Andy Grove, who's also a mentor and a badass. And then an Intel engineer. And so

46:58 I think Andy's like twenty years older than Steve, something like that. And it's just hard not to love. Andy Grove teaching A younger Steve Jobs. And there's just so so many lessons that now because the Steve Joss Archive has organized this.

47:11 That essentially like And he can teach us at the same same time he's teaching Steve'cause we're reading along, right? And so this is the background. Says as Pixar became a leader in graphics, Steve and his mentor, Andy Grove, discussed how Intel might learn from Pixar. When an Intel engineer tried to follow up, Steve resisted. And so we see this email chain between Steve

47:31 This engineer at uh at Intel whose all whose name is not released and then Steve Jobs. And so the engineers like hey, you know, I talked to Andy We're taking this really seriously, like let's get our two teams together, whatever. And then Steve hits him back. This is in nineteen ninety five.

47:47 Pixar secrets were invented through significant investment over ten years or more. And we value them highly. What does Intel propose to give Pixar for disclosing and licensing its secrets to Intel? And so the engineer responds, like, Oh, well, you know, we have not entered into any financial arrangement in exchange for good ideas for our microprocessors in the past. And we don't have an intention to do so in the future.

48:07 And so then Steve did not like that and he Then we see in his response. This approach has not served you well in the past, as evidenced by your poor graphics architectures and performance. Maybe you should think of changing it for the future. And so then Steve emails Andy and this is gonna

48:22 Th this is gonna be the opening for Annie to school and to teach Steve Jobs, like a younger Steve Jobs. And to Steve's credit, he also says this in the the last interview, the one I I keep referencing that I uh watched and listened to. In addition to reading this book, he's just like listen, I don't care. about being right. I care about being excellent.

48:38 So if somebody presents information to me, you can ask people on my team. Uh and there's a a different opinion. Like I will change my idea. Yeah, I don't care where the ideas come from. I just want to be excellent. And we see that Like in the email.

48:51 Like he has his opinions like uh Intel should pay us for this. And Andy's going to correct that and and explain why. And Steve has such reverence for the people that laid the foundation that he's working upon. That he agrees immediately. And so Steve email Andy, Andy, maybe it's just me, but I find the engineers approach extremely arrogant.

49:07 Given Intel's dismal showing and understanding computer graphics architectural issues in the past. If I were going to make hundreds of millions of something I sure as hell would be willing to pay for the best advice money could buy. Anyway, this wasn't this isn't a sales pitch. I just wanted you to know what I thought.

49:23 And so when I read Andy's response, I went and do what I normally do is like I wanna know how old they are when they're saying the stuff and so At this point It says uh I wrote Steve is forty and Andy is around sixty. And so this is what

49:37 Uh and he says. Emails Steve back. Steve, I am firmly on the engineer's side on this one. He is taking your offer to help us very seriously. He rounded up the best technical people. and was ready to go when you uh when you introduced a brand new element into the discussion. Money. You and I have talked many times about this subject.

49:54 You never suggested or hinted at the this being a commercial exchange. I took your offer to help us exactly as that help. Not as an offer of a commercial relationship. You may remember. That from time to time I offer suggestions

50:06 That were pertained to your business. I gave what I had, put some thought into the problem I saw you were facing, and it never encountered my mind to charge you for it. In my view, that's what friendly companies and friends do for each other. In the long run These things balance out.

50:23 I'm sorry you don't feel that way. We will be worse off as a result, and so will the industry, and then we see Steve in real time learning. This is gonna remind me of what Michael Jordan said in his autobiography on episode two thirteen. I am not so dominant. that I can't listen to creative ideas coming from other people. Successful people listen. Those who don't listen don't survive long. That is the end of Michael Jordan's quote.

50:45 We jump into Uh Steve Jobs email. Two Andy Grove. Uh, Andy, I have many faults.

50:53 But one of them is not in gratitude. And I do agree with you that in the long d long run, these things balance out. Therefore I have changed my position One hundred and eighty degrees. We will freely help.

51:04 engineer. Make his processors. Much better for three D graphics. Please ask engineer to call me and we will arrange for a meeting as soon as the appropriate picks are technical folks. can be freed up from the film. Thank you for the clearer perspective.

51:19 So then we get another interview from nineteen eighty six of Steve. This is after Pixar's release of Toy Story and its successful IPO. But next. So it's after he fixed things a Pixar, but Next is still struggling and hasn't been purchased by Apple yet. There is something that's in this interview. So I was listening to in the car, I was listening to that uh that the loss interview with Steve.

51:37 And my wife was listening to it with me. And Steve goes into the fact that he believes w w the with the web and where computers and and the internet is going. And he says it's in nineteen eighty six, by the way. Uh that you know it's gonna go from a computational device to a communication device. that it's gonna be an unbelievable amount of commerce

51:53 There's gonna be billions and billions and billions of dollars transacting on the web. This is way before it happened. And she even mentioned she goes, Oh, he nailed that. I was like, Yes, he did. And you see this in this interview too. It's like So again, the clarity of thought. Deep understanding of

52:06 Not only w the industry is happening now. But how these things can change in the future. I think most large companies and medium sized companies and even small companies are starting to look at the web as the ultimate direct to consumer distribution. This is exactly what he said in in that that talk, the lost interview as well. Bypassing all middlemen.

52:23 Going directly from the supplier to the consumer that is a powerful concept. when you think about it. That is a powerful concept when you think about it. What does he mean? It is not just shopping for goods and services. It is shopping for information. you are going to be buying information or finding information and really making a lot of decisions about what you're going to do with your life. and what you're gonna purchase from the web.

52:47 He continues. There's a lot of things happening with the web. In terms of allowing people to access information that they would have never had before. What this does, of course, is let special interest groups get together. In other words, You're able to find other people Just like you. the same exact interests that you have and you can learn from each other.

53:05 And you can do it whenever you want,'cause it's all on demand. That's insane. And so then the interview goes back to this idea. It's like What how did this feel uh to be forced out of the company that you created? And even ten years later, he he says this in the the lost interview. It's like if we keep talking about this, I'm gonna I'm gonna get emotional. Like I it it's still very painful. And so in this interview, he says, Oh, of course, that was a very painful time, but you just march forward and you learn from it. One of the things I've always tried to coach myself on.

53:29 was not being afraid to fail. When you have something that doesn't work out, a lot of times people reaction. is to get very protective. About never wanting to fall. on their face again.

53:40 I think that's a big mistake. Because you never achieve What you want. without falling on your face a few times in the process of getting there. I've tried not to be afraid to fail.

53:52 And matter of fact, I've failed quite a bit since I left Apple. And then he's asked like what do you think about the uh the problems that Apple's having? Yeah, they're losing money, their market share's evaporating, their product line sucks. And he says, Ah this is so fantastic. And he says this right after

54:07 Uh, right be excuse me, right before not right after, right before he's coming back. Apple's problem. Is that their differentiation evaporated. What did Jeff Bezos' last shareholder let say. Differentiation is survival.

54:21 Right here. And then we have Steve Jobs saying Apple's problem. Is that their differentiation evaporated. The cure for Apple is to innovate. it's way out of its current predicament.

54:31 There's a lot of good people left at Apple that are capable of doing that with proper leadership. Which is what has been missing. And so when you go back and you look at Steve giving talks in the seventies to eighties the nineties. There's even a talk where Edwin Land talks about where he uh does this like right off the cuff.

54:48 He's like eventually, you know, we're gonna have this device, it's gonna be able to take uh it's gonna fit in your shirt pocket. You'll be able to take photos. You better communicate each other. I think he said in like the early seventies. Steve talks about building like smaller like post PC devices even in the eighties. So something something more like an iPad than like an iPhone.

55:03 But they talk about this here. Where Steve sees an opportunity and he says, I think this is nineteen ninety six, I think. I think the PC as we know it is going to be around for quite some time, but the heart of the question is Are we entering a time window where we might see the first successful post-PC devices? That is an idea from the 80s first from Steve.

55:23 and from the seventies from Edwin Lan, it is appearing in nineteen ninety six with Steve The iPhone is eleven years away. It's incredible how many times in these books in whether the story of a person's life or the story of an industry They have an idea, they don't understand how to get there. It might take a decade, two decades, three decades to get there.

55:41 Like it's almost like somebody implanted that idea in their brain and is now part of them. They never let go of the idea. That's the way I feel that Steve was about these post P C devices that he would talk about. A lot. So then he goes back to this idea of the corporate c he calls it corporate lifestyle. I think we would refer this maybe it's like corporate culture to this day.

55:58 And his point was that the contrast between like Apple and IBM, like IBM's more hierarchical And his whole pl thing is like great will come from e everywhere. I um I mentioned this to you a few times, but I think there's this excellent documentary. on HBO, it's called the Defiant Ones. Technically it's about the relationship between Jimmy Ivine and Doctor Dre and early hip hop industry.

56:17 Really it's a it's it's one of the greatest documentations on entrepreneurship if you look at it and watch it through that lens. But in that documentary, Jimmy Ivine is saying great can come from anywhere. And what he was talking about is the fact that He found a demo tape uh that Eminem handed out at like the Rap Olympics. that was handed to I think Jimmy's A and R.

56:36 That Then he that he gave to Jimmy. Jimmy heard it and he's like, Oh, I'll give it to Doctor Dre And like the rest is history. And he was talking about like You know, this guy this is like the middle of nowhere.

56:45 There was no like giant Hip hop scene in Detroit at the time. It was all, you know, West Coast, East Coast at the time. It's like great can come from anywhere. Great can come from anywhere. Why did I think about that? Because listen to what Steve is gonna say to us here. I would say Apple

56:58 Apple had a very if it had a corporate lifestyle, it f a few very big differences to other corporate lifestyles that I'd seen. The first one was a real belief. That there wasn't a hierarchy of ideas that mapped onto the hierarchy of the organization. Damn, that's a good line. There isn't a hierarchy of de ideas that are gonna map onto the hierarchy of the organization. In other words Great ideas could come from anywhere.

57:19 And we better sort of treat people in a much more egot Eagle Teryan. Sense. In terms of where the ideas Came from.

57:27 Great can come. From anywhere. And so their conversation continues and she's like uh Carrie G uh Gross, I think, or Gloss, uh is the I think her name's Terry Gross. She's the one uh interviewing him at this point. And

57:40 They're like, Well This is like a very different approach to corporate hierarchy. It's like more like how startups think. But you know, isn't that like a very high stress place? And so then he's reflecting on His early days at at Apple and you know, we we've heard ideas like this from other sources, but

57:55 This is fascinating'cause it then leads him to say something about, you know I've never really thought of my life and my work as different things. And he says, Well we were very young and most of the folks were not married, so they could work fifteen hour days. But you didn't have a typical situation where you worked so that you could support your life.

58:11 Your work was your life in many cases. Then he's asked a follow up question. Do you feel you've changed from that? Is that your life still? In his response. I feel it is still my life, but it is not all of my life.

58:23 It's less of a percentage, but I still don't really There's a pause. I've never been able to think of my work and my life as different things. They're the same thing. And then he says as he gets older, now he's a family, he's married, he's got kids, it used to be ninety nine percent of my life.

58:40 And now maybe it's fifty percent of my life. But he never thought of them as different things. So then he's invited to give a speech at Palo Alto High School. And this is actually for the high school graduation. And I'm just gonna read you some highlights here.

58:53 Because I think what happens is he's really highlighting what he feels a is actually important. In life. And he says, I'm supposed to offer you some wisdom and advice that you may remember along your travels. Be aware of the world's magical Mystical.

59:06 And artistic sides. The most important things in life are not the goal oriented materialistic things that everyone and everything tries to convince you to strive for. Most of you know that deep inside. I bet many of you have had.

59:20 Some of these intuitive feelings. About what you could do with your lives. We are never taught to listen to our intuitions. To develop and nurture our intuitions. But if you do pay attention to these subtle insights

59:32 You can make them come true. People will come at you with reasons. Why you shouldn't do these things. And so then he gives some positive advice. Be a creative person. Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights.

59:45 That others don't see. And one way to be more creative, he says, is You need to get a more diverse set of experiences. And how do you do that? By not traveling the same path as everyone else.

59:56 And he continues, so to be a creative person, you have to invest in yourself by exploring uncharted paths that are outside the realm of your past experience. Seek out new dimensions of yourself, especially those That carry a romantic scent. But one has no way of knowing which of these paths will lead anywhere in advance. That's one of the most important lines.

1:00:16 There's no way to tell in advance. No one ha One has no way of knowing which of these paths will lead anywhere in advance. The only thing one can do is to believe that some of what you follow with your heart will indeed come back. To make your life much richer. And it will.

1:00:30 And you will gain an ever Firmer trust in your instincts and intuition. Don't be a career. The enemy of most dreams and intuitions is And one of the most dangerous and stifling concepts ever invented by humans. Is the career.

1:00:44 A career is a concept. for how one is supposed to progress to stages during the training for and practicing of your work life. Many people find what they believe to be safe harbors. Like a lawyer or accountant. Only to wake up ten or fifteen years later and discover the price they paid.

1:01:01 So I just want to pause here to interject because I do think I have a unique perspective from like my vantage point here. I obviously know a lot of my friends are lawyers' accountants and you know, that they're not like I don't think Steve's picking on those two occupations. Uh per se, but I do know a ton of them. uh that feel this way.

1:01:15 But I also talk to a lot of founders because of the podcast, right? And you know what a surprising regret is, I think, from the outside. How many of this appears over and over again? Building a big

1:01:27 Company. You'd be shocked at how many founders start out with a small idea. Gets more successful. turns into a big company. And then their business grew so much.

1:01:36 And as a result had to change. And it changed into something that they no longer love. Or enjoy. We are terrible predictors. Of what we will think.

1:01:45 Humans, all humans. Terribly bad at predicting what we think. We actually want or actually make us h Happy. And there's so many conversations where like I cannot believe this, like what I thought I wanted.

1:01:55 what I thought other people told me success was, like this giant company by headcount or by complexity or whatever. It's like I don't like it. Anymore. So I just wanna again Not

1:02:05 Try to tell you what's to do, obviously. I never would. just telling you like what other people experience and maybe you know you figure you you can figure it out for yourself. This part is fantastic. Make your avocation your vocation. Make what you love your work. The journey is the reward.

1:02:18 People think that you've made it. When you've gotten to the end of the rainbow. Rainbow and got a pot of gold. But they're wrong. The reward is the crossing the rainbar. Rainbow.

1:02:28 That's easy for me to say. I got the pole pot of gold. Literally. But if you get to the pot of gold. You already know that that's not the reward.

1:02:37 And you go looking for another rainbow to cross. And so the summary of that paragraph for me is time is the stuff Life is made of. quote from Ben Franklin. That is literally How you spend your time is all that matters. That w is what your life is.

1:02:52 Think of your life as a rainbow. This is some again Maybe my favorite quote in the entire book. Think of your life as a rainbow. arcing across the horizon of this world. You appear.

1:03:01 Have a chance to blaze in the sky. And then you disappear. What is he saying? Go for it like your life depends on it. Why?

1:03:09 Because it does. It literally does. The two end points of everyone's rainbow. This is This is Again.

1:03:18 think one of the he's got a ton of great ideas, right? But something you'll if you study Steve, what he says over and over again is like if you need to use your inevitable death as a tool to make decisions on how you're gonna spend your time. The two endpoints of everyone's rainbow. Are birth and death. We all experience both completely alone.

1:03:35 And yet most people of your age have not thought about these events very much. Much less even seeing them. In others. How many of you have seen the birth of another human?

1:03:45 It's a miracle. And how many of you have witnessed the death of a human? It is a mystery beyond our comprehension. No human alive knows what happens to us after our death. Some believe this.

1:03:56 Others that. But no one really knows. Again, most people your age have not thought about these events very much. It's as if we shelter you from them. afraid

1:04:06 That the thought of mortality will somehow wound you. For me, it's the opposite. To know my arc will fall. Makes me want to blaze. While I'm in the sky.

1:04:17 Not for others. But for myself. For the trail that I know that I'm leaving. And I love the way he ends his speech. Now as you live your arc across the sky, you want to have as few regrets as possible.

1:04:28 Remember, regrets are different from mistakes. Mistakes are those things that you did and you wish you could do over again. In some You were a fool. In other he says usually concerning women. That's hilarious. In some you are a fool, usually concerning women.

1:04:41 In others you were scared. In others you hurt someone else. Some mistakes are deep and others are not. But if your intent was pure then they are almost always enriching in some way.

1:04:51 So mistakes are things that you did and wish you could do over again. Regrets Are most often things you didn't do. And wish You did.

1:05:02 So then right before he goes back to Apple, Steve gives an interview that's all about Pixar. And so of course I had to pull out a couple of things'cause I love Steve always is always quoting and talking about what he learned from Walt Disney, which I think is amazing. And so this is a uh a very interesting idea that you need to be editing Before.

1:05:18 You can actually You know, people think of editing as something that happens after the fact. And Steve's whole point is like, Yeah, but you can also edit before you make it. Walt Disney realized many decades ago that animation was so expensive that you couldn't afford to animate ten times more than what you need. Matter of fact, you don't want to animate even ten percent more than what you need. And therefore the only conclusion you can come to

1:05:35 is that you have to edit your film before you make it. Working with Disney gave us access to that wisdom that you can't buy for love or money. The art of storytelling is very old. And no amount of technology can turn a bad story into a good story. I don't think it has changed a long time and I'm not sure that it will. He's talking about storytelling.

1:05:53 Meanwhile, you can hardly find an apple two around too much anymore, and it's not clear whether you'll be able to boot up a Macintosh five years from now. Sooner or later they all become part of the sedimentary layer that is the foundation for new innovation. By contrast Disney released its first animated feature film. Film.

1:06:08 Snow White in nineteen thirty seven. That's sixty years ago. A few years ago, they released it on video and sold twenty eight million copies. Making probably around a quarter billion dollars of profits. Sixty years after its initial release. And then they include Steve's interview in this book called In the Company of Giants, that came out I think in nineteen ninety seven.

1:06:28 I read the book and covered it all the way back on episode two oh eight. highly recommend buying a book. It's an interview with Steve and I think fifteen other technology company founders. It's excellent. And so the main theme I would say of that interview Um is that you better have great great people. That you have to go for great. This is something that Steve talked about. His entire career.

1:06:46 You better have great people. There are no shortcuts around quality, and quality starts with people. I spend twenty percent of my time one day a week even now recruiting. And so he goes on about that point for a while, and then the interviewer asks him a great question. If finding A players is so important, how can you tell who an A player is and who isn't? And this is what Steve said. That's a very hard question. Ultimately there are two paths.

1:07:06 If a candidate candidate has been in the workplace for a while You have to look at the results. There are people who look so good on paper. And talk such a good story. But have no results behind them.

1:07:17 They can't point to breakthroughs. Or successful products that they shipped. and played an integral part in. Ultimately the results should lead you to the people. As a matter of fact, that is how I find great people.

1:07:28 I look at great results and I find out who's responsible for them. But then he makes a great point. Startups usually don't have, you know, unlimited capital. So you have to find undiscovered. You have to you're to be the one discovering the great talent. However, sometimes young people haven't had the opportunity yet to be in a position or influence to create such results. So here you must evaluate potential. It's certainly more difficult.

1:07:48 But the primary attributes of potential are intelligence and the ability to learn quickly. Much of it is also drive and passion. Hard work makes up for a lot. And then he talks about his counterintuitive job interview technique.

1:08:01 Many times in a job interview, I will purposely upset someone. I'll criticize their prior work. I'll do my homework, find out what they worked on and say God That really turned out to be a bomb. That really turned out to be a bozo product.

1:08:13 Why did you work on that? The worst thing that someone can do in an interview is to agree with me and not go under. What I look for is someone who comes right back at me and says you're dead wrong. And here is why. And he places everything he's discussing in the proper p context. So it's like

1:08:28 Why are you doing all this? And he has a very simple objective. He says my job is to make sure the work is as good as it should be and to get people to stretch beyond their best.

1:08:40 Part of the CO's job is to control. And beg and plead and threaten at times. To do whatever is necessary to get people to see things. In a bigger and more profound way. Then they have.

1:08:51 And to do better work than they thought they could do. When they do their best and you don't think it's good enough, you have to tell them straight. This isn't good enough. I know you can do better. You need to do better.

1:09:03 Now go and do better. Tell it to them straight. This isn't good enough. I know you can do better. You need to do better. Now go and do it. So then we get into part three and this is about His return to Apple up until his uh his death, unfortunately.

1:09:18 And w again we have Leslie Berlin does this fantastic job. In you know, very short, you know, handful of paragraphs here. Just giving us a brief overview of what's to come. The Apple that Steve returned to after its purchase of Next at the end of nineteen ninety six didn't resemble the company he remembered. Apple had lost eight hundred million dollars that year.

1:09:35 But he also found many employees whose talents and love for Apple struck him as phenomenal. There's something here worth saving, he said. Steve remained driven by the same mission he articulated in his early years. to put something back into the pool of human experience. And his years away.

1:09:50 Look now, this is crazy. And I I had known this, but I never thought about this. Like I never I but It was never articulated.

1:09:58 But if you think about it, it's like his years away. were longer than his first time at the company. That's crazy. And in his year years away, longer than his first time at the company, he had matured and learned how to lead. He saw his job.

1:10:11 As number one recruit. Number two. To set an overall direction and number three. To inspire and cajole and persuade. He gave particular thought to his p t oh, this is fascinating too.

1:10:22 He gave particular thought to his responsibility for the business aspects of a creative company. He has this combination that's really interesting. And so he says a you need a risk taking creative environment on the product side. And that requires a fiscally conservative environment on the business side. So on the product side, risk taking creative environment. combined with a fiscally conservative environment on the business side.

1:10:43 His second tenure at Apple was a study and focus. Soon after he returned, he slashed the company's product offerings from seventeen to four. This upset some fans and led to thousands of job losses, but he was unwavering in his belief. That it was necessary to save the company. You've got to choose what you put your love into really carefully, he said.

1:11:02 A stream of breakthroughs including the iMac, OSX, iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad. Reflected that focused love. As did Pixar's blockbuster and award winning films from the same Period. Apple's technology offered tools to make something wonderful and Pixar films he believed.

1:11:18 had the rare opportunity to put stories into the culture stories that would speak to our grandkids grandkids grandkids Steve wanted to build a foundation for Pixar and Apple. that would last beyond his lifetime and we know from our vantage point That he definitely did. The engine driving these transformations was a remarkably consistent set of values.

1:11:36 That Steve held dear. Life is short. Don't waste it. Tell the truth. Technology should enhance human creativity.

1:11:43 Process matters. Beauty matters. Details matter. The world we know is a human creation. And we can push it forward.

1:11:53 And so then a few years later, in two thousand three, he goes and speaks to the Stanford uh business school uh students and he actually It's telling us Like he's recalling the internal struggle and I've heard him speak about this and and write write about this in a few different ways. So this is very fascinating'cause it gives you like some background to how he saw this taking place and this is about six years after he made this decision.

1:12:13 So he says I was working at Next, working at Pixar, reading the rumors in the papers that Apple's going to buy a company And then they'll buy this company for their operating system. And one of our guys said, We should sell next to them. We've got a much better operating system. And I said, forget it, it'll never happen. So this is one of those cases where

1:12:28 You hire the right people. They don't always listen to you in key moments in time. So this person being very smart didn't listen to me. And he went over and talked to Apple. And said you ought to buy next. And they were interested.

1:12:38 And then he comes back and says they want to talk to us and I was like, No way Go away, you're making this up. He did this twice. Finally said, Okay, fine. Let's talk to them. I couldn't believe it.

1:12:49 They really were interested. And so we ended up ended up selling them next. And after that I was pretty much out of the picture. Then one of Apple's board members called me. I had never met this person and he said, Look, I want your straight scoop on what you think of the CEO here.

1:13:03 And I thought, I don't even know this person. Whatever I tell them, they're probably go tell the CO And then I'll be Persana non grata. And I will not have a chance to help my team not get crushed by these other folks there. And I thought a lot. And then I thought

1:13:15 You know This is a director of a company that I started. And that I love for many years. And still do. And so how can I not tell them the truth?

1:13:23 So I spilled my guts. And I never heard from him again. And so I figure fine. I was spending my days at Pixar and having a great time. It was springtime going into summer.

1:13:32 And six years ago, a few weeks from now. I got a call back from him. The director and he said We're gonna dismiss our CEO and we would like you to come back and run the company. And I said, I can't do that. I'm the CEO of Pixar.

1:13:44 And so what Steve's talking about there, he wasn't sure that it was even legal to to be the CO of two public company Cs at the time. And so he says, I'll help you anyway. I can, but I can't do that. He call back a few days later and said, We'd like you to come back as interim leader and help us find a new CO.

1:13:57 And I said Well I have to think about that. And I was thinking about it and I called up a friend of mine. A really smart guy. So he doesn't name him here. I know from other books, this is Andy Grove.

1:14:07 So he says I called up a friend of mine, a really smart guy, a good friend I'd known for a long time that worked at another company in the industry. And I probably woke him up in the morning. And I was telling him About my struggles about should I do this or could I do this or should I not and this and that and finally He interrupted me.

1:14:22 And he said Steve. I don't give a shit about Apple. Yeah. And then this was hilarious because when I read this previously If you really read between the lines, like Steve is giving you and I a blueprint on to what to work on.

1:14:33 You ask yourself, What do I give a shit about? And then you go and do that because that's what he did. And so he says that finally interrupted me. And he said, Steve, I don't give a shit about Apple. And then I realized, you know? I do give a shit about Apple.

1:14:44 And that's kind of what crystallised it for me. And so I went back there as interim CEO. And I decided right up front that I was gonna act like I was the permanent CEO. And so once he's back at Apple, we see these emails again from the Cross Archive of what's happening. And Avi Tavanian.

1:15:01 I actually went to YouTube to make sure I mean pronounced his name correctly. Um, there's this exchange between Avi Tavanian. And and Steve. And He had run software engineering at next. And so he comes back and he assumes the same role as Apple when it acquired next. He told Steve that the Apple culture at the time of the acquisition

1:15:18 was so bad. that you know, we should just sell the company. And I think Steve's response, his email back is excellent'cause it tells you like his mindset. Like there's no way in hell Steve's gonna sell Apple. So it says you know I had the same feeling lately that Apple employees don't deserve to be saved.

1:15:31 They think they work so hard. Heck, I don't see it. They also think that they have no responsibility for any of the mess that Apple's in. I don't think Uh.

1:15:39 This part made me laugh the first time I read it. I don't know who they think engineered and shipped such bad products. Who created and authorized such bad marketing? Who caused the support to be so bad? They just don't want to share any responsibility for the current state of the company. But I just love that idea. It was like who do they think performs so poorly? Like again, insight to human nature. They're never gonna think. That it's Sam.

1:16:00 Uh, but there is something good w here worth saving. I don't quite know how to express it. But it has to do with the fact that Apple is the only alternative to Windows. And that Apple can still inject some new thinking into the equation. And he also includes in the email to Avi That

1:16:15 something we mentioned earlier. It's like I don't care about being right, I just want to be excellent. Please continue to challenge me. It's the way we get to the right decisions and I enjoy it. And so then there's this speech to Apple employees, and you can actually see this on YouTube too. But it's included the the part of the transcript is included in the book.

1:16:30 And it really just like lays out like to explain to him like why am I doing all the things that I'm doing. Right? People have to know why. He says I've been back about eight to ten weeks and we've been working really hard. What we're trying to do is not Do something really high flu We're trying to get back to the basics. We're trying to get back to the basis of great products. Great marketing and great distribution.

1:16:49 So to that and he says we started with the product line. We looked at the product roadmap going out a few years and we said A lot of this doesn't make sense. And it's way too much stuff, and there's not enough focus. We actually got rid of seventy percent of the stuff on the product roadmap.

1:17:02 I couldn't even figure out the damn product line after a few weeks. I kept saying, What is this model? How does this fit? I started talking to customers and they couldn't figure it out either. You're going to see the product line get much simpler.

1:17:12 And you're going to see the product line get much better. And so his advice to you and I is focus on the gems. Just get rid of all the crap. We've been able to focus a lot more on the thirty percent of the gems, not the seventy percent of the stuff that was distracting us. So that's the product line. Then he talks about that.

1:17:28 We have not kept up in innovations in our distribution. Now crazy this. So the crazy thing about that, right, we know what's gonna happen in the future. Steve when he said that did not know that. We have not c all he knew is that we're not we're not doing well in distribution. This is Not only they didn't have their own

1:17:43 Retail stores. They weren't selling direct on their website yet either. And so that's two major things that he's gonna change. Let's go back to the marketing. To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world.

1:17:53 It is a very noisy world. I can't tell you how many times. I have read This paragraph. Uh th th like'cause I had notes on this talk for a long time. I don't know, fifty times.'Cause what he says here is so important.

1:18:05 Uh, to me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. It's a very noisy world. And we're not gonna get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us. Now Apple Fortunately, is one of the half a dozen best brands in the entire world.

1:18:21 It's right up there with Nike. Disney. Coke. Sony. It is one of the great of the greats.

1:18:27 But even a great brand needs investment and caring if it's going to retain its revelence and vitality. And the way to do that is not to talk about speeds and feeds. And so this is where he says, Hey, look at the job Nike does on marketing. We're gonna do that, but we're gonna do it for computers. The best example of all, one of the greatest jobs of marketing that the universe has ever seen is Nike.

1:18:49 Remember, Nike sells a commodity. They sell shoes. And when you think of Nike, you feel something different than a shoe company. In their ads, as you know, they don't ever talk about the products. They don't ever tell you about their air souls or why they're better than Reeboks. What does Nike do in their advertising?

1:19:04 They honor great athletes. And they honor great athletics. That's who they are. That is what they're about. And so he begins asking, like, what is our core value? What are we about?

1:19:15 Uh, the c the question we asked was our customers want to know who is Apple and what do we stand for? Where do we fit in this world? And what we're about isn't making boxes for people to get their jobs done. Although we do that well. We do that better than almost anybody in some cases. But Apple's about something more than that.

1:19:29 Apple at its core, its core value. Is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. That is what we believe. And we believe that in this world People can change it for the better.

1:19:41 And that those people that are crazy enough to think they can change the world. Are the ones That actually do. And so we were going to communicate this. And so he's referencing the think different ad campaign.

1:19:53 You can see the entire ad campaign. On YouTube if you want. It's he starts out here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels. And so he's describing this before he plays it for the Apple uh employees. It honors those people who have changed the world. Some of them are living, some of them are not.

1:20:06 But the ones that aren't, you know that if they ever use the computer It would have been a Mac. So after he gives his speech, this is something I haven't come across in other books before. There's actually a protest. That's a good sign that people actually care about what you're doing, right? That the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.

1:20:22 And so He cancels the Newton. Product line. And people rebel so much that they showed Apple They show up at Apple to give a protest, right?

1:20:30 And what he does is so smart. This is Steve's response to customer protest, and we know this because of And he says some people are understandably upset that Apple has decided to stop developing future Newton based computers. Uh, today some of them are coming to Apple to protest our decision. This is okay.

1:20:47 We are reserving a space for them on our campus and it will provide and we will provide them with Coffee and other hot drinks. Artists it may be cool out there. Yeah, our decision to end Newton development was not taken lightly and it is unlikely to be reversed. Even so.

1:21:00 Let's welcome the Newton customers and developers who come to protest this decision. Hopefully. They will feel our enthusiasm about the future of Apple. And leave more settled. than when they arrived.

1:21:12 And so in about a year he raised uh Apple's market cap to four billion from one point eight billion. And so he talks about all the different things on how he got there. But what I found is fascinating is like an insight to human nature. It's like people are never gonna be satisfied. And so he has this he puts a a framework on this. He calls it Apple's hierarchy of skepticism.

1:21:30 And as the basis of this, he uses Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And so it says like once you fix something, like people are always gonna find something else to complain about. So he goes Uh, when I came to Apple a year ago, all I heard is Apple's dying. Apple can't survive. And it turns out that every time we convince people that we've accomplished something at one level They come up with something new.

1:21:48 I used to think this was a bad thing. I thought oh jeez. When are they ever gonna believe that we're going to be able to turn this thing around? But actually now I think it's great. Because what it means is we've now convinced them That we've taken care of last month's question.

1:22:00 And they're on to the next one. So I thought Well, let's get it ahead of the game. And let's try to figure out what all the questions are going to be and map out where we are. So that's what the Apple hierarchy of skepticism is.

1:22:11 And so he takes it piece by piece. He says on the first level What we encountered a year ago was survival. So what do we do? We did many things. But the three things that stood out in people's minds were we brought in new management

1:22:21 To run the company. A new board of directors that got some phenomenally experienced people on it. And we did a deal with Microsoft, the largest software company in the world, wanting to help Apple Was A fact that didn't escape very many people.

1:22:34 And it added a lot of credibility to what we were doing. The combination of these three things and a lot of other medium sized things convinced people fairly rapidly that survival, at least in the short term, was not an issue. So what is the response? Immediately after we did this, then everybody moved up a level. Now it wasn't about survival. It was well, there's no stable business in the Mac market. That was the next level of the hierarchy.

1:22:56 So we had to start demonstrating That we had a stable business. And that one could be made from the Macintosh market because it's a great market. So what do we do? Well the most important thing was profits.

1:23:07 Apple delivered profits of forty seven million dollars in the next quarter. And then delivered a quarter uh the quarter after that. of fifty five million dollars in profits. We also realigned our distribution channels and we began an advertising campaign for our brand around Think Different. We invested in an online store.

1:23:24 We are now one of the largest e commerce sites. Now on the internet. So the aggregate of all these things was that the market value of Apple has risen from one point eight billion dollars a year ago. To about four billion dollars yesterday.

1:23:37 So what did people do then? Well, they don't send us a card or anything. They just go on to the next thing. What's the next one? Well if you survived and you've got a stable business

1:23:46 Well, what's your product strategy? You're a product driven company. You better have a doggone good product strategy, they said. And so this goes back to his idea. It's like okay, we cut everything, his his famous like four product matrix. the the Apple Matrix and he says, Okay, what this told us is that if we had four great products, that's all we need.

1:24:02 And as a matter of fact, if we only had four, we could put the A team on every single one. And so one of this innovation that he's talking about, that he's given a speech at Macworld. uh was the introduction of the IMAC. And so that's what he talks about next. We immediately began a program to build the most kick ass consumer product we knew how to do. And that's the I Mac, and we're really, really happy with this thing. It's gorgeous.

1:24:21 We believe it's going to change the way computers look and should look. And so he goes, Okay, so now what? What more could you ask for? Well there's always something right. The last one is growth. Well if all this stuff's so good, show me some growth. How are you going to grow?

1:24:35 And this is his point of differentiation is like the growth is gonna come from building great products that consumers want. And he didn't know how right he was. At this point, right? But he says Apple had declined rapidly in the consumer market. A market that he had invented.

1:24:49 Apple invented the market for selling computers to consumers. And yet have failed to come out with compelling products at consumer price point. So he is saying that is the next level that he's focused on now. We began a program to get back into the consumer market with a vengeance. And this

1:25:04 Is where we see a tremendous amount of growth for ourselves. Think about how crazy it is, right? He's saying This this consumer market, we're gonna get him back in there with a vengeance. This is where we're gonna see a tremendous amount of growth for ourselves. He's saying that in nineteen ninety eight.

1:25:19 There's no such thing as an iPad, no such thing as an iPhone, no such thing as an iPod yet. And so what I think might be my favorite parts of this entire book Is there several sections? called e uh email from Steve to himself. Uh he does this quite a bit.

1:25:34 Um it says why he Steve often captured his thoughts by emailing himself notes. And the reason it's important is because obviously every email is it's time and date stamped. And so you can see like the evolution of his thinking. You know, and involve like a lot of the same ideas. You'll see like a little

1:25:47 Like the like little, you know seeds of them and then they grow and then they maybe combine with other ideas. And so his he sends an email to himself in the year two thousand, like what is Apple's reason for being? And so I just wanna pull out a couple of highlights for that he was thinking in in two thousand. Apple is the world's premier company at building high technology products that are easy to learn and use by mere mortals.

1:26:06 Beginning over twenty years ago, Apple has consistently set the standard for easy to use computer systems and software. Why? Why do we do this? Because we're in love.

1:26:16 with the potential of personal computers enhance and enrich the lives of regular people. Not just with spreadsheet and databases. But was creative. We are a creatively driven company in everything we do.

1:26:28 Apple Mary state of the art technology. with Apple's legendary ease of use to create products that enable users to do more. Apple. Is the world's per this is This is the way you think about like

1:26:42 Think about what he's saying here. Right. Yeah. So far it's like okay, where are you going with this? He really summarizes hit the way he thinks about Apple at this point. Apple. is the world's premier bridge builder between mere mortals

1:26:53 In the exploding world. of high technology. demystified technology. It will have a much greater impact. than any other thing we can do.

1:27:03 And then we have another email that Steve sends to all Apple employees. This one happens in two thousand two, and it's actually on his all time favorite quote. And it's this quote from Aristotle. And Aristotle said. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act. But a habit.

1:27:17 That was sent in two thousand two. A few years later, he's giving this interview. Thinking like sixty minutes or some like show like that. And I think it's right around the release of uh the iPhone and it uh the interviewer is saying, you know, you're gonna go down one of the greatest inventors and innovators in American history. How do you think about that? And Steve said something something that

1:27:34 I think is echoing What Aristotle said. And she said, I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good. Then you should just go do something else wonderful.

1:27:43 Not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next. And if you take these two quotes and you think about them in context of Steve's own career It's like he didn't do the apple two. The apple two is one of the greatest uh products ever ever created, right?

1:27:56 Uh he didn't start there. Then he made the Macintosh. Then he just kept going. Then he found help found Pixar. Then you know, he he does uh the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. I Mac, all these other fantastic products. And I think he has that in common with a lot of the people that they write biographies of. They don't do just one great thing. Or if they do one great thing, they do that one great thing thing for decades after decades. So I like that idea. It's like we are what we repeatedly do.

1:28:20 We're great if we do one great thing. It's like no excellence then is not an act, but it's a habit. It's a lifelong habit. And then the book republishes this interview that he did actually with Leslie Berlin, who's the one doing a bunch of the introductions and like the editing of this book. And she interviewed Steve back in two thousand three. And this again, like I talked about this last week when I talked about uh the fact that I had lunch with Sam Zell.

1:28:41 over two hours, there's not one thing I could tell that guy. About entrepreneurial business history he didn't already know. I told you I came back and I was like, I want that like it It was reassurance that I was on the right path. We're gonna go over this this interview. And this is something I've known about C forever, you know. I think I mapped out um you know, between all the podcasts I've done and then all the podcasts I did.

1:29:00 Based on Steve's influences. I should re really reprint this bonus episode I did, or republish it. I've done like thirty nine or forty different episodes just trying to map out who Steve Jobs was. And then going deep on the people Like all the people he just randomly mentions that he studied and he inspired and I'd go and read their biographies, right? And so

1:29:16 Guess what I'm saying is like I re re read this interview. In the interview, Steve is gonna talk about one of his mentors, which is Bob Noyce, the founder of Intel. Uh, you'll recognize him because I covered him all the way back on episode One sixty six. His all he's got a biography called The Man Behind the Microchip.

1:29:32 Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, if you want to read that book or or listen to that episode. But the reason uh th this is so important to me and I spent so much time in this actual this one, you know, interview. I think it's

1:29:45 Obvious that if Steve Jobs was young and still building his career today, like he would listen to founders. Listen to what he talks about. In this interview. So this is the introduction. Uh, in two th in May two thousand three, Steve spoke with Leslie Berlin about his mentor, Robert Noyce. Noyce co invented the microchip and co founded Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor, the first successful silicon.

1:30:07 microchip company in Silicon Valley. And so then he begins to speak about How important Through his relationship. That he built with Bob.

1:30:15 Steve was a young man. Listen to this. He says I was young, I was in my late twenties and Bob Well gosh, he must have been in his later forties. Leslie hops in, she says he was born in twenty seven, in nineteen twenty seven.

1:30:27 And so s Steve says, Yeah, I was born in nineteen fifty five, so he's almost thirty years older than me. Yeah, so he was well, he was in his early fifties. Meaning he was in his early fifties when he started to mentor A young Steve Jobs. And now that I'm approaching this is the I love this'cause we think about the full scope of human

1:30:43 uh the full spectrum of like your human lifetime, right? Like you could think of like what did you think when you were in your twenties, what did you think when you're thirties. And now This is Steve talking when he's in his almost uh almost fifty. He's like the difference of what he thought when he was twenty, what he did not know and what Bob was trying to teach him. So says and now that I'm approaching fifty, it's easy to see how people in their fifties

1:31:02 No more than people in their twenties. He just kind of tried to give me the lay of the land and tried to give me a perspective. That I could only partially understand. Meaning only partial understand when he's twenty. There's no Some of the stuff like

1:31:14 you know, I've had this happen in my own life. Older people older wiser people try to tell you something like Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fine for you And then you realise something happens in your life, you experience and then that's where you learn the lesson. You're like Damn it. And this is what I love about Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett.

1:31:29 They keep repeating. So few people are capable of learning from the experience of others. And Warren and Charlie, like we just happen to be able to be the m some of those few people that can sh actually learn from the experience of others. And life is a lot better and easier if you could do that. So I think there's an echo of what Steve's telling us here. So it's like he was giving me a perspective that I can only partially understand at that time.

1:31:47 I think he was interested in what someone in their twenties thought too. And he was fascinated by the personal computer. The personal computer and Intel had nothing to do with each other at the time. So he was fascinated by that stuff. That was it. So we just became buddies, and there's something that Bob says in his in that biography. Where he says something.

1:32:04 I think the line I don't have it in front of me so I'm going off memory. So something like he the reason he spent so much time much much time mentoring and then investing in young entrepreneurs is says Something like I wanted to restock the fish. The stream I wanted to restock the stream I fish from.

1:32:19 Like I benefited, he talked to in his, you know, studying deeply. David Packard and Bill Hewlett, among other people. And he's like, Well, you know, th these people were so helpful for me. All these people helped me in my career, like now that I'm You know, he's wealthy and well known, his company's successful. I have an obligation. Very similar to what Sam Zell said last week. You know, I was like, Well, Sam, why you doing this? Like why are you flying all over the world at your expense?

1:32:39 Given these speeches. And he could be doing whatever he wants. He could be on an island. He could buy an island and just be fed grapes all day. He's like, I don't want to do that. That's not interesting to me. I have an a he that's what the word used, like I have an obligation. I consider an obligation To pass on what he learned. That guy's been an entrepreneur for sixty one years.

1:32:55 How many people on the planet can say that they've been an entrepreneur for sixty one years. There's some of'em. There's a s there's a small group of people. Imagine the the knowledge that's in this this guy's brain. And then what does he do? He goes travels all around the world at his expense. sharing his wisdom and his love of entrepreneurship with other people. That is

1:33:11 I wanna Freaking scream. And you know that's not the word I was about to say. Uh so I just love this. I just love this idea that we see this over and over again where it's just like, Man, I have an obligation. Like Bob Noy said it.

1:33:24 You know, Bob Nois has been dead for thirty something years. And yet that same theme, that same Whatever you wanna call it. That same idea is still alive today. I just absolutely love it. So let's go back to this uh This interview and so Leslie's saying uh one of my favorite quotes from Bob is where he says that optimism is a central ingredient for innovation. And so this is what Steve says.

1:33:42 Well, it's optimism and passion. Because it's really hard. And if you don't really, really care about what you're doing, you're going to give up. If you're a sane person. Because it's super hard.

1:33:53 And I'm sure was extremely hard for him. At times. This is two thousand three. Steve Jobs, remember that. Optimiz it's optimism and passion because it's really hard. If you don't really, really, really care about what you're doing, you're gonna give up. 'Cause you're sane, if you're a sane person. Obviously s people like Steve Jobs

1:34:09 Uh, people like Bob Noyce. people like you and I, I don't think people to the average person that are gonna think people like us are sane. You know, I told the story where I was telling my dad. Then I got to meet Sam and like, you know, this guy sold his company for thirty eight billion dollars.

1:34:21 eighty one years old, still still at it every day, still like enthusiastic and you know, he didn't understand. He's like why? I 'Cause to him work is drudgery. Work is something that you have to do. Where it's like entrepreneurs, people like you and I and Steve and Bob. It's like no no no it's like We have to do it because it's part of our personality, but it's there's no separation between our life and our work.

1:34:38 There is no oh I have a X amount of dollars so I'm just gonna sit on my ass and do nothing all day. That's not gonna happen. So then Steve goes back on the importance of asking older, more experienced entrepreneurs for help. Uh I called him, meaning Bob Noyce, and Andy uh Grove and a few other people. I called Jerry Sanders, who's the founder of micro the microchip company AMD. I just called him up and said, Look, I'm young and I'm trying to run this w I'm trying to run with this company he's talking about when he was in his early twenties, okay?

1:35:01 I'm trying to run this company. I'm just wondering if I could buy you lunch once a quarter and pick your brain. And everybody I asked said yes. It was nice. Bob said yes. Andy Grove said yes. That's how I met Andy.

1:35:12 Jerry Sanders said yes. It was pretty wonderful. I was very, very lucky because I got to meet and get to know a little bit of Hewlett, Bill Hewlett, and David Packard too. So this idea Go back to what we just talked about a little while ago, where Andy Grove is like schooling'em. It's like hey, you know, we we we we weren't entering into a commercial relationship.

1:35:28 Part of being friends and helping each other is I'm gonna tell you everything I know, you're gonna tell me everything you know, and then just gonna balance out in the end and then Steve, you know, reflects. He's like, Okay, thank you, and I change my perspective. I'll do whatever I can help, help. That idea, that relationship they built. Over multiple decades. He meets Andy Grove when he's in his early twenties, he's still talking to him.

1:35:45 Uh twenty years later. I think Steve was around forty years old when that that email exchange was happening. And this is something Steve would repeat throughout his entire career after shared on a past podcast where he said he feels asking for help is a superpower. A superpower no one uses. He goes a little bit into that here. I think I got lucky and had the Hootspa. Uh to call these guys up. There's a tradition here in Silicon Valley, and many people don't spend time to learn about it.

1:36:05 Some people but some people, like himself, get curious as to what came before them. Leslie says, Why does that sense of connection matter? Why is it so important to you? Listen to this. This is Steve is so I don't even know if poetic is the right word. Like there's just a passion to everything he does. You could tell he like truly gives a shit about what he what he's doing. And so Steve says

1:36:26 There's a human drama to most everything. You look at it sometimes and it seems dry as history. But if you peel the onion onion. There's humanity underneath. Right, how many times you and I go over these biographies? It's not just about the the amazing

1:36:39 career they built, an amazing business they built like There's times where you like Bad things happen in their family, there's health issues. It's like all the struggle going on today. Like you're peeling the onion and you realize there's humanity underneath that you and I can relate to'cause we all go through the same shit. Just to understand what's going on now, you can't really do that unless you understand how it got here.

1:36:58 There's a great quote by Schopenhauer. It's a great quote. I should pull this up. If I I'll get it all wrong, I've got to go and get it. So He loves it so much. Goes upstairs.

1:37:07 uh grabs Schopenheimer's book on the suffering of the world. And then reads it. Uh and then reads it to Leslie. 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 And witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession.

1:37:26 The tricks. We're meant to be seen. Only once. And when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive. Their effect is gone.

1:37:36 And so a few years before he gives this legendary commencement fest uh address that's been viewed, you know, tens of millions of times, probably a hundred million times by now. At Sanford. MBA students, a graduate school of business students there uh a few years before. And so he's going over Uh just some like ideas or things that he's working on. This is two thousand three.

1:37:53 Uh in Apple. And this is very important, uh something he says. Uh, I'm r at the same time as reading this book, I was rereading James Dyson's autobiography, which is gonna be the next episode. And him and Stephen James pick up on the exact same thing. So he says If Apple comes up with a dozen innovations in a year, we can maybe advertise four or five of them.

1:38:09 We can't advertise more than that because even if we had all the money in the world, the customer would get very confused with all these messages coming at them. James in his autobiography says you simply cannot mix your messages when selling something new. A consumer can barely handle one great new idea, let alone two Or even several. So that's on the product side and the advertising side. Then he talks about the distribution side. This is the Apple stores. And he says that we and we're gonna ambush our customers. This is just hilarious. So he says our goal in retail was not just to sell to the five percent of people who own our products today.

1:38:37 It was to go for the other ninety five percent. And we decided that these other ninety five percent would not drive ten miles to look in an apple store. If they weren't at all interested. Uh in buying our products. And

1:38:48 You know they're not interested'cause they have a bunch of products. So we decided we had to ambush them. That's a great That's a great sent like a great word that he's using there. We had to ambush them. What that meant is that we had to go to high traffic locations and put stores there.

1:38:59 The customers don't have to take a risk of driving ten miles to find out that they weren't interested. They just had to take the risk of walking ten feet. And then he's gonna repeat something that he started talking about twenty five years before. This talk that he's giving at at uh at Stanford Graduate School of Business. The fact that everything comes down to the people. Everything goes down comes down to the quality of people that you work with, the quality people that you have in your life. That's

1:39:21 There's a huge variance in the quality of people. You probably already experienced that. And so you have to go for great. That's been the most important lesson that I've learned in business. That the dynamic range of people dramatically exceeds things you encounter in the rest of our normal lives. And to try to find those really great people who really

1:39:39 Really love what they do. And there's also an element that they're missionaries, they're not mercenaries, and he's talking about this. He's like, Listen, when I returned to Apple in nineteen ninety seven, so that'd be six years before he's talking about this, the individual contributor contributors were phenomenal. The individual contributors, right? The con the the the management and the overall uh company culture was terrible. Obviously, uh you and I talked about this when we went over Johnny Ives Uh excellent, excellent.

1:40:02 uh biography. And so I'm sure Johnny's one of these people and he says, I asked a lot of these guys why did you stay? And they said, Because we bleed six colors. I heard that from a lot of people. There are there were six colors in the a old Apple logo. So I bleed Apple. Colours, right?

1:40:18 It was management that was a problem. So we actually got rid of most of the management team and promoted a lot of these young people into management positions. This is Steve's very unique perspective on management. And what I found is that nobody in their right mind wants to be a manager. It's true. It's a lot of work and you don't get it to do the fun stuff.

1:40:33 But the only good reason to be a manager is so some other bozo doesn't be the manager and ruin the group that you care about. And so he continues about management. And this is why I think people love Steve. They just love people that are unfiltered. That we we all think this. But no one talks about it. We all play this like this fake game with this jargon and pretend like

1:40:52 Like we're not all humans underneath. And so what do you talk what does he talk about? I study management school. Like You know this is W I agree with what he's saying here, so basically what I'm saying. There's a lot of management t techniques. It's all croc. And a really smart guy I met a long time ago who used to teach at Disney University. Walt Disney himself recruited him s this guy.

1:41:10 To run Disney Universally told me about his point of view. Steve has what, uh thirty years of uh three decades of experience. Uh running companies at this point. And he's like, But I like with this guy that ran Disney University. Actually said.

1:41:22 And he says he called it management by values. What that means is you find people that want the same things you want. And so he's gonna tell this in an an analogy. We're all gonna take a trip together. The first thing to is to figure out where we all wanna go. The worst thing is if we all decide we want to go to different places. You can never manage it.

1:41:38 This guy wants to go to New Orleans. You want to go somewhere else. I wanna go to San Francisco. You wanna go to San Diego. That doesn't work. But if we all say we all want to go to San Diego, that's the key. Then we can argue about how to get there.

1:41:51 You think it's better to take a plane. You think it's better to take a train. We'll figure that part out because if I say I want to take a train to San Diego and somebody says that's really stupid, it'll take three days. We can fly and be there in an hour, I'll go, Oh Okay.

1:42:05 Because actually I wanna go to San Diego. So if I can get there in an hour flying, I'll ditch my idea about the train. That's what management by values is. It's finding people with passion. There's that word again. It's finding people with passion.

1:42:20 That wanna go to San Diego. who want to go to the same place you want to go. That is the key. And then he goes into okay, now we have agreed to where we want to go, how do we do that? And his whole point is you figure it out along the way. That's what you get paid to do, right? So if you want to preserve something, what you wanna do is have a good enough place to go. That's got a long enough focal length.

1:42:40 That it will survive over time. That everybody agrees on. And not codify how you're going to get there. And that's one of my mantras.

1:42:49 around Apple and Pixar. Right, because the people that you recruit Yeah everything like this is what we just talked about. Everything with Steve. is gonna come back to

1:42:58 the quality of the people. That you have around you. And that's one of my mantras around Apple and Pixar. That recruiting is the most important thing that you do. Finding the right people.

1:43:07 That is half the battle. And so based on my understanding of Steve throughout this reading, I think the person that was most influential on how he managed when he came back to Apple was actually the time he spent with Ed Ed Catmull. Seeing how Ed Catmull actually ran. Uh Pixar. And and

1:43:20 Says something uh over and over again. In his autobiography, Creativity Inc. about this. It's very similar to what Steve's saying here. If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it Or throw it away and come up with something better.

1:43:34 And so I think that adds context into why Steve keeps repeating that recruiting is the most important thing that you do. Finding the right people is half the battle. And so then we go back to this idea that Steve loved to email himself. all these notes and like kinda document what he's thinking. And so there's this actually long longer part of the book that's multiple emails of him over you know a length of time.

1:43:56 drafting that the legendary Stanford commencement address. And so we can see as you read through the emails, and again, this book is available for free. You can read it online or download it. I don't understand why you wouldn't You can actually see the like the evolution of his thinking or like how these ideas Uh like he writes'em to himself and then uh like how they they they'll change in the final draft and then uh how they change when he actually delivered the address, which I thought was interesting. But I just just I just do want to pull out a couple of things here.

1:44:23 This was excellent. Yeah. 'Cause he sa he says that the world we live in is a circus world and you never know what's around the next corner, which I thought was a great A great line. And so that obviously can be negative and positive events.

1:44:35 But this was a extremely positive event in his life, this is when he meets his wife. So he's emailing himself these notes that he wants to write about talk about. at the commencement address and this subject to himself was that you can't plan to meet the people who will change your life. And so this is the note to himself that he's gonna eventually share a variation of this with those graduating students. You can't Plan to meet the people who will change your life. I was invited to speak at Stanford's business school.

1:44:58 a few times a year and I always try to do it. I had accepted an invitation to speak one Thursday late in the afternoon and I wasn't feeling very well and I had a dinner late that evening with some important customers. But he decides anyways to go. So he's like, Oh, it doesn't matter. I've I said I was gonna do this, so I'll do this. He says It didn't take me long to notice this really cute girl sitting next to me. I think she was stunned when it was me that got up to speak. And I knew something was up when I s when I was staring at her, forgetting what I was talking about mid sentence.

1:45:21 After my talk, I stayed around to speak with some students, and then she stayed too. But then she left and I didn't know who she was and I thought I might never see her again. So I wound things up and left and caught her up and caught up with her in the parking lot. I asked her if she would have dinner with me on Saturday. She said yes and gave me her phone number.

1:45:36 As I was walking to my car, this is one of my favorite things he ever did. He says as I was walking to my car, I asked myself If this was the last day of my life, would I rather have dinner with the important customers? Or her. I race back to her car.

1:45:49 Just as she was about to drive off and ask her. How about dinner tonight? She said sure. And we were married eighteen months later. You can't plan to meet the people who will change your life. It just happens.

1:46:01 Maybe it's random, maybe it's fate. Either way you can't plan for it. But you want to recognize when it happens and have the courage and clarity of mind to grab onto it. So then another email, he's you know, re recounting the lessons that he's learned from his life that he's trying to organize for the benefit of you know, the not only the people that are in the audience, now the tens of millions of people around the world that have watched that commencement address. And so we see this evolution again.

1:46:25 And this is just absolutely fantastic because I'm not sure if I should read the highlight first. Let me read the highlight first and then my note. 'Cause that's the order that that That this happened for me. And so he's talking about

1:46:35 starting Apple. And he says when my partner Steve Woznianak And I started Apple. Most of our friends and our family Told us we were nuts. Waz had a great job designing handheld calculators at Hewlett Packard, and I had a fun job designing games at Atari.

1:46:48 And we were giving them up to start this company. I remember talking to Was and saying, Hey, we may fail. But we have no responsibility now, no wives, no kids, no house payments, nothing. If we don't do this now, we never will. We have nothing to lose.

1:47:00 The worst thing is we'll get out of this. Or excuse me, the worst thing we'll get out of this is that we'll have memories of having gone for it. to give ourselves the experience of participating in what Bill Hewitt And David Packard did. To start a company.

1:47:13 So rather than invest in better cars or better apartments or our bank accounts. We decided to invest in our selves. And so when I read this section, this is the first thing. Again, like When I'm reading, I think I've told you this before, but I got I just read Whatever when I'm reading books, whatever pops out I'm like I I wanna remember, I just highlight. I don't sit and like contemplate it. It's just all instinct, like oh this is interesting I wanna remember this.

1:47:34 And then immediately I write down the first thing that pops to mind. You can never predict When you hear a line, you know, on a podcast or you read it in a book. Or hear in a movie, like what That's like a prompt for your thinking, right? This

1:47:46 Paragraph that I just read prompted this thought. One thing that reading biographies of dead people will do for you. It will remove the illusion that you have something to lose. If you want to design calculators at HP, then do that. But if what you really want to do is to try to start a company, you're making a giant mistake playing it safe.

1:48:03 Everything is temporary. There is no such thing as safety. Then we see another email that he drafts for himself. for the commencement address. This is another one of my favorite ideas. And something that, you know, is gonna happen when you become friends with the eminent dead.

1:48:17 And it's important to obviously pick that up before uh you know, w were one of them. The most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices is to remember that I'll be dead soon. I know it sounds a bit dramatic, but it's true. And when I remember this, I realized that all the expectations and standards and restrictions of others

1:48:33 And society. mean nothing in the end. I realize that I have nothing to lose by following my heart and my intuition, even if I embarrass myself. Or I fail in the eyes of others. Because I'll be dead soon.

1:48:44 And when I realized that I don't have forever to decide what my intuition tells me is waiting out there for me. When I was seventeen I read a quote that said something like, If you live each day As if it's your last, some day you'll most certainly be right. And since I was seventeen. I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself

1:48:59 If today was the last day of my life, would I want to do what I'm about to do today? Goes back to Ben Franklin's quote. Time is The stuff life is made of. That's all that matters. We can we get confused with prestige and money and and

1:49:11 Expectations of others. It doesn't matter. Do you I am a very good thing. My wife wouldn't agree with us, but I'm a very simple person. In sense it's like I just try to design A day.

1:49:21 Delike. Did I like what I did today? And if I did, then let me do do that again tomorrow. And if I find work that I love to do and I do it every day and I do it over a long time, that means I'll get really good at it.

1:49:31 Right. And then then I'll be able to build value for other people and collect some of that value for myself. So it's like very simple. It's like Twenty four hours. That's all I I don't worry about five year plan, ten year plan, twenty pl twenty year plan. It's like Can I d can I design a good twenty four hours myself and then keep doing that day after day? So it's very similar to what he's saying here.

1:49:47 If today was the last day of my life, would I want to do what I'm about to do today? When the answer has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something in my life. Another way to think about this. Is that your life is a story. It's hard to see it. When you're looking forward at twenty two.

1:50:01 Which is, you know, the the the intended audience for what he's writing here. But imagine yourself as an old person looking back on your life. Your life will be a story. It will be your story. With its highs and lows, its heroes and villains, its forks in the road that mean everything.

1:50:16 And if you can remember. That your life is a story in the making. It'll help you make important decisions. And so then there's just a few things that I wanna pull out from the actual commencement address at Stanford University. There's something I actually save on my phone.

1:50:30 'Cause I think what Steve's about to tell us here. is very similar to this. Like I I I did a podcast uh on uh Anthony Bourdain, who, you know, I I was a huge fan of. I read his books, I watched his Uh his shows. Uh I was devastated when he killed himself. Um I'm actually reading a a another book with somebody that worked very closely to him because I thought Tony Born's

1:50:48 quality work was excellent. And so reading this book, like hopefully I can learn and like apply in some small way, like some lessons that Tony learned. But there's something I heard Tony say one time. that um I save and I look at on my phone all the time. And I try to use it as a like a Just the way I think about my own work.

1:51:04 And he says, I admire people who do things that are interesting to them. Who don't have a strategy or a master plan or have a brand. I don't care about any of those things. And what we're about to hear he Steve talk about.

1:51:17 Is He did things that were interesting to him. you know, he trusted that like if he just followed his own interest and his the his passion, which was you know, making insanely great products. that it would work out in the end. And we saw that when he was

1:51:29 A very young man. So he says, My biological mother was a young unwed graduate student, and she decided to pick me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates. So everything was all set for me. To be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents who were on a waiting list got a call in the middle of the night.

1:51:50 Asking. We have an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him? They said of course. My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college.

1:51:59 And then my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college. This was my start in life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college.

1:52:12 But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working class parents' savings. were but were being spent on a c on my college tuition. After six months I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea. What I wanted to do with my life.

1:52:26 and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all the money. That my parents had saved. So I decided to drop out and trust that it all work out okay. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.

1:52:40 It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in a friend's house. I returned Coke bottles for five cent deposits to buy food. And I would walk seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Harry Chrishner temple. And so then he's talking about

1:52:57 Just following his interest. He was interested in the time at taking a cal c calligraphy class. Remember, he he's dropped out. He's not a student. He's just learning for the sake of learning, which obviously is way more important than learning for the sake of

1:53:10 Formal education. None of this had e had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful topography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would never have had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.

1:53:30 And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them either. Again, you cannot connect the dots looking forward. That's why I think following You're just something you're intensely interested in. Like mo maneuver yourself.

1:53:44 into a into your work that you are intensely interested in. And then do it for a long time. That combination, like time carries most of the weight. As long and the way you stay in something wrong, it's like you're intensely interested about it. Steve was intensely interested in building products when he was like nineteen.

1:53:59 He was still intensely interested in it. doing the same thing when he was fifty. Again, that's why we're talking about today. Again, you 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, your destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will co somehow connect down the road.

1:54:18 Will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you to off the well war worn path. And that will make all of the difference. And then later on the speech he goes back to this theme that like if you know that you're temporary, everything that you think matters People's opinions of you. None of that. None of it matters.

1:54:35 It's just like what do you want to do? Your time is limited. Don't waste it living someone else's life is one of the best pieces of advice anybody could give you. Some sometimes life is gonna hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going after he got fired from Apple And struggled for you know twelve, thirteen years. was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.

1:54:55 Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And like any great relationship

1:55:13 It just keeps getting better and better as the years Roll on. So keep looking. Don't Settle.

1:55:20 Your time is limited. Do not waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

1:55:37 Everything. else is secondary. This is fantastic. I've never seen this before. U gave a speech to Apple employees the day before the iPhone is released in two thousand seven. And this speaks to one of my favorite ideas about him, and an idea I think you and I can use in our lives, is that one of his talents was spotting markets filled with second rate products.

1:55:56 Uh, same with James Dyson, right? Which we'll cover next week. And it wasn't dr uh, so he's talking about the the the creation of wanting to have a phone. He says it wasn't driven by a bunch of market research or financial spreadsheets about how big certain markets were. It wasn't driven by that at all. It was driven by the fact that we all hated our phones. We talked.

1:56:12 To all of our friends. And all the people we knew. And they hated their phones too. And we thought this is a really important device and everyone hates it. They don't know how to use even ten percent of the features that are on these phones.

1:56:23 We thought we could make a contribution by making something truly great that we loved. And we've done it. We love this thing. And starting tomorrow at six PM We're gonna find out if other people love it as much as we do.

1:56:37 And think about that, the most successful consumer product of all time. came from just fact that he was just building a product for himself. Few pages later they print out. uh this this joint interview that the Steve Jobs. I think it's the last joint interview that Steve Jobs

1:56:52 And Bill Gates. uh gave Um, and they're on stage together. And really I just want to pull this out because this jumped off the page two, Bill they're they're like Talking about what they like about each other and after being like frenemies.

1:57:04 For multiple decades. And Bill says Steve gave a speech once Which is one of my favorites, where he talked about in a certain sense that we build the products that we want to use ourselves. And so he's really pursued that with incredible taste. And elegance.

1:57:16 And that's had a huge impact on our industry. And so the iPhone comes out. Fortune magazine named Steve. CEO of the decade. So

1:57:25 Art Levison, who's the CO of Genitech at the time. And on Apple's board sent Steve A congratulatory. Email. Steve's response is perfect and it's

1:57:35 You can almost predict what his response is gonna be based on what we've already talked about. Right. And his his thing is like you did something wonderful, it's great. Go do it again. And do it again and Do it again forever.

1:57:46 So this is from Art to Steve. And he's qu he there's a line that he's quoting from The Fortune magazine artic article where they called him the Beethoven of Business. The Beethoven of Business Not sure it gets any better than that. Congratulations. Steve's response.

1:58:00 Is four words. All glory. is fleeting. And then a year before Steve dies, he sends an email to himself. No subject, but one of the greatest things I've ever seen anybody write.

1:58:14 I grow little of the food I eat. And of the little I do grow, I did not breed or perfect the seeds. I do not make any of my own clothing. I speak a language that I did not invent or refine. I did not discover the mathematics I use.

1:58:28 I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate. And do not enforce or adjudicate. I am moved by music. I did not create myself. When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.

1:58:41 I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor. Object oriented programming are most of the technology I work with. I love and admire my species, living and dead. And I'm totally dependent on them. For my life and well being.

1:58:57 And then the book ends with Steve's resignation letter from Apple. A few weeks before he died. to the Apple board of directors and the Apple community. I've always said if there ever came a day where I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple CEO, I would be the first to let you know.

1:59:12 Unfortunately. That day has come. I hereby resign as CO of Apple. I would like to serve if the board sees fit as chairman of the board. Director and Apple employee.

1:59:22 As far as my successor goes. I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CO of Apple. I believe Apple's brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role. I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple.

1:59:39 And I thank you all. For the many years of being able to work alongside you. Steve. Becoming friends with the eminent dead is a reminder that our time here is limited. We don't know how much time we have left.

1:59:54 We have to go for it. For the full story, download the book for free. You can go to StevejobsArchive.com. I'll leave the links down below as usual. You can read the book online. We don't uh Apple books. Download the the file and actually send it to your Kindle, any other uh e reader.

2:00:10 Whatever you want to do. highly, highly recommend. It's a no brainer. I cannot believe the gift that Steve Jobs Archive have just given to the world. The fact that We have Steve in his own words talking directly to you and I.

2:00:22 Highly, highly recommend you read the entire thing. And if you wanna see my top ten highlights from this book and every book that I read. Uh, you can join my email list. I will leave that link down below. And another way to support the podcast is by signing up for Founders Premium.

2:00:34 You can ask me questions directly, and you can listen to the AMA Ask Me Anything episodes that I make. That is two hundred and ninety-nine books down. One thousand ago. And I'll talk to you again.

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