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 his words in speeches interviews and emails offer a window into how he thought and he was an
Exquisite thinker 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 imposed first and most strenuously on himself 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 told a group of students you appear have a chance to blaze in the sky and then you disappear he gave an extraordinary amount of thought to how best to use our
fleeting time he was compelled by the notion of being part of the Arc of human existence and animated by the thought that he and that any of us 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 he saw clearly what was not there what could be there what had to be there 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 in these Pages Steve drafts and refines he stumbles grows and changes but always always he retains that sense of possibility I hope these selections ignite in you 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 that our world is not fixed and so we can change it for the better that was the introduction written by Steve's wife Loren Powell jobs of the book that I'm going to talk to you about today which is available for free 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 it on 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 and so I'm going to go back through that introduction to because 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 hit you if you think about like you know
that that was her husband 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 thought her introduction was really
touching I thought there was a lot of ideas that are that are tied into that but what was interesting is the book actually starts out right before before the introduction there's a quote from Steve in 2007 I'm going to 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 anybody can read it for free all over the world that's just absolutely incredible um 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 and so it's already obvious that this is going to book a book I'm going to reference and read over and over again through my life so
here's Steve in 2007 there's a there's a lot of ways to be 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 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 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 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 and he it 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 10 or 15 bucks for this or something but it's just Steve unfiltered talking for I don't know an hour and 20 minutes uh 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 and so there's
something he says in that interview that is very similar and that interview was given about 11 years 12 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 it'll show are you just doing it just to make money and what I love about Steve is no one's ever going to say that this guy was motivated by money right there's no reading of his career
where that's possible and obviously became incredibly wealthy but it's the idea of hey I'm going to make something people make something uh that people love something that's wonderful and you'll see how much I care through the product that I make and so in that talk
the opposite of this is something Steve ha Steve hated where there was like no Spirit no taste no Humanity in the products and so he was talking about in 1996 he's like listen Microsoft you have to admire what they 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 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 relistened to that after I had read this because I'm like oh it's the exact same idea he's just saying the opposite 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's he would give us so let's go back to the introduction written by uh his wife I just want to pull out a couple 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 sense of the worlds that would emerge from marrying the Arts of technology so the reason this is so important to youi
something you and I have discussed over and over again is there's ideas are extremely powerful right your mind is a powerful place which 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 20s the idea he like
you should build a company at the intersection of Arts and Technology that is Edwin L's idea that is an idea that Steve Jobs learned from Edwin L that Steve used when he was in his 20s his 30s his 40s his 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 L that is why some that that's why I repeat it so much I I actually heard this hilarious tweet the other day where somebody said that uh a lot of people's alarm clocks are David goggin 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 Edwin L to the point where he built a company say hey
that's a really good idea let me take that idea that Edwin L used for Polaroid and I'm going to use it for apple and then as obviously ideas are Immortal so Edwin L passed away Steve Jobs carried that torch and then now we're going to hopefully preach that that lesson to
people and that that idea will outlive and Outlast both you and I so go back to another uh thing that she said his unbelievable rigor which he imposed first and most strenuously on himself 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 you know was Unapologetic unapologetically extreme in the sense that hey the work has to come first and so he says be a yard stick of quality some people aren't used to an environment where Excellence is expected Excellence is expected 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 perform and
extreme winners that do this I was listening to this interview uh 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 Kobe Bryan is being
interviewed by Ahad Rashad and they're reflecting on this very difficult part of Kobe's career and ahad's like you know how did you deal with all this like this external pressure and he goes but the pressures this is a mod Rashad asking Kobe's like but the pressures
from fans expecting Kobe to and then Kobe immediately first of all he makes a stanky face like he smells something bad like G he in immediately interrupts a mod and this is what Kobe says their expectations will never be higher than my own never never never
never never he says never that's not an exaggeration he says never like 10 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 held it's nobody should
be capable of holding you a higher standard than you are there's nobody like you said but but the presses from fans expecting you to be H and Kobe's like no their expectations will never be higher than my own never never never never never saying it over and over again only when you impose such strict
standards on yourself can then you oppose them on others and it's unlikely there's anybody else that knew Steve Jobs as well as his wife did and she says his unbelievable rigor which he imposed most first and most strenuously on himself and then she references this
l that he said I'm pretty sure he says it to a group of graduating uh High School seniors at paoo high school if I'm not if I remember this correctly this is the full quot quote though this is so important this is a quote I think I'll remember for the rest of my life
and this is I've never come across you know I've done I don't know 10 podcasts on on Steve I've read every single book I can find on them 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 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 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 it made me think of De Hawk the founder of Visa 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 such a simple ought to be three words design
your product for how things ought to be and I think Steve would agree with that as well and then finally the last paragraph of the in uction 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 everybody's focused on the outcome 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 andreon the world is a very
malleable place if you know know what you want you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think okay so now the book begins you got to download the book just for
the pictures like I think I'm going to have the pictures printed out and framed they're just absolutely excellent especially the pictures of young Steve but they're they're it's separated into three parts goes in chronological order usually about a decade uh of his career
and so Leslie bin 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 and so then this is where this why this this book is so valuable it's going to 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 is all of Jeff basos 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 them more in the future as well but then a collected like edited transcripts of like his important speeches so that book you pick it up it's like Jeff basil speaking directly to you this book is hey Steve Jobs speaking directly to you
and a lot of this spread over multiple decades so I'm going to read you from he's giving this talk uh in 1995 and he's Rec recording an oral history on the early history of Silicon Valley and what was like growing up there 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 II and fed troops around the world for General patent 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 I actually read this next paragraph to my daughter this is something we've been talking about I'm trying to teach her as well 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 word and this is now Steve talking about one of the most important lessons that his father taught him 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 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 what what it was like growing up in early Silicon Valley and
he says there was a that moved down the street for me he was an engineer at huet 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 like what's a ham radio
operator I was like well you got to Google like figure out what it is and she's like this is very confusing go one way to think about this is that a ham radio was its amateur radio right it was essentially podcasting before 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 has an underground Pirate Radio Vibe and I just love that because one of my favorite Steve Jobs quotes 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
they're products that you'd buy in kit form right so you have to actually put them together they have detailed manuals on how to put things together but you have to actually P 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 like when you're done it gives you this like finished product 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 going to 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 ones self 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 results of human creation 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 going to see this is
something that this is everpresent in History's Greatest entrepreneurs an early love for reading so he says my mother taught me how to read before I got to school 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 going to see this is I talked about this I think last week as well and the week before maybe the all-time greatest quote on understanding the mindset of an entrepreneur is comes from
Ivon shanard the founder and owner of Patagonia if you want to understand uh the entrepreneur study the juvenile delinquent and so we see this in Steve's Early Childhood 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
like it and they really almost got me they came this close to really beating any curiosity out of me and then he describes his difficulty with college this is Steve Jobs at 19 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 you're 20-year-old 22y old founder you have it all figured out well one of the greatest entrepreneurs maybe the greatest entrepreneur to ever do it at 19 he says I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life and so Steve's going to drop out
of school he's going to drop into SCH 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 going to travel uh to Europe spends a bunch of time in India comes
back and then eventually they start what's going to wind up being the beginning of Apple this is from 1976 to 1985 1985 is when uh he actually gets expelled from Apple the first time and so now we have lesie Berlin giving us like this overview of this point of his
life in 1976 when Steve and his friend Steve wnc began assembling what would become be known as the apple one in the family garage the word computer conjured up images of hulking machines tended by professional programmers a single company IBM dominated the industry but
Steve and W were part of a new this is the most important sentence in this entire paragraph but steveen W were part of a new generation of creative thinkers engineers and hobbyists trying to build small cheap machines that they could program themselves and the reason that
is so important is you guys 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 that time that company was founded 55 years before apple and yet the two
Steves 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 W 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 says when Apple launched Steve was 21 he was precocious but inexperienced and unpolished at Apple'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 to the Apple 2 Apple was one of the fastest growing companies in America and by the time Steve turned 30 he was a public face of a Fortune 500
company inside Apple his ideas and passion were inspiring but Steve's management style was divisive right before Steve gets kicked out in 1984 he working on the Macintosh and I love what he said right here it was he believed with everything and he also says this in
that 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 to Steve M 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 would have been writers musicians or 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 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 and listen and read the biographies uh of enzor Ferrari or listen to the podcast I've done on Enzo Ferrari Ferrari would describe his products the way you would describe your
lover and Steve to me speaks very similar the feelings and the passion that this is now Steve a direct quote from Steve the feelings and the passion that people put into it were completely indistinguishable 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 into an even bigger pile of money right there is an irrational
love for the the way like he approached the product that he made and the company that he built and then ironically these type of Craftsmen 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 going to 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 it is inevitable so that was the introduction by lesie 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 wnac and a small group of friends all of our friends wanted them too it turned out that that it took maybe 50 hours to build one of these things by hand so that's going to 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 we could just plug in the parts instead of of having to hand wire the whole thing we could cut the assembly time time down for maybe 50 hours to more like an hour now listen to how they funded their
primitive operation are you willing to sell your car and put that money into your company because that's what Steve Jobs did w 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 uh Club this isn't in the book but it's from in in other biographies of of Steve there's a guy named Paul I think his name is Paul Terrell he owns the bite shop he says hey come and you know 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 and so one of my favorite pieces of early Apple uh like history trivia is the fact that their their first major sale was made Barefoot CU Steve walked into this guy's computer shop Barefoot and so he's
he's recounting this now 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 50 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 100 computers we built 50 of them 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 calleded a bunch of part suppliers and wind up getting them on like 30-day credit and then
using the money from the bite shop to pay off the parts and so he says we got paid in cash oh so we built 50 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 realization
crisis which was that our profit wasn't liquid it was in 50 computers sitting on the floor cuz they had made 100 of them sold 50 and they're like okay now if we sell this other 50 this is where our profit is right so then we and this was fascinating they went up pitching the
idea which is going to wind up being Apple to two other companies to see if they wanted to do it like in their company or to invest they both said no we took our idea for the computer to a few companies one was HP where W was working and one was Atari where 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 uh biggest regret in his life he was offered 30% of Apple I think for like 50,000 or 100,000 it was something like that and he said he said no uh so he says 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 a trillion doll
company looks like 50 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 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 fast forward a few years Steve is now 22 years old this is his first appearance in a national publication it is actually that the the magazine the New Yorker sent a reporter down to the first annual personal
Computing Expo and most of the 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 22 I don't think he knew this reporter was coming and so they're just say hey tell us about what what this apple thing is tell us what you're doing and listen to Steve here I wish we had these personal when I
was growing up people have been hearing all sorts of things about computers during the past 10 years through the media supposedly computers have been trolling various aspects of their lives yet 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 interact with it and find out all about it it's analogist 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 we started a little personal computer manufacturing company in a garage in Los Altos in 1976 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 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 he would be around 28 years old this is 1983 so he's around 28
years old it's at the international design conference in Aspen and the theme of the speech is that computers and Society are out on a first date and so listen to what he does he says if you looked at computers they look like garbage all the great product designers
are off designing automobiles are buildings hardly many of them are 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 an isakson's biography of Steve where it says one of his great talents
was spotting markets full of second rate products Steve is a world-class product designer right even at this age and he's saying this is kind of weird like I think this industry is going to 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 they're designing automobiles or they're designing buildings like that's where the money is none of them are designing computers so I just spotted this Market full of second rate products to 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 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 more time
interacting with these machines than they do interacting with automobiles today people are going to spend 2 3 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 he's saying people are going to 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 and then he goes into the fact that he thinks he has this giant opportunity because it's still early that most people if they were in their 30s when he's given this speech
they lived most of their life without a computer at all and his whole point was like well that that you're going to be the last generation that ever happens to and he was saying that in 1983 it's even more true now and so he says in the 80s 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 he like we can change the trajectory of this industry we can hold it to a higher standard we they don't
have to be these ugly faceless you know blinking 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 PE that probably kept me out of jail was the books I could go read with Aristotle or PL or Plato I almost said plate oh come on man I could go read what
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 the middle so books are phenomenal things and this is interesting because 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 is like you read enough books about like I have an idea of how Steve Jobs stopped because I've spent an insane insane amount of time injesting his talks his reading his biographies his own writing and so I
have like a you know after a while you can have like a little you know Steve Jobs on your shoulder like what would Steve do in this situation and I've done this with a a handful of other people you you'll see it in the podcast because I'll read every single thing that I
could find on them and so that's like the tell but 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 Plato would say and then this is fasing again we goes back to the power this the how
powerful ideas can be and the fact you can hear one line one book and it just stays with you forever he's saying this in 1983 the book is going to end with this email that he sends himself a year or maybe a few months before he dies and it's how 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 and we're speaking a language that was developed by other people and
we use mathematics that was developed by other people people we are constantly taking and the ability to put something back into the pool of Human Experience 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 that made the the lives of other people better and so not only is Steve telling us that with his words but we saw that with his actions he dedicated his life to making
something wonderful these tools and these products that you and I use to this day a DEC more than a decade 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 going to see here is
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 21 22 years old he still had it at 30 he was still talking about it you know when he was in his 50s this is a quote from
uh Steve Jobs the Lost interview that I'm going to read that really sets up this section of the book I really think the book and this interview go so well together 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 were doing 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 Macintosh went back and looked at how Alexander grah Bell invented and marketed the telephone and he talks about Henry Ford
is well Edwin L did the same thing when Edwin L went and invented the instant uh the polar camera right invented not only the camera but the entire in uh the entire in photography industry he went back and like okay well how do you Market a product that is like never
existed no one asked Alexander gbell to make the telephone right and so we see Steve right here calling all the studying he had done up to this point now he brings it back and he talks about how it influences and in uh influen his work and so he says now he's talking
about the mosh right but he's going to use this historical analogy it's sort of like in 1844 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 historical perspective you can't do that unless you studied and learned from history so he talks about
this is kind of like 1844 with the telegraph but here's the problem he's not going to compare the Macintosh to the telegraph he's like oh it's actually not a Telegraph and I'll tell you 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 it wouldn't have worked and the reason it wouldn't have worked now think about that he does does
this a lot if a line is important he repeats it 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 without learning Morse code what's the problem with that it takes about 40 hours to learn Morse code how many humans are willing to invest 40 hours every you're gonna put a
telegraph on every desk so it means every single human that has a telegraph has to invest 40 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 1870s Alexander granbell filed the patents for the telephone another radical breakthrough in communication that performed basically the same function but people already knew how to use it and why do you know how to use it because you know how to talk you don't
have to teach people how to speak they already do it the neatest thing was was about it was that in addition to allowing you to communicate with just words it allowed you to sing it allowed you to entone your words with meaning beyond the simple Linguistics we are in
the exact parallel situation today that is Steve's quote we're in the exact same the exact the same now I can't even speak apparently somebody has to teach me how to speak 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 Steve was constantly placing the products he was making in historical perspective you can't do that unless you studied and learned from history so then the book has an
interview with Michael morit at this time Michael morit got there should be a biography on this guy not only is's a great writer but uh he was a a journalist then turned venture capitalist for seoa now is like a multi-billionaire but there's this interview that's taking place in May
1984 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 76 if you want to go back and listen to it I'm going to reread the book soon it's actually been on my table
for a while so it's return to the Little Kingdom Steve Jobs and the creation of apple and I just want to 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 Founders at
least the very best of them 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 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 return to the company from which he had been rudely rejected to engineer a turnaround as complete and spectacular as apples while turnarounds are
difficult in any circumstances they are doubly ult in a technology company it is not too much of a stretch to say that Steve founded Apple not once but twice and the second time he was alone now we go back to the book this is happening May 1984 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 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 time
and so Steve says I don't think my taste and 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 and so Michael morit
interjects he's like yeah but I think you're just being modest and so Steve resp 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 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 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 when he was 30 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 and maybe I 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 going to wind up being it's just going to take what another 13 years 14 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 because think about it well let me read this to first he says I want to build things what I'm best at doing is finding a group of talented people and making things with them I want to make things and why this is so amazing is because at
this point uh the the numbers I've seen have been varied but they're somewhere in this range he had about $70 million at that time okay so if you adjust for inflation in our present day that's like being 30 years old and having $200 million today he could have stayed
retired he could have been become an investor he could have taken it easy and he didn't go he couldn't you could argue 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 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 some us earlier cared about it when he started Apple when he was 20 cared about it when he was still
making great products up until the day he died and you see that idea right here in the text he's 30 years old he could go off into the sunset never hear from like be a wealthy man for the rest of his life live a life of leisure he's like no I want to build things I want to
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 yard stick might be quite different than that my yard stick may be how every
computer that's designed for 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 the from 1985 to 1986
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 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 it'll be new and creative ones the same time uh he bought Pixar which was 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 that is the computer he thought or excuse me the the the company he thought he was going to buy we obviously know how that ends right but this is a crazy thing but both Pixar and next quickly ran into trouble
imagine running not one but two failing companies simultaneously and then the the outcome right obviously selling uh next to Apple and then Pixar becoming you know the greatest uh Animation studio 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 NEX and Pixar quickly ran into trouble uh within six years of Nexus launch the entire founding team other than Steve had resigned and Pixar meanwhile was eaing out an existence and so not only is Steve one
of the greatest Founders to ever do it he's one of the greatest investors to ever do it this is insane I'm going to reread creativity Inc because I haven't read it I read it like 270 books ago or something like that and just this idea it's like okay uh he bought it from
George Lucas for $5 million with the agreement that he's gonna give George Lucas 5 million and then commit to investing at least a another 5 million so that's 10 million total and then before they wind up doing the deal and actually becoming profitable he dumped
another $60 million into it Steve's enthusiasm kept him writing check after check to Pixar ultimately investing some $60 million of his own money and he talks about that he did that for a decade uh Ed KML the his co-founder and the guy that wrote creativity Inc talks
about this in a few books that I 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 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 even when it was painful he shifted Nexus Focus to selling software that shift meant closing a factory and laying off more
than 200 of Nexus 530 employees meanwhile Pixar Stripped Away its advertising in Hardware businesses and entered into agreement with Disney all to pursue what something what sometimes seemed an Impossible Dream to make fully computer animated feature films which
had never been done before a Toy Story it was obviously the first one in history which goes on to be a massive success after nearly a decade of difficulty the streamlined NEX 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 a need of an operating system bought next for 427 million quote from Steve if you really look closely most overnight successes took a long time I would say all of them I can't think of an exception to that uh at the
moment if you really look closely most 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 a 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 1986 it's about making sure that you're you're running an efficient company and what Steve says here reminds me 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 in 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 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 and so it's during this time of struggle
in 1991 he's actually asked to give a speech to the Freshman the incoming freshman of his Alma moer which I don't know do you call it an alma moer 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 which point I I I chose to highlight is because next to his computers they're not selling and Pixar just had a did a round of layoffs so he's saying this like the the title 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 he says the last experience I wanted to recount for you there is a man and I think he's here today his name is Jack dunman he used to
be the dean of the school he was one of my the heroes of my life while I was here because Jack looked 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 often times when I was at the end
end of my rope cuz Steve was flat broke at this point in his life uh when I was at the end of my rope Jack would go for a walk with me and I would discover a $20 bill in my coat pocket after the walk with no mention of it from Jack before during or after I learn more
about generos 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 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 with me my entire life and so one thing I love with 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 this this is an email exchange between Steve Intel CEO Andy Grove who's also a mentor and a badass and and then an Intel engineer and so I think Andy's like 20 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 many lessons that now because the Steve Jobs archive has organized this that essentially like Andy can teach us at the same same time he's teaching Steve because 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 this engineer uh at Intel who's all whose name is not released and then Steve Jobs
and so the engineer like hey you know I talked to Andy we're going to study from you we're taking this really seriously like let's get our two teams together whatever and then Steve hits them back this is in 1995 Pixar secrets were invented through significant investment
over 10 years or more and we value them highly what does Intel propose to give Pixar for disclosing and Li licensing its secrets to Intel and so the engineer responds he like oh well you know we have not entered into any Financial arrangement in exchange for good ideas
for our micro processors in the past and we don't have an intention to do so in the future 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 going to this is going to be the opening for Andy to school and to teach Steve like a younger Steve Jobs and Steve's credit he also says this in the The Lost 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 so if somebody presents information to me you can ask people on my team that I and there's a a different
opinion like I will change my idea you I don't care where the ideas come from I just want to be excellent and we see that like in the email like he has this opinions like Intel should pay us for this and Andy is 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 emails Andy Andy maybe it's just me but I find the engineers's approach extremely arrogant 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 and so
when I read Andy's response I went and do what I normally do is like I want to know how old they are when they're saying this stuff and so at this point it says uh I wrote Steve is 40 and Andy is around 60 and so this is what uh Andy says he mails Steve back Steve I am
furly on the engineer 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 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 offered suggestions 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 I'm sorry
you don't feel that way we will be wor off as a result and so will the industry and then we see Steve in real time learning this is going to remind me of what Michael Jordan said in his Autobiography on episode 2113 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 we jump into uh Steve Jobs email to Andy Grove uh Andy I have many faults but one of them is not in gratitude and I do agree
with you that in the long long run these things balance out therefore I have changed my position 180° we will freely help engineer make his processors much better for 3D Graphics please ask engineer to call me and we will arrange for a meeting as
soon as the appropriate Pixar technical folks can be freed up from the film thank you for the clear perspective so then we get another interview from 1986 of Steve this is after Pixar's release of Toy Story and its successful IPO but next so it's after he fix 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 in the car I was listening to that uh that the loss interview with Steve and my wife was listening to it with me and Steve goes into the fact that he believes with the with the web
and where computers and and the internet is going and he says this in 1996 by the way uh that you know it's going to go from a computational device to a communication device that there's going to be an unbelievable amount of Commerce there's going to be billions and
billions and billions of dollars transacted on 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 not only the industry
is operating 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 L interview as well bypassing all middlemen 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 going to purchase from the web 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 interest
that you have and you can learn from each other and you can do it whenever you want because 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 to be forced out of the company that you created and even a
10 years later he he says this in the The Lost interviews like if we keep talking about this I'm going to get emotional like I 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 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 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 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 the problems that
Apple's having they they're losing money their Market share's evaporating their product line sucks and he says this is so fantastic and he says this right after uh right 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's last shareholder let say differentiation is survival right here and then we have Steve Jobs saying Apple's problem is that they're different differentiation evaporated the cure for apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament 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 70s the 80s the 90s there's even a talk where Edwin L talks about where he uh
does this like right off the cuff he's like eventually you know we're goingon to have this device it's going to be able to take uh it's going to fit in your shirt pocket you'll be able to take photos you'll be able to communicate each other I think he said in like the
early' 70s Steve talks about building like smaller like post PC devices even in the 80s so something more like an iPad than like an iPhone but they talk about this here where Steve sees an opportunity and he says I think this is 1996 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 for from Steve and from the 70s from Ed Lan it has appear ing in 1996 with Steve the
iPhone is 11 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 but that idea is
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 PC devices that he talk about a lot so he goes back to this idea of the corporate he calls it corporate
lifestyle I think we would refer this maybe it's like corporate culture to this day and his point was that the contrast between like apple and IBM like IBM is more hierarchial and his whole thing is like great will come from everywhere I um I've 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 iven and Dr Dre and early hip-hop industry really it's a it's one of the greatest documen on entrepreneurship if you look at it
and watch it through that lens but in that documentary Jimmy iven 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 anr that then
that he gave to Jimmy Jimmy heard it he's like oh I'll give it to Dr Dre and like the rest his history and he was talking about like you know this guy this is like the middle of nowhere 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 he like great can come from anywhere great can come from anywhere why did I think about that because listen to what Steve is going to say to us here I would say apple apple had a very if it had a corporate lifestyle it 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 ideas that are going to map
onto the hierarchy of the organization in other words great ideas could come from anywhere and we better sort of treat people in a much more egot egarian sense in terms of where the ideas came from great can come from anywhere and so their conversation continues and she's
like uh Terry Gross I think or gloss uh is the I think her name is Terry Gross she's the one interviewing him at this point and 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've heard ideas like this from other sources but this is fascinating because 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 15-hour days but you didn't have a typical situation where you worked so you could support your life your work was your life in many cases
then he's asked the followup question do you feel you've changed from that is that your life still and his response I feel it is still my life but it is not all of my life it's less of a percentage but I still don't really and 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 99% of my life and now maybe it's 50% of my life but he never thought of them as different things so then he's invited to
give a speech at Pao Alto High School and this is actually for the high school graduation and I'm just going to read you some highlights here because I think what happens is he's really highlight in what he feels 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 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 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 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 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 path is everyone else 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 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 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 and one of the most dangerous and stifling Concepts ever invented by humans is the career a career is a concept for how one is supposed to progress through 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 10 or 15 years later and discover the price they paid 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 lawers 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 but I also talked 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 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 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 humans All Humans terribly bad at predicting what we think we
actually want will actually make us happy and there's so many conversations where like I cannot believe this like what I thought I want wanted what I thought other people told me who 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 want to again not try to tell you what to do obviously I never would just telling you like what other people experience and maybe you know you fig you can figure it out for yourself this part is fantastic make your advocation your vocation make
what you love your work the journey is the reward 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 rainbow rainbow that's easy for me to say I got the PO pot of gold
literally but if you get to the pot of gold you already know that that's not the reward 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 is what your life is think of your life as a rainbow this is 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 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 because it does it literally does the two end points of everyone's rainbow this is this is again I think one of the he's got a ton of great ideas right but something you 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 going to spend your time the two end points of everyone's rainbow are birth and death we all experience both completely alone and yet most people of
your age have not thought about these events very much much less even seen them in others how many of you have seen the birth of another human 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 after our death some believe this 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 that the thought of mortality will somehow wound you for me it's the
opposite to know my Ark will fall makes me want to blaze while I'm in the sky 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 Ark across the sky you want to have as few regrets as possible
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 were a fool usually concerning women 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 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 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 things because 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 a very interesting idea that you need to be editing before you can actually you know people think of editing as something that happens after the fact and Steve's whole point is's like yeah but you can also edit before you make
Walt Disney realized many decades ago that animation was so expensive that you couldn't afford to animate 10 times more than what you need matter of fact you don't want to animate even 10% more than what you need and therefore the only conclusion you can come to 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 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 5 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 fil film Snow White in 1937 that's 60 years ago a few years ago they released it on video and sold 28 million copies making probably around a quar billion dollars of profits 60 years
after its initial release and then they include interview in this book called in the company of giants that came out I think in 1997 I read the book and covered it all the way back on episode 208 highly recommend buying the book it's an interview with
Steve and I think 15 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 you
better have great people there are no shortcuts around quality and quality starts with people I spend 20% 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 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 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 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 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 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 why did you work on that the worst thing that someone can do in an interview is to agree with me and knuckle under what I look for is someone who comes right back at me and says you're dead wrong
and here is why why and he places everything he's discussing in the proper context it's like 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 part
of the CO's job is to cool 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 than they have 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 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 his death unfortunately and again we have lesli Berlin does this fantastic job and 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 NEX at the end of 1996 didn't resemble the company he remembered Apple had lost $800 million that year 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 now this is crazy and I I had known this but I never thought about about this like I never I it was never
articulated 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 as number one
recruit number two to set an overall direction and number three to inspire and control and persuade he gave particular thought to his oh this is fascinating too 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 his second tenure at Apple was a study and focus soon after he returned he slashed the company's product offerings from 17 to 4 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 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 had the rare opportunity to put stories into the culture stories that would speak to our grandkids grandkids grandkid 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 that Steve held dear life is short don't waste it tell the truth technology should enhance human creativity process
matters Beauty matters Details Matter the world we know is a human creation and we can push it forward and so then a few few years later in 2003 he goes and speaks to the Stanford uh Business School uh students and he actually is 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 because it gives you like some background to how he saw this taking place and this is about six years after he made this decision 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 operating system and I said
forget it it'll never happen so this is one of those cases where 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 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 I said okay fine let's talk to them I couldn't believe it they really were interested and so we end up ended up selling them
next and after 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 and I thought I don't even know this person whatever I
tell them they'll probably go tell the CEO and then I'll be Persona nrata 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 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 so I spilled my guts and I never heard from him again and so I figured fine I was spending my days at Pixar and having a great time it was Springtime going into summer and six years ago a few weeks
from now I got a call back from him the director and he said we're going to 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 and so what Steve's talking about there he wasn't sure that it was even legal to to
be the CEO of two public company cosos at the time and so he says I'll help you anyway I can but I can't do that he called back a few days later ler and said we'd like you to come back as interim leader and help us find a new Co 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 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 and he said Steve I don't give a about
Apple 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 what to work on you ask yourself what do I give a about and then you go and do that because that's what he did and
so he says finally he interrupted me and he said Steve I don't give a about Apple and then I realized you know I do give a about Apple and that's kind of what crystallized it for me and so I went back there as interim CEO and I decided right up front that I was going
to act like I was the permanent CEO and so once he's back at Apple we see these emails again from the SE Archive of what's happening and AI tanian I actually went to YouTube to make sure I pronounce his name correctly um there's this exchange between Avi tanian and and Steve and he had run software
engineering at next and so he comes back and he assumes the same role at Apple when it acquired next he told Steve that the Apple culture at the time of the acquisition was so bad that you know we should just sell the company and I think Steve's response his email back is
excellent cuz it tells you like his mindset like there's no way in hell see is going to sell Apple so it says you know I had the same feeling lately that Apple employees don't deserve to be saved 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 this part made me laugh the first time I read it I don't know who they think engineered and Shi 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 Lov that idea was like who do they think perform so poorly like again insight to human nature they're never going to think that it's them uh but there is something good
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 AI that something we mentioned
earlier he 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 includ the
the part of the transcript is included in the book and it really just like lays out like explaining 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 8 to 10 weeks and we've been working really hard what
we're trying to do is not do something really high flute we're trying to get back to the basics we're trying to get back to the basics of great products great marketing and great distribution So to that end he says we started with the product line we looked at the
product road map 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 70% of the stuff on the product road map 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 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 30% of the gems not the 70% of the stuff that was distracting us so that's the product line then he talks about that we have not kept up in Innovations in our distribution now crazy this so the crazy
thing about that right we know what's going to happen in the future Steve when he said that did not know that we have not all he knew is that we're not we're not doing well on distribution this is not only they didn't have their own retail stores they weren't selling
Direct on their website yet either and so that's two major things that he's going to change let's go back to the marketing to me marketing is about values this is a very complicated world it is is a very noisy world I can't tell you how many times I have read this
paragraph uh like because I had notes on this talk for a long time I don't know 50 times cuz what he says here is so important uh to me marketing is about values this is a very complicated world it's a very noisy world and we're not going to 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 it's right up there with Nike Disney Coke Sony it is one of the great of the
greats but even a great brand needs investment and caring if it's going to retain its rence 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 going to do that but
we're going to do it for computers the best example of all one of the greatest jobs of marketing that the Universe has ever seen is Nike 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 rebok what does Nike do in their advertising 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 uh 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 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 and that those people that are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that actually do and so we are going to communicate this and so he's referencing the think different ad campaign you can
see the entire ad campaign on YouTube if you want it's starts out here to The Crazy Ones The Misfits the rebels and so he's describing this before he plays it for the Apple employees it honors those people who have changed the world some of them are living some of them are not
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 a speech this is something I hadn't come across in other books before there is 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 and so he cancels the Newton product line and people rebel so much that they show at Apple they show up at Apple to give a protest right and what he does is so smart this is Steve's response to
customer protest and we know this because of this email that he sent 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 we are reserving a space for them on our campus and it will Prov and we will provide them with coffee and other hot drinks our it may be cold out there our decision to end Newton development was not taken lightly and it is unlikely to be reversed even so 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 and so in about a year he raised uh Apple's market cap to 4 billion from 1.8 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 going to be satisfied and so he has this he puts a a framework on this he calls it Apple's hierarchy of skepticism and as
the basis of this he uses maso's hierarchy of needs and so he says like once you fix something like people are always going to find something else to complain about so he goes uh when I came to Apple 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 I used to think this was a bad thing I thought oh gez when are they ever going to believe that we're going to be able to turn 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 and they're on to the next one so I thought well let's get to the head 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 and so he takes it piece by piece he says on the first level what we accounted a year ago was survival so what did we do we did many things but the three things that stood out in
people's minds were we brought a new management 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 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 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 did we do well the most important thing was profits Apple delivered profits of $47 million in the next quarter and then delivered a quarter uh the quarter after that of $55 million 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 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 $1.8 billion a year ago to about $4 billion yesterday 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 well what's your product
strategy you're a product driven company you better have a dog on 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 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 he's giving the speech at macor 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 iMac and we're really really happy with this thing it's gorgeous we believe it's going to change the way computers look and should look
and so he goes okay so now what 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 and this is his point of differentiation is like the growth is
going to 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 had had invented Apple invented the market for selling computers to Consumers and and yet have
failed to come out with compelling products at consumer price points 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 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 going to get in back in there with a Vengeance this is where we're going to see a tremendous amount of growth for ourselves he's Sayang that in 1998 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's several sections called uh email from Steve to himself uh he does this quite a bit um it says why Steve often captured His Thoughts by emailing
himself notes and the reason it's important is because obviously every email is time and date stamped and so you can see like the evolution of his thinking you know andol like a lot of the same ideas you'll see like a little like 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 2000 like what is Apple's reason for being and so I just want to pull out a couple highlights that he was thinking in in 200000 apple is the
world's Premier company at building high technology products that are easy to learn and use by mere mortals beginning over 20 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 with
the potential of personal computers to enhance and enrich the lives of regular people not just with spreadsheets and databases but with creative we are a creativity driven company in everything we do Apple Mary's 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 PR this is this is the way you think about like think about what he's saying here right so far it's like okay where you going with this he really summarizes the way he thinks about Apple at this point
apple is the world's Premier bridge builder between mere mortal in the exploding world of high technology demystified technology it will have a much greater impact than any other thing we can do and then we have another email that Steve sends to all Apple employees this
one happens in 2002 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 that was said in 2002 a few years later he's giving this interview I think
in like 60 Minutes or something like show like that and I think it's right around the release of uh the iPhone and uh the interviewer is saying you know you're going to go down one of the greatest inventors and innovators in American history how do you think about
that and Steve said something that I think is echoing what Aristotle said and Steve said I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good then you should just go do something else wonderful 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 the Apple 2 is one of the greatest uh products ever ever created right uh he didn't stop there then he made the Macintosh then he just kept going then he found helped found Pixar then you
know he he does uh the iPod the iPhone the iPad iMac 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
for decades after decades so I like that idea it's like we are what we repeatedly do he Aris didn't say we're great if we do one great thing he like no excellence 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 2003 and this again like I talked about this last week when I talked about U the fact that I had lunch with Sam zel over two hours there's not
one thing I could tell that guy about entrepreneur or 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 going to go go over this this interview and this is
something I've known about Steve 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 based on Steve's influences I should re really reprint this bonus episode I did or republish it I've done like 39 or 40
different episodes just trying to map out who Steve Jaws was and then going deep on the people like all the people he just randomly mentions that he studied and he inspired and i' go and read their biographies right and so guess what I'm saying is like I read
reread this interview in the interview Steve is going to talk about one of his mentors which is Bob no the founder of Intel uh you'll recognize him because I covered him all the way back on episode 166 his he's got a biography called the man of behind the microchip Robert noise
and the invention of Silicon Valley if you want to read that book or listen to that episode but the reason this is so important to me and I spent so much time in this actual this one you know interview is the fact that I think it's 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 20 in May 2003 Steve spoke with lesli Berlin about his mentor Robert no noise co-invented the microchip and co-founded Intel and
Fairchild semiconductor the first successful silicon microchip company in Silicon Valley and so then he begins to speak about how important the his relationship that he built with Bob Steve was a young man listen to this he says I was young I was in my late 20s
and Bob well gosh he must have been in his later 40s lesie hops in she says he was born in 27 in 1927 and so Steve says yeah I was born in 1955 so he was almost 30 years older than me yeah so he was well he was in his early 50s meaning he was in his early 50s when he started to
Mentor a young Steve Jobs and now that I'm approaching this is the I love this because we think about the full scope of human uh the full spectrum of like your human lifetime right like you could think of like what did you think when you in your 20s what did you think when
you're your 30s and now this is Steve talking when he's in this almost almost he's like the difference of what he thought when he was 20 what he did not know and what Bob was trying to teach him so it says and now that I'm approaching 50 it's easy to see how people in their 50s know more than
people in their 20s 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 partially understand when he's 20 there's no some of the stuff like 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 realize something happened to your life you experience and then that's where you learn lesson you're like damn it that person was right and this is
what I love about Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett 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 some of those few people that can 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 can only partially understand at that time I think he was interested in what someone in their 20s
thought too and he was fascinated by the person 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 I think the line I don't have it in front of me so I'm going off memory says something like he the reason he spent so much time much time mentoring and then investing in young entrepreneurs he says something like I wanted to restock the
fish the stream I wanted to restock the stream I fish from like I benefited he talked in his you know studying deeply David Packard and Bill huet among other people and he's like well you know these people were so helpful for me all these people help me in my career like now
that I'm you know he's wealthy and well known his company successful like I have an obligation very similar to what Sam zel said last week you know I was like Sam why are you doing this like why are you flying all over the world at your expense giving these speeches you know
he 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 that's what the word he used like I have an obligation I consider an obligation to
pass on what what he learned that guy's been a entrepreneur for 61 years how many people on the planet can say that they've been an entrepreneur for 61 years there's some of them there's that's a small group of people imagine the knowledge that's in this this guy's
brain and 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 I want to 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 no said it you know Bob noise has been dead for 30 something years and yet that same theme that same whatever you want to 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 lesie 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 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 and I'm sure it was extremely hard for him at times this is 2003 Steve Jobs remember that optimis 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 going to give up because you're sane if you're a sane person obviously people like Steve Jobs uh people like Bob noise people like you and I I don't think people to the average person are going to think people
like us are Sayan you know I told the story where I was telling my dad that I got to meet Sam and like you know this guy sold this company for $38 billion 81 years old still still at it every day still like enthusiastic and you know he
didn't understand he's like why like cuz 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 there's no
separation between our life and our work there is no oh I I have an x amount of dollars so I'm just going to sit on my ass and do nothing all day that's not going to happen so then Steve goes back on the importance of asking older more experienced entrepreneurs for help uh I
called him meaning Bob noise 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 I'm trying to run with this company he's talking about
when he was in his early 20s okay 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 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 huet Bill huet and David Packard too so this idea go back to where just talked about a little while ago where Andy Grove is like schooling him it's like hey you know we we weren't entering into a commercial
relationship part of being friends and helping each other is I'm going to tell you everything I know you're going to tell me everything you know and it's just going to balance out in the end and then Steve you know reflects he like okay thank you and I've changed 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 20s he's still talking to him uh 20 years later I think Steve was around 40 years old when that that email exchange was
happening and this is something Steve would repeat throughout his entire career I've shared on a past podcast where he he feels asking for help as a superpower a superpower no one uses he goes a little bit into that here I think I got lucky and had the hoota 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 some people but some people like himself get curious as to what came before them lesie 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 there's just a passion to everything he did does you could tell he like truly gives a about what he's doing and so Steve says 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 career they built and the amazing business they built like there's times where you like
bad things happen in their family there's health issues there's like all this struggle going on today like you're peeling the onion and you realize there's Humanity underneath that you and I can relate toz cuz we all go through the same just to understand what's
going on now you can't really do that unless you understand how it got here there's a great quote by shophow 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 uh grabs schoenheimer's book on
the suffering of the world and then reads it uh and then reads it to lesie he who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits sometime in the conjurer's booth at a fair and Witnesses the performance twice or Thrice in succession the tricks were
meant to be seen only once and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive their effect is gone and so a few years before he gives this legendary Commencement Address that's been viewed you know tens of millions of times probably 100 million times by now at
Stanford he talks to actual MBA students a Graduate School of Business students there a few years before and so he's going over uh just some like ideas or things that he's working on this is 2003 uh in apple and this is very important something he says uh I'm at the same
time I was reading this book I was rereading James lon's autobiography which is going to 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 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 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 we're going to Ambush our customers this was just hilarious so he says our goal in retail
was not just to sell to the 5% of people who own our products today it was to go for the other 95% and we decided that these other 95% would not drive 10 miles to look at an Apple store if they weren't at all interested uh in buying our products and you know they're not
interested because they have a bunch of products so we decided we had to ambush them that's a great that's a great s 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 the
customers don't have to take a risk of driving 10 miles to find out that they weren't interested they just had to take the risk of walking 10 feet and then he's going to repeat something that he started talking about 25 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 comes down to the quality people that you work with the quality people that you have in your life that's 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 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 1997 so that'd be 6 years before he's talking about this the individual contributor contri
contributors were phenomenal the individual contributors right he thought the the the the management and the overall company culture was terrible obviously uh you and I talked about this when we went over Johnny IV's uh excellent excellent 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 there were six colors in the old Apple logo so I bleed Apple colors right 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 to do the fun stuff but the only good reason to be a manager is so some other boo 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 with this jargon and pretend like like we're not all humans underneath and so what he talk what do he to talk about I study
Management in school like you know this is what I agree with what he's saying here basically what I'm saying there's a lot of management 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 this guy to run Disney University told me about his point of view Steve has what 30 years of three decades of experience uh running companies at this point and he's like but I like what this guy that ran Disney University actually said and he says he called it management
by values what that means you find people that want the same things you want and so he's going to tell this in an analogy we're all going to take a trip together the first thing to is to figure out where we all want to go the worst thing is if we all decide we want
to go to different places you can never manage it this guy wants to go to New Orleans you want to go somewhere else I want to go to San Francisco you want to 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 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 3 days we can fly and be there in an hour I'll
go oh okay because actually I want to 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 that want to go to
San die 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've 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 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 and that's one of my mantras around apple and Pixar
right because because the people that you recruit everything like this is what we just talked about everything with Steve is going to come back to 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 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 CML seeing how Ed CML actually ran uh Pixar and Ed 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 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 kind of 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 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 like the evolution of his thinking or like how these ideas uh like
he writes them to himself and then like how they they'll change in the final draft and then uh how they changed when he actually delivered the address which I thought was interesting but I just just I just do want to pull out a couple things here this was excellent cuz he
say 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 but this was an 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 or 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 going to
eventually share a very viation 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 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 said I was going to 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 when I was staring at her forgetting what I was talking about mids sentence 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 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 as I was walking to my car this is one of my favorite things he ever did and 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 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 plan to meet the people who would change your life it just happens 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 recounting the lessons that he's learned from his life that he's trying to organize for the benefit of you know not
only the people that are in the audience now that tens of millions of people around the world that have watched that commencement address and so we see this Evolution again and this is just absolutely fantastic because I don't not sure if I should read the Highlight
first let me read the Highlight first and then my note because that's the order that that that this happened for me and so he's talking about starting apple he says when my partner Steve W anak and I started Apple most of our friends and our family told us we were
nuts was had a great job designing handheld calculators at H Packard and I had a fun job designing games at Atari and we were giving them up to start this company I remember remember talking to W 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 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 huet and David Packer did to start a company so rather than invest in better cars or better apartments or our bank accounts we decided to invest in ourselves 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 like I just read whatever when I'm reading books whatever pops out I'm like I want to remember I just highlight I don't sit and like contemplate it just all Instinct like oh this is interesting I want to remember this 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 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 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 going to happen when you become
friends with the eminent dead and it's important to obviously pick that up before uh you know we're 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 tramatic but it's true and when I remember this I
realize that all 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 my intuition even if I embarrass myself or I fail in the eyes of others because I'll be dead soon
and when I realize that I don't have forever to decide what my intuition tells me is waiting out there for me when I was 17 I read a quotee that said something like if you live each day as if it's your last someday you'll most certainly be right and since I was 17 I
have looked in the mirror every morning and ask myself 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 up that's all that matters we can we get confused with Prestige and
money and and expectations of others it doesn't matter do I a very my wife wouldn't agree with this but I'm a very simple person in sense it's like I just try to design a day that I like 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 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 24 hours that's all I I don't worry about 5 year plan 10 year plan 20 20 year plan it's like can I can I design a good 24 hours myself and then keep doing that day after day so it's very similar to what he's saying Here If today was the last day of my life would
I want to do what I'm about to do today when 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 that when you're looking forward at 22 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 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 want to pull out from the actual commencement address at Stanford University there's something I actually save on my phone because I think what
Steve's about to tell us here is very similar to this like I I did a podcast uh on Anthony Bourdain who you know 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 another book with
somebody worked very closely to him because I thought Tony bourdin's quality of work was excellent and so reading 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 a way I think about my own work 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 Steve talk about is he did things that were interesting to him you know he trusted that like if he just followed his own interest and 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 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 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 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 and that 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 17 years later I did go to college but I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford and all of my workingclass parents savings were but were being spent on a on my college tuition
after 6 months I couldn't see the value in it I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life 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 would all work out
okay it was one of the best decisions I ever made 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 5cent deposits to buy food and I would walk 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good
meal a week at the Harry Krishner Temple and so then he's talking about just following his interest he was interested in the time of taking a 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 formal education none of this had had even a hope of any practical application in my life but 10 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 type faces or proportionally spaced fonts 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 there something you're intensely interested in like maneuver yourself 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 long is like you're intensely interested about it Steve was intensely interested in building products when he was like 19 he was still intensely interested in it doing the same thing when he was 50
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 somehow connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even it lead you to off the well 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 it's just like what do you want to do your time is UN 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 going to hit you in 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 12 13 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 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 it just keeps getting better and better as the years roll on so keep looking don't settle 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 everything else is secondary this is fantastic I've never seen this before uh he gave a speech to Apple employees the day before the iPhone is released in 2007 and this speaks to one one of my favorite ideas about him and 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 same with James Dyson right which we'll cover next week and it wasn't d uh so he's talking about the the the creation of wanting to 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 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 10% of the features that are on these phones 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 6 p.m. we're going to find out if other people love it as much as we do and think about that the most successful consumer product of all time came from the fact that he was just building a product for himself a few pages later they print out uh this this
joint interview that uh Steve jobs I think it's the last joint interview that Steve Jobs 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 too Bill they're they're like talking about what they
like about each other you after being like frenemies 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 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 art Levon who's the CEO of genitech at the time and on Apple's board sent Steve a congratulatory email
Steve's response is perfect and it's you can almost predict what his response is going to be based on what we've already talked about right and his his thing is like you did something wonderful that's great go do it again and do it again and do it again forever so this is from art
to Steve and he's qu there's a line that he's quoting from The Fortune Magazine art article where they called him the Beethoven of business the Beethoven of business not sure gets any better than that congratulations Steve's response 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 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 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 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 wellbeing and then the book ends with
Steve's resignation letter from Apple few weeks before he died to the apple board of directors and the Apple Community I 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
unfortunately that day is come I hereby resign as CEO of Apple I would like to serve if the board sees fit as chairman of the board director and Apple employee as far as my successor goes I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO 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 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 we have to go for it for the full story download the book for free you can go to stevejobs archive.com I'll
leave the links down below as usual you can read the book online read on Apple Books download the the file and actually send it to your Kindle any other uh e-reader whatever you want to do highly highly recommend it's a no-brainer that I cannot believe the gift that Steve
Jobs archive have just given to the world the fact that we have steveen his own words talking directly to you and I highly highly recommend you read the entire thing and if you want to see my top 10 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 you can ask me questions directly and you can listen to the AMA ask me anything episodes that I make that is 299 books down 1,000 ago and I'll talk to you again soon