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Make Something Wonderful
Steve Jobs in his own words
A curated collection of Steve’s speeches, interviews and correspondence, Make Something Wonderful offers an unparalleled window into how one of the world’s most creative entrepreneurs approached his life and work. In these pages, Steve shares his perspective on his childhood, on launching and being pushed out of Apple, on his time with Pixar and NeXT, and on his ultimate return to the company that started it all.
Featuring an introduction by Laurene Powell Jobs and edited by Leslie Berlin, this beautiful handbook is designed to inspire readers to make their own “wonderful somethings” that move the world forward.
A curated collection of Steve’s speeches, interviews and correspondence, Make Something Wonderful offers an unparalleled window into how one of the world’s most creative entrepreneurs approached his life and work. In these pages, Steve shares his perspective on his childhood, on launching and being pushed out of Apple, on his time with Pixar and NeXT, and on his ultimate return to the company that started it all.
Featuring an introduction by Laurene Powell Jobs and edited by Leslie Berlin, this beautiful handbook is designed to inspire readers to make their own “wonderful somethings” that move the world forward.
194 pages, ebook
Published April 11, 2023
234 people are currently reading
1,935 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 152 reviews
April 25, 2023
Can be a bit repetitive and, if you've read a biography on Steve Jobs, the first parts of the book feel like a road already traveled many times over.
The best parts are when you get many personal emails and less well known speeches that are very interesting and thought provoking.
It's a quick read. If you enjoy Steve's thoughts and perspectives, you'll find this is an enjoyable read.
The best parts are when you get many personal emails and less well known speeches that are very interesting and thought provoking.
It's a quick read. If you enjoy Steve's thoughts and perspectives, you'll find this is an enjoyable read.
March 2, 2025
A truly spectacular book! I highly recommend looking up the video clips mentioned and watching them alongside the text—it’s far more powerful to hear the strength and conviction in Steve’s own voice.
Before reading this, I had never watched any videos about Steve Jobs or been particularly interested in biographies. But this book gave me chills multiple times—seeing his emails, speeches, and interviews firsthand made it clear how deeply he cared about building something simple yet powerful.
At its core, the message is simple (if I understood it right): Pour your time, effort, and heart into something, refine it with great care, and one day, the results will speak for themselves. Loved it!
Before reading this, I had never watched any videos about Steve Jobs or been particularly interested in biographies. But this book gave me chills multiple times—seeing his emails, speeches, and interviews firsthand made it clear how deeply he cared about building something simple yet powerful.
At its core, the message is simple (if I understood it right): Pour your time, effort, and heart into something, refine it with great care, and one day, the results will speak for themselves. Loved it!
August 5, 2024
Make Something Wonderful is a collection of Steve Jobs’s notes, emails, interviews, drafted speeches, and various thoughts he left behind. There are photos as well; some from his personal life, and many from his time at Apple, NeXT, and Pixar.
One thing that stood out to me was Jobs’s commitment to simplicity, both in design and communication. Whether drafting his famous Stanford commencement address or responding live to an angry questioner at a conference, you can feel his effort to speak directly and clearly to the underlying issue and the big picture… in as few words as possible. I kept thinking how tempted I would be to expound, explain, and expand, but I find his restraint aspirational.
Many seem to forget Steve Jobs’s central role at Pixar, and that he was simultaneously CEO at two major companies. As someone who works in animation (this book was a gift to Disney employees from Bob Iger), I was eager to hear Jobs’s thoughts on the relationship between art and storytelling and technology, and how success is measured in each field. Pixar’s sustained streak of successful films is a testament to the broader applicability of Steve’s problem solving and leadership philosophy.
An exchange that stood out was a series of emails with Intel’s CEO and an unnamed Intel engineer. The engineer had asked for help with 3D graphics based on Pixar’s pioneering work. Steve’s response amounted to: “We worked hard on that, and it’s valuable. You can pay if you want to talk to our engineers.” The CEO, Andy Grove, reminded Steve that not only had he already offered his help, but that Intel had helped Jobs in the past without bringing money into the equation, for the industry and for consumers. Job’s response (6 days later, from timestamps) led with: “Andy, I have many faults, but one of them is not ingratitude. And, I do agree with you that ‘In the long run, these things balance out.’ Therefore, I have changed my position 180 degrees - -“ Followed by an invitation to set up a call with Pixar’s talent.
Speaking of Steve’s faults… If you are looking for a comprehensive biography or complete works, this is not it. Nor does the book tackle the complexities or human costs of Jobs’s driven persona. While there are occasional references to shortcomings and failures and layoffs and protests, this is largely a hagiographic celebration of a man who, flaws acknowledged, was truly an original thinker and man of vision. The goal is to inspire, and it does that.
Growing up in the desktop revolution and early days of the Internet (the first website was published on my 9th birthday), I was a committed Windows user. I viewed Jobs’s philosophy of the incompatible, walled garden and simplified user interface with derision. I wasn’t aware of the timeline of his departure from Apple, and attributed more of the company’s stagnation to him than was deserved. Yet, in time, and with his return, Apple focused on its core philosophies and released a series of revolutionary products, including a mature OS and a phone that changed our concept of communication forever. Jobs may have radiated a reality distortion field, but it was the kind that produced tangible, positive results. I’m thankful he directed that energy to change the face of art and technology, rather than starting a cult. Though… Apple has been called such.
I’ll leave you with this. Another industry Apple revolutionized was music. Steve Jobs wrote himself an email on April 16, 2023, drafting a collection of songs to form his own celebrity playlist for the recently launched iTunes Music Store. As I read it, I made a YouTube Music playlist (chill, Apple, you have my money) to accompany me through the remainder of the book. And now this review. There’s a lot of Dylan, a lot of Beatles, and plenty of the Bay Area hippie ethos embedded in the best technology we use every day.
Written and posted from my iPhone
One thing that stood out to me was Jobs’s commitment to simplicity, both in design and communication. Whether drafting his famous Stanford commencement address or responding live to an angry questioner at a conference, you can feel his effort to speak directly and clearly to the underlying issue and the big picture… in as few words as possible. I kept thinking how tempted I would be to expound, explain, and expand, but I find his restraint aspirational.
Many seem to forget Steve Jobs’s central role at Pixar, and that he was simultaneously CEO at two major companies. As someone who works in animation (this book was a gift to Disney employees from Bob Iger), I was eager to hear Jobs’s thoughts on the relationship between art and storytelling and technology, and how success is measured in each field. Pixar’s sustained streak of successful films is a testament to the broader applicability of Steve’s problem solving and leadership philosophy.
An exchange that stood out was a series of emails with Intel’s CEO and an unnamed Intel engineer. The engineer had asked for help with 3D graphics based on Pixar’s pioneering work. Steve’s response amounted to: “We worked hard on that, and it’s valuable. You can pay if you want to talk to our engineers.” The CEO, Andy Grove, reminded Steve that not only had he already offered his help, but that Intel had helped Jobs in the past without bringing money into the equation, for the industry and for consumers. Job’s response (6 days later, from timestamps) led with: “Andy, I have many faults, but one of them is not ingratitude. And, I do agree with you that ‘In the long run, these things balance out.’ Therefore, I have changed my position 180 degrees - -“ Followed by an invitation to set up a call with Pixar’s talent.
Speaking of Steve’s faults… If you are looking for a comprehensive biography or complete works, this is not it. Nor does the book tackle the complexities or human costs of Jobs’s driven persona. While there are occasional references to shortcomings and failures and layoffs and protests, this is largely a hagiographic celebration of a man who, flaws acknowledged, was truly an original thinker and man of vision. The goal is to inspire, and it does that.
Growing up in the desktop revolution and early days of the Internet (the first website was published on my 9th birthday), I was a committed Windows user. I viewed Jobs’s philosophy of the incompatible, walled garden and simplified user interface with derision. I wasn’t aware of the timeline of his departure from Apple, and attributed more of the company’s stagnation to him than was deserved. Yet, in time, and with his return, Apple focused on its core philosophies and released a series of revolutionary products, including a mature OS and a phone that changed our concept of communication forever. Jobs may have radiated a reality distortion field, but it was the kind that produced tangible, positive results. I’m thankful he directed that energy to change the face of art and technology, rather than starting a cult. Though… Apple has been called such.
I’ll leave you with this. Another industry Apple revolutionized was music. Steve Jobs wrote himself an email on April 16, 2023, drafting a collection of songs to form his own celebrity playlist for the recently launched iTunes Music Store. As I read it, I made a YouTube Music playlist (chill, Apple, you have my money) to accompany me through the remainder of the book. And now this review. There’s a lot of Dylan, a lot of Beatles, and plenty of the Bay Area hippie ethos embedded in the best technology we use every day.
Written and posted from my iPhone
January 12, 2025
4.5
I’ve never highlighted a book more in my life. Great introduction to a legend I knew little about.
Listing down some of my favourite and life changing (not to be dramatic) quotes so that I can be reminded of them:
“One of the things I always tried to coach myself on was not being afraid to fail. When you have something that doesn’t work out, a lot of times, people’s reaction is to get very protective about never wanting to fall on their face again. 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.”
“Make your avocation your vocation. Make what you love your work. The journey is the reward.”
“So to be a creative person, you need to “feed” or “invest” in yourself by exploring uncharted paths that are outside the realm of your past experience.”
“You’re not grabbing the pencil out of the twenty-five-year-old’s hand to do it better than they are. If you’re smart, you’re hiring twenty-five-year-olds who are smarter than you.”
“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 - the worst we’ll get out of this is that we’ll have the memories of having gone for it.”
“I realize that all of the expectations and standards and restrictions of others and society mean nothing in the end. I realize that I have nothing to lose by following my heart and intuition, even if I embarrass myself or fail in the eyes of others. Because I’ll be dead soon. And I realize that I don’t have forever to decide to find what my intuition tells me is waiting out there for me.”
“Sometime life’s gonna hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going 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. 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.”
“The minute you can understand that you can poke life, and if you push in, then something will pop out the other side; that you can change it, you can mold it—that’s maybe the most important thing: to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there, and you’re just going to live in it versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.”
I’ve never highlighted a book more in my life. Great introduction to a legend I knew little about.
Listing down some of my favourite and life changing (not to be dramatic) quotes so that I can be reminded of them:
“One of the things I always tried to coach myself on was not being afraid to fail. When you have something that doesn’t work out, a lot of times, people’s reaction is to get very protective about never wanting to fall on their face again. 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.”
“Make your avocation your vocation. Make what you love your work. The journey is the reward.”
“So to be a creative person, you need to “feed” or “invest” in yourself by exploring uncharted paths that are outside the realm of your past experience.”
“You’re not grabbing the pencil out of the twenty-five-year-old’s hand to do it better than they are. If you’re smart, you’re hiring twenty-five-year-olds who are smarter than you.”
“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 - the worst we’ll get out of this is that we’ll have the memories of having gone for it.”
“I realize that all of the expectations and standards and restrictions of others and society mean nothing in the end. I realize that I have nothing to lose by following my heart and intuition, even if I embarrass myself or fail in the eyes of others. Because I’ll be dead soon. And I realize that I don’t have forever to decide to find what my intuition tells me is waiting out there for me.”
“Sometime life’s gonna hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going 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. 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.”
“The minute you can understand that you can poke life, and if you push in, then something will pop out the other side; that you can change it, you can mold it—that’s maybe the most important thing: to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there, and you’re just going to live in it versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.”
April 13, 2023
The hagiographic editing is a bit repetitive around some of the well-worn stories to those like myself that followed his biography (calligraphy at Reed, yes, yes, we get it)… but if given the chance I would read every email he wrote, and this may be the closest we get. Were that each of our best collected words (and a few moments of growth) worthy of being edited together in this way as an act of love by those you surrounded yourself by. It is clear those closest to him loved him dearly and extend his dent in the universe just a bit further.
February 26, 2025
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
The book is a selected collection of Steve Jobs' writing, speeches, and email exchanges. I've thoroughly enjoyed it for what it is, as it mostly serves as inspiration and a reminder of how Jobs, whose impact on modern life can't be denied, looked at life.
The book is a selected collection of Steve Jobs' writing, speeches, and email exchanges. I've thoroughly enjoyed it for what it is, as it mostly serves as inspiration and a reminder of how Jobs, whose impact on modern life can't be denied, looked at life.
April 12, 2023
A great read. Lots of wisdom and good honest feelings.
July 29, 2024
Rip <3. Sent from my iPad
October 9, 2023
This (mostly) chronological compilation of email correspondences, interview transcriptions, and images showcase Jobs' career ups and downs not only during his time at Apple. I learned a lot about Jobs, but I do wish that these first-hand accounts of current life were supplemented with a basic background and life outside of work on Jobs.
December 5, 2023
My love for Steve Jobs knows no bounds. He was absolutely brilliant and a true visionary. Was he weird, was he crazy? Absolutely and that’s how he founded and built a company with creatives in mind. It’s not Apple vs. android. Who cares? Not me. It has always been about the core principles. This is a treasure and I am so grateful to have it gifted to me by Apple. To see his journey from his own words was a gift. Meditate. Surround yourself with people smarter than you and from different walks of life. But the most important lesson of all.. Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
December 31, 2024
I love steve
May 16, 2023
Isaacson’s biography is very good, but the way this book is constructed from Job’s own words is terrific.
November 12, 2023
This book is absolutely amazing. It's a selection of Steve Jobs' speeches, interviews, and — crucially — emails.
I found the fact that emails were included especially riveting. Some examples:
- At some point, Pixar organized a Waltz for its end of year holiday party. Some 40 employees thought this was unfitting for Pixar's culture. Rather than cave in to the employees' concerns — something that I was inclined to do as a founder — Steve wrote an email to all staff, nudging them to think of the Waltz instead as a fun occasion to see each other in black tie.
- Andy Grove was a mentor of Steve's. At some point, Andy's staff at Intel asked Steve if they could pick Apple's brain about creating software for 3D Graphics. An email exchange ensued between Steve, Andy, and one of Intel's senior engineers. I won't spoil the ending, but it was amazing to see how Steve showed respect to his mentor after being a bit rebellious initially.
- Steve explained how he recruited CEO John Sculley from Pepsi by asking him "do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?" So bold, and so true.
Overall, I finished reading the book feeling very inspired to deepen the connection with my artistic self and to truly make the most of every moment. As Steve said several times, he wanted to leave a blazing path in the sky in the short time while he was alive.
I found the fact that emails were included especially riveting. Some examples:
- At some point, Pixar organized a Waltz for its end of year holiday party. Some 40 employees thought this was unfitting for Pixar's culture. Rather than cave in to the employees' concerns — something that I was inclined to do as a founder — Steve wrote an email to all staff, nudging them to think of the Waltz instead as a fun occasion to see each other in black tie.
- Andy Grove was a mentor of Steve's. At some point, Andy's staff at Intel asked Steve if they could pick Apple's brain about creating software for 3D Graphics. An email exchange ensued between Steve, Andy, and one of Intel's senior engineers. I won't spoil the ending, but it was amazing to see how Steve showed respect to his mentor after being a bit rebellious initially.
- Steve explained how he recruited CEO John Sculley from Pepsi by asking him "do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?" So bold, and so true.
Overall, I finished reading the book feeling very inspired to deepen the connection with my artistic self and to truly make the most of every moment. As Steve said several times, he wanted to leave a blazing path in the sky in the short time while he was alive.
April 16, 2023
Meditations on life and work and creativity and technology. I long for a print copy to keep on my desk, perhaps eBay will deliver one. The photos are especially wonderful.
August 14, 2024
Considero este libro un valioso archivo histórico. La lectura ofrece la oportunidad de conocer notas internas e incluso correos de Steve Jobs dirigidos a los equipos de Apple y Pixar, como si fueras parte de ese early stage.
Además, el factor estético del libro, dispuesto por Jony Eve (mismo diseñador del IPhone y productos de Apple), añade una experiencia visual distinta y valiosa a la lectura.
Sin el contexto previo de la vida de Steve Jobs es difícil sacarle provecho al contenido que ofrece el libro. Recomiendo encarecidamente leer en primer medida la biografía de Steve Jobs escrita por Walter Isaacson y, seguidamente, continuar con “Make Something Wonderful” como una lectura complementaria. Esta combinación cierra la cronología y ofrece un contenido muy cercano al personaje central de esta historia.
Además, el factor estético del libro, dispuesto por Jony Eve (mismo diseñador del IPhone y productos de Apple), añade una experiencia visual distinta y valiosa a la lectura.
Sin el contexto previo de la vida de Steve Jobs es difícil sacarle provecho al contenido que ofrece el libro. Recomiendo encarecidamente leer en primer medida la biografía de Steve Jobs escrita por Walter Isaacson y, seguidamente, continuar con “Make Something Wonderful” como una lectura complementaria. Esta combinación cierra la cronología y ofrece un contenido muy cercano al personaje central de esta historia.
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July 4, 2023No rating for a memoir but this was a good one. It’s not the typical memoir style, it’s personal collections of Steve’s emails, memos, speeches and interviews. It was great to know more in depth about Steve and how we shaped the way we communicate today. Highly recommend
December 11, 2023
I knew (know) startlingly little about Steve Jobs, Apple, Pixar etc.; surprising especially having lived through the era of their initial impact. This short book was a nice compilation of speeches, emails, thoughts and photos to help whet my interest for more, in a more thorough format.
July 25, 2023
"Once you learn that. You"ll never be the same again "
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 4, 2023
Great addition to other biographies on Steve Jobs. Filled with many great quotes and learnings. Go read this, it’s free and pretty great!
May 6, 2023
key takeaways:
### Part I, 1976–1985
It is 1958. IBM passes up the chance to buy a young, fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox is born. And IBM has been kicking themselves ever since.
It is ten years later, the late sixties. Digital Equipment [DEC] and others invent the minicomputer. IBM dismisses the minicomputer as too small to do serious computing, and therefore unimportant to their business. DEC grows to become a multi-hundred-million-dollar corporation before IBM finally enters the minicomputer market.
It is now ten years later, the late seventies. In 1977, Apple, a young, fledgling company on the West Coast, invents the Apple II, the first personal computer as we know it today. IBM dismisses the personal computer as too small to do serious computing and unimportant to their business.
The early eighties, ’81. Apple II has become the world’s most popular computer. Apple has grown to a $300 million company, becoming the fastest-growing corporation in American business history, with over fifty competitors vying for a share. IBM enters the personal-computer market in November ’81 with the IBM PC.
1983. Apple and IBM emerge as the industry’s strongest competitors, each selling approximately one billion dollars’ worth of personal computers in 1983. Each will invest greater than $50 million for R&D and another $50 million for television advertising in 1984, totaling almost one quarter of a billion dollars combined.
The shakeout is in full swing. The first major firm goes bankrupt, with others teetering on the brink. Total industry losses for ’83 outshadow even the combined profits of Apple and IBM for personal computers.
It is now 1984. It appears IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers initially welcoming IBM with open arms now fear an IBM-dominated and controlled future.
### Unknown chapter
The years after Steve left Apple were among the toughest of his career—and the most formative.
Determined to build a new great computer company, he started NeXT with several members of the Macintosh team. “We’ll make a whole bunch of mistakes, but at least they’ll be new and creative ones,” he predicted.
Around the same time, Steve invested $10 million in a small company called Pixar. It was a tiny computer graphics operation, newly spun off from filmmaker George Lucas’s empire. The technical expertise at Pixar attracted Steve; its initial product was a high-end graphics computer that cost more than $100,000.
Both NeXT and Pixar quickly ran into trouble. The NeXT computer system, which debuted in 1988, was powerful and packed with the humanistic touches Steve loved. It was visually striking and intuitive to use, with high-quality audio and the complete works of Shakespeare built in. But it was also late to market and expensive—and it sold poorly. Within six years of NeXT’s launch, the entire founding team, other than Steve, had resigned.
Pixar, meanwhile, was eking out an existence selling computers and software and, later, animating commercials. The company was also making award-winning short films that charmed Steve. This use of technology in service of brilliant storytelling embodied one of his favorite things: work at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. The short films fired Steve’s enthusiasm and kept him writing check after check to Pixar, ultimately investing some $60 million.
But the films were, as Steve put it, “in the background,” not the company’s focus. He described Pixar’s early business strategy as “find a way to pay the bills,” and he later speculated that the only reason the company didn’t fall apart then was that the leadership team “would all get depressed … but not all of us at once.”
If at times in these years he seemed disappointed by the possibilities of technology—“this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t,” he told a reporter in an uncharacteristic flash of pessimism—his world was also expanding beyond his work. He treasured his privacy, saying of his public persona, “I think of it as my well-known twin brother. It’s not me.”
Steve learned how to hone a company to its essence, even when it was painful. He shifted NeXT’s focus to selling software. The shift meant closing a factory and laying off more than two hundred of NeXT’s five hundred and thirty employees. Meanwhile, Pixar stripped away its advertising and hardware businesses and entered into an agreement with Disney, all to pursue what sometimes seemed an impossible dream: to make fully computer-animated feature films.
After nearly a decade of difficulty, the streamlined NeXT and Pixar both transformed into unlikely success stories. At the end of 1995, Pixar premiered Toy Story in the same month it held its initial public offering. A year later, Apple, in need of operating-system software, bought NeXT for $427 million. “If you really look closely,” Steve liked to say, “most overnight successes took a long time.”
As CEO of Apple and Pixar (he held both roles until Disney acquired Pixar in 2006), he saw his job as “number one, recruit; number two, set an overall direction; and number three, inspire and cajole and persuade.” He said, “You’re not grabbing the pencil out of the twenty-five-year-old’s hand to do it better than they are. If you’re smart, you’re hiring twenty-five-year-olds who are smarter than you.” He gave particular thought to his responsibility for the business aspects of a creative company. A “risk-taking creative environment on the product side,” he said, required a “fiscally conservative environment” on the business side. “Creative people are willing to take a leap in the air, but they need to know that the ground’s going to be there when they get back.”
Key Events
January 1975—Popular Electronics publishes a story about the Altair 8800, sparking the microcomputer revolution. That same year, Bill Gates drops out of Harvard to design programming languages for the Altair. Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, a club launches for people who want to build their own computers: the Homebrew Computer Club, which Steve occasionally attends with Steve Wozniak.
April 1976—Steve and Woz co-found Apple Computer to sell the Apple I, designed by Woz. (A third co-founder, Ron Wayne, drops out ten days after joining.) Apple I buyers must supply their own keyboards and television monitors, as well as know how to write hexadecimal code and use a soldering iron.
January 1977—Apple incorporates, with ownership split evenly among Steve, Woz, and the angel investor Mike Markkula.
April 1977—The Apple II, a more user-friendly computer, debuts at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. At $1,298, the Apple II costs about twice as much as a year of in-state tuition at the University of California.
May 1978—Lisa Brennan Jobs is born.
May 1979—Apple’s publications department manager, Jef Raskin, begins work on an inexpensive computer he calls Macintosh.
December 1979—During a visit to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, Steve sees, for the first time, a networked computer with a mouse, windows, icons, menus, and multiple typefaces. “I was so blown away,” he later recalled. He brings the technology, and several PARC researchers, to Apple.
September 1980—Steve takes over the high-profile Lisa computer project. He is removed nine months later, after the team rebels against his management style.
December 1980—Apple goes public in one of the most successful initial public offerings in American history up to that time.
February 1981—Ten years after dropping out of the University of California, Berkeley, Woz leaves Apple to re-enroll.
Steve takes over the Macintosh project.
August 1981—Apple faces its first real competition when IBM introduces its personal computer. IBM’s market share soon surpasses Apple’s.
January 1983—Time shakes up its “Man of the Year” tradition to choose the computer as “Machine of the Year.”
Apple introduces the Lisa computer, priced at $10,000, targeting business users. It fails in the market.
April 1983—Jobs recruits the Pepsi executive John Sculley to be Apple’s CEO, using the memorable line, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
January 1984—Macintosh debuts.
June 1985—When Macintosh sales fall far short of projections, Apple lays off 20 percent of employees and announces the first quarterly loss in its history.
September 1985—After losing a power struggle with Sculley, Steve leaves Apple with five Mac team members in tow. Within days, Apple sues for breach of fiduciary responsibility and charges Steve with masterminding a “nefarious” scheme to steal trade secrets for his new computer company, NeXT.
January 1986—Steve becomes the majority shareholder in Pixar, after the pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay introduces him to the company’s leaders, Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith.
NeXT and Apple settle their lawsuit over NeXT’s launch and Steve’s recruitment of Mac team members out of court.
August 1986—Steve attends the premiere of Pixar’s first animated short, Luxo Jr., at a graphics industry conference. Luxo Jr. showcases Pixar’s software, but it is the audience’s standing ovation for the storytelling that catches Steve’s attention.
October 1988—Steve unveils the NeXT Computer System at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. A highlight is the machine’s five-minute performance of a Bach violin concerto, accompanied by a violinist from the symphony. The computer did not sell well but had its fans; Tim Berners-Lee wrote the code for the World Wide Web on a NeXT computer.
March 1989—Pixar’s film Tin Toy wins an Oscar for Best Animated Short, a first for a computer-animated movie.
March 1991—Steve marries Laurene Powell in a ceremony at Yosemite.
July 1991—Facing heavy financial pressure, Pixar signs a deal with Disney that is far more favorable to the larger company. In exchange for financing up to three Pixar films, Disney owns the films and their characters, receives most of the films’ profits, and prohibits Pixar from pitching to another studio any ideas that Disney rejects.
September 1991—Reed Jobs is born.
February 1993—Steve ends NeXT’s production of computers to focus entirely on software.
October 1993—With Apple losing tens of millions of dollars every quarter, CEO John Sculley, who pushed Steve out of Apple in 1985, resigns. Apple will cycle through two more CEOs in the next three years but fail to regain its footing.
August 1995—Erin Jobs is born.
November 1995—Toy Story, the world’s first full-length fully animated feature film, earns $29 million in its opening weekend. It goes on to become the top-grossing animated movie of the year.
A week after Toy Story opens, Pixar holds a successful initial public offering. It was a bold bet placed months earlier; if Toy Story had been a bust, the IPO would have been one, too.
December 1996—In need of a new operating system, Apple acquires NeXT for $427 million. As part the agreement, Steve rejoins Apple as a special adviser to the CEO, Gil Amelio.
February 1997—The success of Toy Story and Pixar’s IPO give Steve leverage to negotiate a more favorable agreement with Disney. The companies sign a five-picture deal.
June 1997—In a public show of no confidence in Amelio, Steve sells a huge block of the Apple shares he received in the NeXT acquisition. Three months later, Steve is named interim CEO.
August 1997—Bill Gates appears on a giant video screen at Macworld to announce Microsoft’s commitment to developing Microsoft Office for Mac. When the audience begins heckling, Steve reprimands them: “We have to let go of […] this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.”
September 1997—Apple introduces the “Think Different” advertising campaign. One year later, it wins an Emmy Award for Outstanding Commercial.
March 1998—Steve hires Tim Cook as Apple’s chief of operations.
July 1998—Eve Jobs is born.
August 1998—Apple debuts the Bondi Blue iMac. The “i” stands for “internet,” targeting consumers who want to“surf the web” as easily as catching a wave at Australia’s Bondi Beach.
October 1998—Apple announces its first profitable year since 1995.
January 2000—In the last three minutes of his Macworld presentation, Steve surprises the audience with the announcement that he will drop “interim” from his CEO title.
March 2000—The wave of internet optimism crashes. The NASDAQ loses nearly $1 trillion in a single month, and hundreds of start-up companies fail in a “dotcom bust.”
November 2000—Pixar’s new campus in Emeryville, California, opens. Steve has been so involved in the headquarters design—from the town hall atrium to the bathrooms—that people call it “Steve’s movie.”
May 2001—The first Apple retail stores open in Tysons, Virginia, and Glendale, California.
March 2001—Apple releases OS X, an operating system based on the NeXTStep software developed at NeXT. Updated versions of the operating system remain at the heart of many Apple products today.
October 2001—Apple introduces the iPod. It’s a new kind of product for the company, not a computer but a portable device built to sync with a computer. Apple built a music player, Steve says, because “We love music, and it’s always good to do something you love.”
April 2003—Apple opens the iTunes Music Store, making it easy to buy individual songs online. The store is only available for Apple computers, but users download one million tracks in the first week. Six months later, at the urging of his executive team, Steve agrees to make the store compatible with non-Apple computers.
March 2004—Pixar’s fifth film, Finding Nemo, wins an Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
July 2004—Steve undergoes surgery to remove a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor.
January 2006—Disney acquires Pixar for $7.4 billion in stock. Steve becomes Disney’s largest shareholder and joins the board of directors, while John Lasseter and Ed Catmull assume leadership of Disney Animation.
January 2007—The iPhone debuts. Steve calls it “the most revolutionary and exciting product in Apple’s history.”
March 2009—On leave from Apple, Steve receives a liver transplant in Memphis, Tennessee.
January 2010—Steve introduces the iPad, calling it“a magical and revolutionary device.”
August 2010—Toy Story 3 becomes the highest-grossing animated movie of all time.
### Part II, 1985–1996
For those of you who didn’t see the Academy Awards last night, Pixar won an award in the category of short animated films: for their computer generated film Tin Toy
Tin Toy is the first computer generated film to ever win an award, and was competing against several very good traditionally animated (non-computer-animated) films!
The computer graphics industry just achieved a major milestone, and Pixar led the way!
Well, I don’t know what a corporate lifestyle is. I mean, Apple was a corporation; we were very conscious of that. We were very driven to make money so that we could continue to invest in the things we loved. I would say Apple was a corporate lifestyle, but it had 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. In other words, great ideas could come from anywhere and that we better sort of treat people in a much more egalitarian sense, in terms of where the ideas came from.
And Apple was a very bottoms-up company when it came to a lot of its great ideas. And we hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies—I know it sounds crazy—but a lot of companies don’t do that. They hire people to tell them what to do. We hired people to tell us what to do. We figured we’re paying them all this money, their job is to figure out what to do and tell us. And that led to a very different corporate culture, and one that’s really much more collegial than hierarchical.
Be aware of the world’s magical, mystical, 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. Think back on this spring—the last three or four months—when you are winding down high school, know where you are going next year, and begin to really have strong intuitions about the world you will encounter. Maybe you see an image of yourself in Paris, sculpting in an artist’s studio as the setting sun shines in the paned windows. Maybe you’re in India, running a hospital for poor children, and you hear the distant clatter of the outdoor marketplace in the early morning. Maybe you see yourself in a recording studio laying down a track for your album. Maybe you see yourself alone in a rented room at 4:30 in the morning being the only person alive to understand a new law of physics you just figured out.
Whatever it may be, I bet many of you have had some of these intuitive feelings about what you could do with your lives. These feelings are very real, and if nurtured can blossom into something wonderful and magical. A good way to remember these kinds of intuitive feelings is to walk alone near sunset—and spend a lot of time looking at the sky in general. 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, you can make them come true.
People will come at you with reasons why you shouldn’t do these things:
You can’t make a living writing songs. (Right, just ask Bob Dylan.)
Helping children in India is nice, but you need to prepare for real life. ( Just ask Mother Teresa.)
You could be doing so much more with your life. (You can hear Albert Einstein’s parents encouraging him to get a real job, when he was working a low-level job in the Swiss patent office rather than teaching in a university, so that he could stay up late at night working through his new ideas.)
If you don’t have any of these feelings, called dreams, then you’re in trouble. Before you “spend” four or more years of your life going in a direction your heart may or may not want you to go, you need to recapture them.
Be a creative person. Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights that others don’t see.
So to be a creative person, you need to “feed” or “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 the wonderful thing about it, in a way.
### Part I, 1976–1985
It is 1958. IBM passes up the chance to buy a young, fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox is born. And IBM has been kicking themselves ever since.
It is ten years later, the late sixties. Digital Equipment [DEC] and others invent the minicomputer. IBM dismisses the minicomputer as too small to do serious computing, and therefore unimportant to their business. DEC grows to become a multi-hundred-million-dollar corporation before IBM finally enters the minicomputer market.
It is now ten years later, the late seventies. In 1977, Apple, a young, fledgling company on the West Coast, invents the Apple II, the first personal computer as we know it today. IBM dismisses the personal computer as too small to do serious computing and unimportant to their business.
The early eighties, ’81. Apple II has become the world’s most popular computer. Apple has grown to a $300 million company, becoming the fastest-growing corporation in American business history, with over fifty competitors vying for a share. IBM enters the personal-computer market in November ’81 with the IBM PC.
1983. Apple and IBM emerge as the industry’s strongest competitors, each selling approximately one billion dollars’ worth of personal computers in 1983. Each will invest greater than $50 million for R&D and another $50 million for television advertising in 1984, totaling almost one quarter of a billion dollars combined.
The shakeout is in full swing. The first major firm goes bankrupt, with others teetering on the brink. Total industry losses for ’83 outshadow even the combined profits of Apple and IBM for personal computers.
It is now 1984. It appears IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers initially welcoming IBM with open arms now fear an IBM-dominated and controlled future.
### Unknown chapter
The years after Steve left Apple were among the toughest of his career—and the most formative.
Determined to build a new great computer company, he started NeXT with several members of the Macintosh team. “We’ll make a whole bunch of mistakes, but at least they’ll be new and creative ones,” he predicted.
Around the same time, Steve invested $10 million in a small company called Pixar. It was a tiny computer graphics operation, newly spun off from filmmaker George Lucas’s empire. The technical expertise at Pixar attracted Steve; its initial product was a high-end graphics computer that cost more than $100,000.
Both NeXT and Pixar quickly ran into trouble. The NeXT computer system, which debuted in 1988, was powerful and packed with the humanistic touches Steve loved. It was visually striking and intuitive to use, with high-quality audio and the complete works of Shakespeare built in. But it was also late to market and expensive—and it sold poorly. Within six years of NeXT’s launch, the entire founding team, other than Steve, had resigned.
Pixar, meanwhile, was eking out an existence selling computers and software and, later, animating commercials. The company was also making award-winning short films that charmed Steve. This use of technology in service of brilliant storytelling embodied one of his favorite things: work at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. The short films fired Steve’s enthusiasm and kept him writing check after check to Pixar, ultimately investing some $60 million.
But the films were, as Steve put it, “in the background,” not the company’s focus. He described Pixar’s early business strategy as “find a way to pay the bills,” and he later speculated that the only reason the company didn’t fall apart then was that the leadership team “would all get depressed … but not all of us at once.”
If at times in these years he seemed disappointed by the possibilities of technology—“this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t,” he told a reporter in an uncharacteristic flash of pessimism—his world was also expanding beyond his work. He treasured his privacy, saying of his public persona, “I think of it as my well-known twin brother. It’s not me.”
Steve learned how to hone a company to its essence, even when it was painful. He shifted NeXT’s focus to selling software. The shift meant closing a factory and laying off more than two hundred of NeXT’s five hundred and thirty employees. Meanwhile, Pixar stripped away its advertising and hardware businesses and entered into an agreement with Disney, all to pursue what sometimes seemed an impossible dream: to make fully computer-animated feature films.
After nearly a decade of difficulty, the streamlined NeXT and Pixar both transformed into unlikely success stories. At the end of 1995, Pixar premiered Toy Story in the same month it held its initial public offering. A year later, Apple, in need of operating-system software, bought NeXT for $427 million. “If you really look closely,” Steve liked to say, “most overnight successes took a long time.”
As CEO of Apple and Pixar (he held both roles until Disney acquired Pixar in 2006), he saw his job as “number one, recruit; number two, set an overall direction; and number three, inspire and cajole and persuade.” He said, “You’re not grabbing the pencil out of the twenty-five-year-old’s hand to do it better than they are. If you’re smart, you’re hiring twenty-five-year-olds who are smarter than you.” He gave particular thought to his responsibility for the business aspects of a creative company. A “risk-taking creative environment on the product side,” he said, required a “fiscally conservative environment” on the business side. “Creative people are willing to take a leap in the air, but they need to know that the ground’s going to be there when they get back.”
Key Events
January 1975—Popular Electronics publishes a story about the Altair 8800, sparking the microcomputer revolution. That same year, Bill Gates drops out of Harvard to design programming languages for the Altair. Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, a club launches for people who want to build their own computers: the Homebrew Computer Club, which Steve occasionally attends with Steve Wozniak.
April 1976—Steve and Woz co-found Apple Computer to sell the Apple I, designed by Woz. (A third co-founder, Ron Wayne, drops out ten days after joining.) Apple I buyers must supply their own keyboards and television monitors, as well as know how to write hexadecimal code and use a soldering iron.
January 1977—Apple incorporates, with ownership split evenly among Steve, Woz, and the angel investor Mike Markkula.
April 1977—The Apple II, a more user-friendly computer, debuts at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. At $1,298, the Apple II costs about twice as much as a year of in-state tuition at the University of California.
May 1978—Lisa Brennan Jobs is born.
May 1979—Apple’s publications department manager, Jef Raskin, begins work on an inexpensive computer he calls Macintosh.
December 1979—During a visit to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, Steve sees, for the first time, a networked computer with a mouse, windows, icons, menus, and multiple typefaces. “I was so blown away,” he later recalled. He brings the technology, and several PARC researchers, to Apple.
September 1980—Steve takes over the high-profile Lisa computer project. He is removed nine months later, after the team rebels against his management style.
December 1980—Apple goes public in one of the most successful initial public offerings in American history up to that time.
February 1981—Ten years after dropping out of the University of California, Berkeley, Woz leaves Apple to re-enroll.
Steve takes over the Macintosh project.
August 1981—Apple faces its first real competition when IBM introduces its personal computer. IBM’s market share soon surpasses Apple’s.
January 1983—Time shakes up its “Man of the Year” tradition to choose the computer as “Machine of the Year.”
Apple introduces the Lisa computer, priced at $10,000, targeting business users. It fails in the market.
April 1983—Jobs recruits the Pepsi executive John Sculley to be Apple’s CEO, using the memorable line, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
January 1984—Macintosh debuts.
June 1985—When Macintosh sales fall far short of projections, Apple lays off 20 percent of employees and announces the first quarterly loss in its history.
September 1985—After losing a power struggle with Sculley, Steve leaves Apple with five Mac team members in tow. Within days, Apple sues for breach of fiduciary responsibility and charges Steve with masterminding a “nefarious” scheme to steal trade secrets for his new computer company, NeXT.
January 1986—Steve becomes the majority shareholder in Pixar, after the pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay introduces him to the company’s leaders, Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith.
NeXT and Apple settle their lawsuit over NeXT’s launch and Steve’s recruitment of Mac team members out of court.
August 1986—Steve attends the premiere of Pixar’s first animated short, Luxo Jr., at a graphics industry conference. Luxo Jr. showcases Pixar’s software, but it is the audience’s standing ovation for the storytelling that catches Steve’s attention.
October 1988—Steve unveils the NeXT Computer System at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. A highlight is the machine’s five-minute performance of a Bach violin concerto, accompanied by a violinist from the symphony. The computer did not sell well but had its fans; Tim Berners-Lee wrote the code for the World Wide Web on a NeXT computer.
March 1989—Pixar’s film Tin Toy wins an Oscar for Best Animated Short, a first for a computer-animated movie.
March 1991—Steve marries Laurene Powell in a ceremony at Yosemite.
July 1991—Facing heavy financial pressure, Pixar signs a deal with Disney that is far more favorable to the larger company. In exchange for financing up to three Pixar films, Disney owns the films and their characters, receives most of the films’ profits, and prohibits Pixar from pitching to another studio any ideas that Disney rejects.
September 1991—Reed Jobs is born.
February 1993—Steve ends NeXT’s production of computers to focus entirely on software.
October 1993—With Apple losing tens of millions of dollars every quarter, CEO John Sculley, who pushed Steve out of Apple in 1985, resigns. Apple will cycle through two more CEOs in the next three years but fail to regain its footing.
August 1995—Erin Jobs is born.
November 1995—Toy Story, the world’s first full-length fully animated feature film, earns $29 million in its opening weekend. It goes on to become the top-grossing animated movie of the year.
A week after Toy Story opens, Pixar holds a successful initial public offering. It was a bold bet placed months earlier; if Toy Story had been a bust, the IPO would have been one, too.
December 1996—In need of a new operating system, Apple acquires NeXT for $427 million. As part the agreement, Steve rejoins Apple as a special adviser to the CEO, Gil Amelio.
February 1997—The success of Toy Story and Pixar’s IPO give Steve leverage to negotiate a more favorable agreement with Disney. The companies sign a five-picture deal.
June 1997—In a public show of no confidence in Amelio, Steve sells a huge block of the Apple shares he received in the NeXT acquisition. Three months later, Steve is named interim CEO.
August 1997—Bill Gates appears on a giant video screen at Macworld to announce Microsoft’s commitment to developing Microsoft Office for Mac. When the audience begins heckling, Steve reprimands them: “We have to let go of […] this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.”
September 1997—Apple introduces the “Think Different” advertising campaign. One year later, it wins an Emmy Award for Outstanding Commercial.
March 1998—Steve hires Tim Cook as Apple’s chief of operations.
July 1998—Eve Jobs is born.
August 1998—Apple debuts the Bondi Blue iMac. The “i” stands for “internet,” targeting consumers who want to“surf the web” as easily as catching a wave at Australia’s Bondi Beach.
October 1998—Apple announces its first profitable year since 1995.
January 2000—In the last three minutes of his Macworld presentation, Steve surprises the audience with the announcement that he will drop “interim” from his CEO title.
March 2000—The wave of internet optimism crashes. The NASDAQ loses nearly $1 trillion in a single month, and hundreds of start-up companies fail in a “dotcom bust.”
November 2000—Pixar’s new campus in Emeryville, California, opens. Steve has been so involved in the headquarters design—from the town hall atrium to the bathrooms—that people call it “Steve’s movie.”
May 2001—The first Apple retail stores open in Tysons, Virginia, and Glendale, California.
March 2001—Apple releases OS X, an operating system based on the NeXTStep software developed at NeXT. Updated versions of the operating system remain at the heart of many Apple products today.
October 2001—Apple introduces the iPod. It’s a new kind of product for the company, not a computer but a portable device built to sync with a computer. Apple built a music player, Steve says, because “We love music, and it’s always good to do something you love.”
April 2003—Apple opens the iTunes Music Store, making it easy to buy individual songs online. The store is only available for Apple computers, but users download one million tracks in the first week. Six months later, at the urging of his executive team, Steve agrees to make the store compatible with non-Apple computers.
March 2004—Pixar’s fifth film, Finding Nemo, wins an Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
July 2004—Steve undergoes surgery to remove a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor.
January 2006—Disney acquires Pixar for $7.4 billion in stock. Steve becomes Disney’s largest shareholder and joins the board of directors, while John Lasseter and Ed Catmull assume leadership of Disney Animation.
January 2007—The iPhone debuts. Steve calls it “the most revolutionary and exciting product in Apple’s history.”
March 2009—On leave from Apple, Steve receives a liver transplant in Memphis, Tennessee.
January 2010—Steve introduces the iPad, calling it“a magical and revolutionary device.”
August 2010—Toy Story 3 becomes the highest-grossing animated movie of all time.
### Part II, 1985–1996
For those of you who didn’t see the Academy Awards last night, Pixar won an award in the category of short animated films: for their computer generated film Tin Toy
Tin Toy is the first computer generated film to ever win an award, and was competing against several very good traditionally animated (non-computer-animated) films!
The computer graphics industry just achieved a major milestone, and Pixar led the way!
Well, I don’t know what a corporate lifestyle is. I mean, Apple was a corporation; we were very conscious of that. We were very driven to make money so that we could continue to invest in the things we loved. I would say Apple was a corporate lifestyle, but it had 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. In other words, great ideas could come from anywhere and that we better sort of treat people in a much more egalitarian sense, in terms of where the ideas came from.
And Apple was a very bottoms-up company when it came to a lot of its great ideas. And we hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies—I know it sounds crazy—but a lot of companies don’t do that. They hire people to tell them what to do. We hired people to tell us what to do. We figured we’re paying them all this money, their job is to figure out what to do and tell us. And that led to a very different corporate culture, and one that’s really much more collegial than hierarchical.
Be aware of the world’s magical, mystical, 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. Think back on this spring—the last three or four months—when you are winding down high school, know where you are going next year, and begin to really have strong intuitions about the world you will encounter. Maybe you see an image of yourself in Paris, sculpting in an artist’s studio as the setting sun shines in the paned windows. Maybe you’re in India, running a hospital for poor children, and you hear the distant clatter of the outdoor marketplace in the early morning. Maybe you see yourself in a recording studio laying down a track for your album. Maybe you see yourself alone in a rented room at 4:30 in the morning being the only person alive to understand a new law of physics you just figured out.
Whatever it may be, I bet many of you have had some of these intuitive feelings about what you could do with your lives. These feelings are very real, and if nurtured can blossom into something wonderful and magical. A good way to remember these kinds of intuitive feelings is to walk alone near sunset—and spend a lot of time looking at the sky in general. 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, you can make them come true.
People will come at you with reasons why you shouldn’t do these things:
You can’t make a living writing songs. (Right, just ask Bob Dylan.)
Helping children in India is nice, but you need to prepare for real life. ( Just ask Mother Teresa.)
You could be doing so much more with your life. (You can hear Albert Einstein’s parents encouraging him to get a real job, when he was working a low-level job in the Swiss patent office rather than teaching in a university, so that he could stay up late at night working through his new ideas.)
If you don’t have any of these feelings, called dreams, then you’re in trouble. Before you “spend” four or more years of your life going in a direction your heart may or may not want you to go, you need to recapture them.
Be a creative person. Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights that others don’t see.
So to be a creative person, you need to “feed” or “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 the wonderful thing about it, in a way.
September 3, 2023
Steve was smart.
August 2, 2023
Absolutely inspiring!
May 24, 2023
Livro bem interessante para entender o que fez de steve jobs um grande comunicador. E ser mais do que alguém de projeto, alguém que consegue construir times incriveis e mobilizados.
May 6, 2023
Refreshing. Inspiring. Timeless.
July 27, 2023
Perfect for where I am in life
February 22, 2025
maravilloso
May 17, 2023
Well, having fairly recently signed up to receive email alerts from the SJ archive , I was both suprised and delighted to find that they were giving me the opportunity to read this book, online and for free.
It is a collection of SJ's writing's, thought's email's - inevitably some of the entries were of less interest to me than others. However, his address (reproduced within the book) at Palo Alto High School (SJ's alma mater) struck a particular chord with myself as I have an adolescent who is about to finish sixth form college (i.e. in US read; High School) and who has also confessed to wanting to make lots of money. Who could possibly be a better mentor than Mr Jobs...;-)
Although maybe not as comprehensive as Walter Issacson's biography (and I guess there was no intention from the SJ archive to make this collection of snippets comprehensive), the book provides interesting insights into SJ's character.
It is a collection of SJ's writing's, thought's email's - inevitably some of the entries were of less interest to me than others. However, his address (reproduced within the book) at Palo Alto High School (SJ's alma mater) struck a particular chord with myself as I have an adolescent who is about to finish sixth form college (i.e. in US read; High School) and who has also confessed to wanting to make lots of money. Who could possibly be a better mentor than Mr Jobs...;-)
Although maybe not as comprehensive as Walter Issacson's biography (and I guess there was no intention from the SJ archive to make this collection of snippets comprehensive), the book provides interesting insights into SJ's character.
July 16, 2023
This was a terrific read. I really appreciated revisiting aspects of Jobs career via his own voice -- and some of the documents included here are great to take in (like staff emails, messages sent to himself, etc.)
July 2, 2023
This is an interesting collection of writings and photos by/of Steve Jobs. You definitely want to read the biography first, but if you read that and couldn't get enough, these are some interesting, in-depth, behind the scenes looks at the way he operated.
When talking to designers, he said one of the reasons I’m here is because I need your help. If you’ve looked at computers, they look like garbage. All the great product designers are off, designing automobiles or buildings. But hardly any of them are designing computers. If we take a look, we’re going to sell 3 million computers this year 10 million in '86 whether they look like a piece of crap or they look great. People are just going to suck this stuff up so fast no matter what it looks like. And it doesn’t cost any more money to make them look great.
He predicted that the Internet would be about 15 years out in 1983.
And we hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies don’t do that. They hire people to tell them what to do. We hired people to tell us what to do. We figured we’re paying them all this money. Their job is to figure out what to do and tell us.
Steve returned to Apple after it purchased Next at the end of 1996. Apple had lost $800 million that year after he returned he slashed the company’s product offerings from 17 to 4. He said “you’ve got to choose what you put your love into really carefully.”
What I found is that nobody in their right mind wants to be a manager. It’s a lot of work and you don’t get to do the fun stuff. But the only good reason to be a manager is so some other bozo doesn’t be the manager, and ruin the group you care about. And if you’ve lived through a bad situation, where you’ve had bad management, you’ll do anything to not have your group destroyed by that again. And you will even step up and be the manager yourself, even though you don’t want to do that.
Story of how he met his wife.
I arrive alone and sat down in the front row. 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 was staring at her, forgetting what I was talking about mid-sentence. After my talk, I stayed around to speak with some students and she stayed to, but then she left. I didn’t know who she was, and thought I might never see her again. So I wound things up and left too, and I 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. 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 raced back to her car just as she was about to drive off and asked her. How about dinner tonight? She said sure, and we were married 18 months later.
You can't connect the dots looking forward; You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something. Your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path.
I can loan you my copy if you're a close friend.
When talking to designers, he said one of the reasons I’m here is because I need your help. If you’ve looked at computers, they look like garbage. All the great product designers are off, designing automobiles or buildings. But hardly any of them are designing computers. If we take a look, we’re going to sell 3 million computers this year 10 million in '86 whether they look like a piece of crap or they look great. People are just going to suck this stuff up so fast no matter what it looks like. And it doesn’t cost any more money to make them look great.
He predicted that the Internet would be about 15 years out in 1983.
And we hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies don’t do that. They hire people to tell them what to do. We hired people to tell us what to do. We figured we’re paying them all this money. Their job is to figure out what to do and tell us.
Steve returned to Apple after it purchased Next at the end of 1996. Apple had lost $800 million that year after he returned he slashed the company’s product offerings from 17 to 4. He said “you’ve got to choose what you put your love into really carefully.”
What I found is that nobody in their right mind wants to be a manager. It’s a lot of work and you don’t get to do the fun stuff. But the only good reason to be a manager is so some other bozo doesn’t be the manager, and ruin the group you care about. And if you’ve lived through a bad situation, where you’ve had bad management, you’ll do anything to not have your group destroyed by that again. And you will even step up and be the manager yourself, even though you don’t want to do that.
Story of how he met his wife.
I arrive alone and sat down in the front row. 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 was staring at her, forgetting what I was talking about mid-sentence. After my talk, I stayed around to speak with some students and she stayed to, but then she left. I didn’t know who she was, and thought I might never see her again. So I wound things up and left too, and I 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. 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 raced back to her car just as she was about to drive off and asked her. How about dinner tonight? She said sure, and we were married 18 months later.
You can't connect the dots looking forward; You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something. Your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path.
I can loan you my copy if you're a close friend.
January 5, 2025
Heavily overlaps with Walter isaacsons epic biography, but still contains little pieces here and there that are new. And definitely worth reading if you want a quick overview of Steve’s thought and don’t want to invest in the tome Isaacson wrote.
Favorite quotes:
““Don’t be a career. The enemy of most dreams and intuitions, and one of the most dangerous and stifling concepts ever invented by humans, is the “Career.”
“Think of your life as a rainbow arcing across the horizon of this world. You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.”
“Remember, regrets are different from mistakes. Mistakes are those things that you did and wish you could do over again. Regrets are most often things you didn’t do, and wish you did.”
“He called it management by values. What that means is you find people that want the same things you want, and then just get the hell out of their way. That’s what management by values is. It’s finding people with passion that want to go to San Diego—who want to go to the same place you want to go to! Right? That’s the key.”
“So if you want to preserve something, what you want to do is have a good enough place to go, that’s got a long enough focal length that it will survive over time, that everybody agrees on—and not codify how you’re going to get there. So that each generation can argue anew about the best way to get to San Diego, and they’re not just taking your footsteps on how you got there. You see what I’m saying? But all the people want to go to the same place.”
“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—that’s half the battle.”
“ultimately, it’s the work that motivates people. I sometimes wish it were me, but it’s not. It’s the work. My job is to make sure the work is as good as it should be and to get people to stretch beyond their best. But it’s ultimately the work that motivates people. That’s what binds them together.”
“Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact—and that is: everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.
And you can change it.
You can influence it.
You can build your own things that other people can use.
And the minute you can understand that you can poke life, and if you push in, then something will pop out the other side; that you can change it, you can mold it—that’s maybe the most important thing: to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there, and you’re just going to live in it versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.”
Favorite quotes:
““Don’t be a career. The enemy of most dreams and intuitions, and one of the most dangerous and stifling concepts ever invented by humans, is the “Career.”
“Think of your life as a rainbow arcing across the horizon of this world. You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.”
“Remember, regrets are different from mistakes. Mistakes are those things that you did and wish you could do over again. Regrets are most often things you didn’t do, and wish you did.”
“He called it management by values. What that means is you find people that want the same things you want, and then just get the hell out of their way. That’s what management by values is. It’s finding people with passion that want to go to San Diego—who want to go to the same place you want to go to! Right? That’s the key.”
“So if you want to preserve something, what you want to do is have a good enough place to go, that’s got a long enough focal length that it will survive over time, that everybody agrees on—and not codify how you’re going to get there. So that each generation can argue anew about the best way to get to San Diego, and they’re not just taking your footsteps on how you got there. You see what I’m saying? But all the people want to go to the same place.”
“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—that’s half the battle.”
“ultimately, it’s the work that motivates people. I sometimes wish it were me, but it’s not. It’s the work. My job is to make sure the work is as good as it should be and to get people to stretch beyond their best. But it’s ultimately the work that motivates people. That’s what binds them together.”
“Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact—and that is: everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.
And you can change it.
You can influence it.
You can build your own things that other people can use.
And the minute you can understand that you can poke life, and if you push in, then something will pop out the other side; that you can change it, you can mold it—that’s maybe the most important thing: to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there, and you’re just going to live in it versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.”
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