Note: This article might seem a bit superfluous, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is the first-ever biography I have read and Jobs will always be the most impressive and thought-provoking entrepreneur I’ve ever read about.
A typical Stevenote (A speech that Steve Jobs gives at Apple events like WWDC and Apple Expo) always ended with the words stated as the title of this article. He will feign some concluding remarks and pretend to leave the stage; Although he will turn his back again to say ‘But… there is one more thing’. Might be the flimsiest thing I have noticed about Steve but I like the way he tried to make the audience feel like ‘Oh there’s more!’. The showmanship that Steve portrayed is impeccable. If you take the case of Elon Musk, he spends more time on his products and makes them exceptionally great and almost negligible effort goes to actually present a product. Although Musk has a point that excellency of the product comes first than anything, convincing the consumer takes a considerable amount of work. Steve Jobs excels in both. He not only knows how to create an amazing product but also knows how to enchant people with his charm. My profundity about CEOs might be very less but as far as I know, I haven’t seen someone like Steve who prepares ridiculously so much on a presentation or a product launch.
Although it is very well known that Steve doesn’t know much of coding, quoting Steve Wozniak’s words, “Steve didn’t ever code. He wasn’t an engineer and he didn’t do any original design, but he was technical enough to alter and change and add to other designs”. There might be people claiming “Steve doesn’t even code, what makes him so famous”. What Steve did was more than coding. Just the ability to build something exceptionally good isn’t ever good enough, we have to sell that to people, we have to have a very good hold on how to attract customer and investor; Else our exceptional talent will remain a hobby. Wozniak himself is a great example for this, he really wasn’t that good with having a business mind or had the “thing” to convert his hobby into a business. Steve had it in him and hence Apple exists.
Bill Gates quoted him as the wizard who saved Apple. Although Steve and Bill have quite a bit of rough history, their relationship wasn’t that bad as people perceive it to be. They both are on the opposite ends in the corporate world competing against each other, so the friction between the both is natural. Even so, Bill is a very sensible and well-read mind that his remarks about Steve are on point. Jobs was indeed a bit of wizard considering the technical background other CEOs had. He was more intuitive and had an impeccable instinct on what works and what doesn’t.
This article is not all about preaching that Jobs was a God and a perfect human being. He had plenty of flaws and made lots of mistakes, just like every other human being. He was a bit of immature and rude to people, even though he had the people skills but when it comes to managing his team that made all these products, he was rude and got on the nerves of his employees. He was very obsessed with perfectionism that his employees went nuts. He even wanted the insides of the computer to be neatly soldered and arranged; something which everyone would not do and considered as inconsequential. His visions felt undoable and insane that his employees had to sacrifice countless nights of sleep. Nobody likes to be stretched to their ability to that extent but in the end, it is going to be worth the trouble. Greatness is never achieved by sound sleep and easy life. It is always about the hustle. Even though his employees hated the workload, they still attest to the fact that whatever they did for Apple was worth the trouble and was glad to be part of it. But some people just didn’t understand Jobs and his vision, ultimately the board of Apple fired him out of the company. Honestly, he indeed was immature and not ready to be a CEO or part of Apple team at that point. I won’t blame the board for that either. In retrospect, firing him from Apple wasn’t bad after all, he bought Pixar studios and he is the reason for the existence of the animated movie series, Toy Story.
Impressing Jobs is a very hard task. Even if you worked hard on some project and wanted to get it approved by him, it better be freaking awesome, else he’ll simply rub it on your face (not literally, of course). Whilst creating the prototype for the iPod, the team worked hard on making it as small as possible by them i.e. they did everything anyone can possibly do to make it small and how Jobs reacted to is interesting. He simply walked over to a nearby aquarium and dropped the iPod into the tank. While it was drowning itself down to the bottom of the aquarium small air bubbles were popping out of the iPod and he simply said, “Those air bubbles, that means there’s more space in there. Make it smaller”.
If you have reached up to this point of the article, I am glad you took your time and patience to read through this. I’ll be concluding this by writing about two quotes that happened to come across my mind through reading about Steve Jobs.
“Good artists copy, great artists steal”
Although this quote was said by Pablo Picasso, I came to know about it via the book Steve Jobs. In essence, what it implies is that a good artist can copy a scenery just as it is and make a replica of it which is quite worthless and redundant. Great artists steal the key techniques and ideas of something and implement it in their own way. Even before Steve Jobs, touch screen technology existed and they had to use a stylus to operate on the screen. But Steve “stole” that idea (touch screen technology) and made it great and useful in his own way, “God gave us 10 styluses, let’s not invent another”, he said. He just didn’t copy it, he stole it and made it extraordinary (Introduction of the revolutionary product, the iPhone). In a way, nothing is new in this world, everything is inspired by something which already existed and we execute it in our own way, that makes it unique. In that sense, I am not a believer of originality, it is non-existent for me. Everything is a conglomerate of a multitude of other ideas. Even this article is a great example for that, I haven’t personally met Steve Jobs or conducted any interview to write all these. These are all simply the facts that I read in books and articles which I compiled and wrote in my own way.
Next one goes like
“Stay hungry, stay foolish”
Which can be interpreted as to be never content with the knowledge you have or don’t consider yourself an expert in anything, if you did so your growth stops there, ergo making everything monotonous and stale.