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Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world.
I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out 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 someday go to college.
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 working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
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, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story , and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right. It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't 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 others' 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.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog , which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog , and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
Steve Jobs' Stanford University Commencement Speech by Steve Jobs is in the public domain.
Steve Jobs on Consulting
I mean, most of you come from companies where you've had work experience, right? How many of you are from manufacturing companies? Oh, excellent. Where are the rest of you from? Okay, so how many from consulting? Oh, that's bad. You should do something.
No, seriously, I don't think there's anything inherently evil in consulting. I think that without owning something over an extended period of time, like a few years, where one has a chance to take responsibility for one's recommendations, where one has to see one's recommendations through all action stages and accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes and pick oneself up off the ground and dust oneself off, one learns a fraction of what one can.
What you're coming in and making recommendations and not owning the results, not owning the implementation, I think is a fraction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get it better. And so what you do get is a broad cut at companies, but it's very thin. It's like a picture of a... I would go... I'm vegetarian, so when you say "steak," it's like a picture of a banana. You might get a very accurate picture, but it's only two-dimensional. And without the experience of actually doing it, you never get three-dimensional. So you might have a lot of pictures on your walls, you can show it off to your friends, you can say, "I've worked in bananas, I've worked in peaches, I've worked in grapes," but you never really taste it.
[Applause]
But you're also a variable expense, and in hard times you find yourself…
"Focusing is about saying no" - Steve Jobs (WWDC'97)
(Audience) What about OpenDoc?
Speaker: What about OpenDoc? Yeah. What about it? It's dead, right? It's dead, right? Yeah.
Well... you know... let me say something, as this is sort of generic. I know some of you spent a lot of time working on stuff that we put a bullet in the head of. I apologize. I feel your pain, but Apple suffered for several years from lousy engineering management. I have to say it, and there were people that were going off in eighteen different directions doing arguably interesting things in each one of them. Good engineers. Lousy management.
And what happened was you look at the farm that's been created with all these different animals going in different directions, and it doesn't add up. The total is less than the sum of the parts.
And so we had to decide what are the fundamental directions we're going in and what makes sense and what doesn't. And there were a bunch of things that didn't. Microcosmically they might have made sense, macrocosmically they made no sense.
And you know, the hardest thing is... when you think about focusing, right? You think, well, focusing is is saying yes! No. Focusing... is about saying no. Focusing is about saying no. And you've got to say no, no, no, no. And you say no, you piss off people, and they go talk to the San Jose Mercury, and they write a shitty article about you. You know? And it's really a pisser because you want to be nice. You don't want to tell the San Jose Mercury the person is telling you this, you know, just was asked to leave or this or that. Is that so you take the lumps, and Apple has been taking their share of lumps for the last six months in a very unfair way, and it's been taking them, you know? ...like an adult, and I'm proud of that, and there's more to come, I'm sure. There's more coming. Some of these, I read these articles about some of these people that have left. I know some of these people, they have done it in seven years, and you know, they leave, and it's like, you know, it it's like the company's going to fall apart the next day. And and so, you know, I think there'll be stories like that; they come and go.
But focus is about saying no, and the result of that focus is going to be some really great products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts.
And OpenDoc... I mean, I was for putting a bullet in the head of OpenDoc... A - I didn't think it was great technology, but B - it didn't fit. The rest of the world isn't going to use OpenDoc, and I think as a container strategy, there's some stuff in the Java space that's much better, and even the OpenDoc guys were basically trying to rewrite the whole thing in Java anyway, which was a restart, so... it didn't make sense.
Steve Jobs Insult Response (WWDC'97)
Question: Mr. Jobs, you're a bright and influential man. Here it comes. It's sad and clear that on several accounts you've discussed, you don't know what you're talking about. I would like, for example, for you to express in clear terms how, say, Java in any of its incarnations, addresses the ideas embodied in OpenDoc. And when you're finished with that, perhaps you could tell us what you personally have been doing for the last seven years.
Jobs: Uh, you know, you can please some of the people some of the time. But one of the hardest things when you're trying to affect change is that people like this gentleman are right in some areas. I'm sure that there are some things OpenDoc does, probably even more that I'm not familiar with, that nothing else out there does. And I'm sure that you can make some demos, maybe a small commercial app that demonstrates those things. The hardest thing is, how does that fit into a cohesive, larger vision that's going to allow you to sell, um, $8 billion, $10 billion of product a year?
And one of the things I've always found is that you've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it. And I've made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room, and I've got the scar tissue to prove it. And I know that it's the case.
And as we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, um, it started with what incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer? Not starting with, let's sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how are we going to market that. Um, and I think that's the right path to take.
Uh, I remember with the LaserWriter, we built the world's first small laser printers, you know? And there was awesome technology in that box. We had the first Canon laser printing, cheap laser printing engine in the world, in the United States, here at Apple. We had a very wonderful printer controller that we designed. We had Adobe's PostScript software in there. We had AppleTalk in there. Just awesome technology in the box. And I remember seeing the first, uh, printout come out of it and just picking it up and looking at it and thinking, you know, we can sell this 'cause you don't have to know anything about what's in that box. All we have to do is hold this up and go, "Do you want this?" And if you can remember back to 1984, before laser printers, it was pretty startling to see that. People went, "Whoa, yes!"
And that's, that's where Apple's got to get back to. And, you know, I'm sorry that OpenDoc's a casualty along the way. And I readily admit there are many things in life that I don't have the faintest idea what I'm talking about, so I apologize for that too. But there's a whole lot of people working super, super hard right now at Apple, you know, AI, John, Gino, Fred, I mean the whole team is working, burning the midnight oil, trying to, and and and people, you know, hundreds of people below them, to execute, uh, on some of these things. And they're they're doing their best. And I think that what we need to do, and some mistakes will be made, by the way. Some mistakes will be made along the way. That's good because at least some decisions are being made along the way. And we'll find the mistakes, we'll fix them. And I think what we need to do is support that team going through this very important stage as they work their butts off. They're all getting calls, being offered three times as much money to go do this, do that. The Valley's hot, and none of them are leaving. And I think we need to support them and see them through this and write some damn good applications, uh, to support Apple out in the market. That's my own point of view. Mistakes will be made. Some people will be pissed off. Some people will not know what they're talking about. But it's, I think it is so much better than where things were not very long ago, and I think we're going to get there.
Steve Jobs - Get Much Simpler, Be Really Clear - Sept. 23, 1997
Good morning. We were up until 3 o'clock last night finishing this advertising, and I want to show it to you in a minute, see what you think of it. I've been back about 8 to 10 weeks, and we've been working really hard. What we're trying to do is not something really high-falutin'; 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. I think that Apple has pockets of greatness, but in some ways has drifted away from doing the basics really well. So we started with the product line. We looked at the product roadmap going out for 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." So we actually got rid of 70% of the stuff on the product roadmap. I mean, 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?" And I started talking to customers, and they couldn't figure it out either. So you're going to see the product line get much simpler, and you're going to see the product line get much better. There's some new stuff coming out that's incredibly nice. In addition, we've been able to focus a lot more on the 30% of the gems and add some new stuff in that's going to take us in some whole new directions. So we are incredibly excited about the products, and I think we're really thinking differently about the kinds of products we have to build, and the engineering team is incredibly excited. I mean, I came out of the meeting with people that had just gotten their projects canceled, and they were three feet off the ground with excitement because they finally understood where in the heck we were going, and they were really excited about the strategy.
In the same way, I think we have not kept up with innovations in our distribution. I'll give you an example; I'm sure it was talked about this morning, but you know, we've got anywhere from two to three months of inventory in our manufacturing supplier pipeline and about an equal amount in our distribution channel pipeline. So we're having to make guesses four, five, six months in advance about what the customer wants, and we're not smart enough to do that. I don't think Einstein's smart enough to do that. So what we're going to do is get really simple and start taking inventory out of those pipelines so we can let the customer tell us what they want, and we can respond to it super fast. You're going to see us be doing a lot of things like that. Today is just the first of many things we're going to be doing with you. So we're going to be not only, I think, catching up to where the best of the best are in distribution, but we're going to actually be innovating and breaking some new ground, I think, in the coming several months, and I'm pretty excited about that as well in the distribution manufacturing side of things.
And that gets us to the marketing side of things. 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. 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 whole world, right up there with Nike, Disney, Coke, Sony. It is one of the greats of the greats, not just in this country, but all around the globe. But even a great brand needs investment and caring if it's going to retain its relevance and vitality. The Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect in this area in the last few years, and we need to bring it back.
The way to do that is not to talk about speeds and feeds. It's not to talk about nips and megahertz. It's not to talk about why we're better than Windows. The dairy industry tried for 20 years to convince you that milk was good for you. It's a lie, but they tried anyway, and the sales were going like this [gestures downward]. And then they tried "Got Milk?" and the sales have been going like this [gestures upward]. "Got Milk?" doesn't even talk about the product fact; it focuses on the absence of the product. But the best example of all, and one of the greatest jobs of marketing in the universe has ever seen, is Nike. Remember, Nike sells a commodity; they sell shoes. And yet 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 Soles and why they're better than Reeboks' Air Soles. What does Nike do in their advertising? They honor great athletes, and they honor great athletics. That's who they are; that's what they are about. Apple spends a fortune on advertising, and you'd never know it. You'd never know it.
relevant: Emotional Inception vs Social Connotation Theory https://youtu.be/GFYasDoJ-98
Advertising works not by planting emotions in our subconscious, but by enabling us to signal who we are to others in ways everyone understands.
The Biggest Hiring Mistake You’re Making – Steve Jobs Warned About This!
The greatest people are self-managing. They don’t need to be managed.
Once they know what to do, they’ll go figure out how to do it, and they don’t need to be managed at all. What they need is a common vision, and that’s what leadership is. Leadership is having a vision, being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it, and getting a consensus on a common vision.
We wanted people that were insanely great at what they did, but were not necessarily those seasoned professionals. We wanted individuals who had at the tips of their fingers and in their passion the latest understanding of where technology was and what we could do with that technology, and we wanted to bring that to lots of people.
The neatest thing that happens is when you get a core group of, say, ten great people: it becomes self-policing as to who they let into that group. So I consider the most important job of someone like myself is recruiting. We agonized over hiring. We had interviews that would start at 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning and go through dinner. A new interviewee would talk to everybody in the building at least once and maybe a couple times, and then come back for another round of interviews. Then, we’d all get together and talk about it. They never filled out an application.
The critical part of the interview, at least to my mind, was when we finally decided we liked them enough to show them the Macintosh prototype, and then we sat them down in front of it. If they were just kind of bored, or said "This is a nice computer," we didn’t want them. We wanted their eyes to light up and for them to get really excited, and then we knew they were one of us.
Everybody just wanted to work. Not because it was work that had to be done, but because it was something we really believed in that was just going to really make a difference. That’s what kept the whole thing going. We all wanted exactly the same thing instead of spending our time arguing about what the computer should be. We all knew what the computer should be, and we just went and did it.
We went through that stage in Apple where we thought, "Oh, we’re going to be a big company, let’s hire professional management." We went out and hired a bunch of professional managers—it didn’t work at all. Most of them were bozos. They knew how to manage, but they didn’t know how to do anything! If you’re a great person, why do you want to work for somebody you can’t learn anything from? And you know what’s interesting? The best managers are the great individual contributors who never ever want to be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as them.
After hiring two professional managers from outside the company and firing them both, Jobs gambled on Debby Coleman, a member of the Macintosh team. Thirty-two years old, an English Literature major with an MBA from Stanford, Debbie was a financial manager with no experience in manufacturing.
"There’s no way in the world anybody else would give me this chance to run this kind of operation, and I don’t kid myself about that. It’s an incredible, high risk both for myself, personally and professionally, and for Apple as a company, to put a person like myself in this job. They’re really betting on a lot of things. We’re betting that my skills at organizational effectiveness override all lack of technology, lack of experience, lack of time in manufacturing. So, it’s a big risk, and I’m just an example; almost every single person on the Mac team, down to your entry-level person, you could say that about. This is a place where people were afforded incredibly unique opportunities to prove that they could write the book again."
Inscribed inside the casing of every Macintosh, unseen by the consumer, are the signatures of the whole team. This is Apple’s way of affirming that their latest innovation is a product of the individuals who created it, not the corporation.
Steve Jobs talks about managing people
"we are organized like a startups"
https://youtu.be/f60dheI4ARg
Steve Jobs talks about managing people
One of the keys to Apple is Apple's an incredibly collaborative company. So, you know how many committees we have at Apple? No, zero. We have no committees. We are organized like a startup. One person is in charge of iPhone OS software, one person is in charge of Mac hardware, one person is in charge of iPhone hardware engineering, another person is in charge of worldwide marketing, another person is in charge of operations. We're organized like a startup; we're the biggest startup on the planet.
We all meet for three hours once a week and we talk about everything we're doing, the whole business. And there's tremendous teamwork at the top of the company, which filters down to tremendous teamwork throughout the company. Teamwork is dependent on trusting the other folks to come through with their part without watching them all the time, but trusting that they're going to come through with their parts. That's what we do really well. We're great at figuring out how to divide things up into these great teams that we have, and all work on the same thing, touch bases frequently, and bring it all together into a product. We do that really well.
So what I do all day is meet with teams of people and work on ideas and solve problems to make new products, to make new marketing programs, whatever it is. And are people willing to tell you you're wrong? Yeah, I mean, other than snarky journalists, I mean, people are willing. Yeah, no, we have wonderful arguments. And do you win them all? Oh, no, I wish I did.
You can't if you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you. You have to let them make a lot of decisions, and you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don't stay. But you must be more than a facilitator who runs meetings; you obviously contribute your own ideas. I contribute ideas, sure, why would I be there if I didn't?
Steve Jobs Vision of AI (5 min)
I have no talent at drawing at all. I can make neat drawings, cut them out, and paste them into my documents so I can combine pictures and words. Then I can send it to an electronic mailbox so somebody else living here in Aspen can dial up a phone number and get their mail and see this drawing I made. We're starting to break out, and you can just see it now, and it's really exciting. So where we are is that the personal computer is a new medium, and society and computers are really meeting for the first time in the '80s. In 15 years, this first phase of getting these tools out into society in large numbers will be all over. But during the next 15 years, we have an opportunity to do it great, or to do it so-so. A lot of us at Apple are working on trying to do it great.
I want to look at one last thing, then we can talk about whatever you want to talk about. What is a computer program? Do you know what a computer program is? Anybody? No, sort of. It's an odd thing, really an odd thing. You've never seen an electron, but computer programs have no physical manifestation at all. They're simply ideas expressed on paper. Computer programs are archetypal. What do I mean by that? Let's compare computer programming to television programming.
Again, if you go back and look at the tapes of the JFK funeral in 1963, I guess, you'll start to cry. You will feel a lot of the same feelings you felt when you were watching that 20 years ago. Why? Because through the art of television programming, we are very good at capturing a set of experiences—an experience, two experiences, 20 experiences—and being able to recreate them. We're very good at that. It takes a lot of money and it's somewhat limited, but we can do a pretty good job of that. You can really feel the excitement of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon.
Computer programming does something a little different. What computer programming does is it captures the underlying principles of an experience—not the experience itself, but the underlying principles of the experience. And those principles can enable thousands of different experiences that all follow those laws, if you will. The perfect example is the video game. What does the video game do? It follows the laws of gravity, of angular momentum, and it sets up this stupid little Pong game. But the ball always follows these laws. No two Pong games are ever the same, and yet every single Pong game follows these underlying principles.
I'll give you another example. There's a neat program called "Hamurabi." Seven-year-old kids are playing this, and it's a game. It comes up on the screen and goes, "Oh, King Hamurabi." You get to be King Hamurabi of the ancient Kingdom of Sumeria for 10 years. It comes up, "Oh, King Hamurabi, this is year one. You have a thousand bushels of wheat in storage, you have 100 people, you have 100 acres of land. Land is trading at 24 bushels an acre. Would you like to sell any land? No. Would you like to buy any land? No. How much would you like to plant or feed? How much would you like to plant?" It turns out that if you don't plant enough, some of your people will starve the next year. And if you plant a lot, then people will come from the surrounding villages because you've got a hot village to live in, and you feed them well.
It's crude, but basically these seven-year-old kids are playing with this macroeconomic model. You can argue about the content of the model, but one thing you can't argue about: they will sit there for hours and play that and learn. We've got to get our models better and better and more sophisticated, but that is an interactive way of learning that none of us ever had when we were growing up. And again, thousands of individual experiences, but all based on that one set of underlying principles.
When I was going to school, I had a few great teachers and a lot of mediocre teachers. The thing that probably kept me out of jail was books, because I could go read what Aristotle wrote or what Plato wrote. I didn't have to have an intermediary in the way. A book was a phenomenal thing; it got right from the source to the destination without anything in the middle. The problem was, you can't ask Aristotle a question.
I think as we look towards the next 50 to 100 years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit or an underlying set of principles or an underlying way of looking at the world, then when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life, his or her whole life, and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday after the person's dead and gone, we can ask this machine, "Hey, what would Aristotle have said about this?" And maybe we won't get the right answer, but maybe we will. And that's really exciting to me, and that's one of the reasons I'm doing what I'm doing. So what do you want to talk about?
Source
Steve Jobs talk at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen
08:00: we're going to sell those 10 million computers in ' 86 whether they look like a piece of or they look great it doesn't really matter because people are going to just suck this stuff up so fast that they're going to do it no matter what it looks like and it doesn't cost any more money to make it look great.
There are going to be these objects this new object that's going to be in everyone's working environment and it's going to be in everyone's educational environment and it's going to be in everyone's home environment and we have a shot at putting a great object there or if we don't we're going to put one more piece of junk object there.
09:40: we have a chance to make these things beautiful and we have a chance to communicate something through the design of the the objects themselves.
Apple CEO Tim Cook on How Steve Jobs Recruited Him and More | The Job Interview
Tim: You know, Steve was a teacher. He taught me the value of focus, the importance of simplicity, the fact that making things simple is so much harder than making things complex. For those of us that were fortunate enough to work with him, he was the teacher of a lifetime.
(jaunty music)
(keyboard clacking)
Hi.
Interviewer: Hi. How are you doing?
Tim: Great. It's my first job interview in a while.
(bright music)
Interviewer: What is the first thing that you remember being good at?
Tim: I think math, surprisingly. You know, I was a pretty good student and I loved math. I loved figuring out complex equations and so forth, and I wanted to be an engineer, and so math and engineering really went well together.
Interviewer: Tell me about the first job you ever had.
Tim: Oh. My first job was delivering papers, and I was about 12 years old. Everybody was sort of expected to work in my family. And I'd get up at 3:00 in the morning, pick up the stack of papers and start throwing, and usually come back and take a nap before school. Throwing papers helped start my college education, and I was the first person in my family that went to college. I knew that being able to do that was a privilege that I needed not to waste. Everyone saw college in those days, and hopefully today, as opening many doors and being able to stand on the shoulders of your parents, that education would do that.
Interviewer: Your first job after you graduated from Auburn was at IBM?
Tim: Yes.
Interviewer: Tell me about your first day.
Tim: I started at the beginning of January of '83, and I drove with everything I owned in my car. Rented an apartment, my own apartment for the very first time, and I had no furniture at all. I was sleeping on the floor for a while before I could afford to actually buy a bed. It was the first time I really had to dress up to do anything, other than maybe go to church, but it was a marvelous place where there were a lot of really smart people from all around the world.
Interviewer: When Steve Jobs recruited you to join Apple, you said you trusted your gut. How did you know you made the right decision?
Tim: There was a feeling that I had in talking to Steve, that he was a very different kind of CEO. He was focused on products, products, and products, and had a belief that small teams could do amazing work. I loved that vision, and I also loved that in an environment where everyone was going to an enterprise kind of company, he wanted to refocus Apple on consumers. And it was brilliant, because at the time, nobody was doing that. Everybody thought you could not make any money selling to consumers. And, you know, I've never thought it was a good idea to follow the herd. I thought I had a chance of a lifetime to work with the creative genius that started the entire industry, and I didn't want to pass that up.
Interviewer: Did you feel like you were bringing something to Apple that was missing at the time?
Tim: People have forgotten this, but Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy, and it was a really awful time. And people advised me not to come to Apple because they thought that it was headed straight down. But I saw something different. I saw sort of the sparkle in Steve's eye, and it just meant that we could pull out this turnaround for this American treasure, and... Ah, I'm so glad to have been a part of that team.
Interviewer: What lessons about management from Steve did you learn?
Tim: He taught me the value of innovation, the fact that small teams could do amazing things. I looked at the size of the iPod team initially, I looked at the size of the iPhone team. These were very small teams in the scheme of things. Hiring the best people to surround you that challenge you, that have skills that you don't, and being confident with that. And also not to be married to my past views, you know, not to be so proud you can't change your mind when you're presented with new evidence and things. He could change like this. I initially was sort of taken aback by that, and then I became so enamored with it. Very few people have that skill because they get married to their past views, and I thought it was a brilliant skill.
Interviewer: Did he change your mind about anything?
Tim: Oh, he changed my mind about a lot of things and he changed his mind about a lot of things.
Interviewer: Did you change his mind about something?
Tim: Yes, of course. He loved to debate, and he loved someone to debate him, and you could always change his mind if you had the best idea. We changed each other's minds. That's the reason it worked so well.
Interviewer: Where does your passion for understanding logistics come from?
Tim: Manufacturing has always interested me because I'm very curious about how things are made. I like to go to factories and see how things are put together, how they're created. My degree is in industrial engineering, my undergraduate degree. And industrial engineering is essentially the study of people and machines, and how the two working together can create things that they couldn't create on their own. And I've always viewed it, the supply chain piece of it, to be a bit of a piece of art when it was done correctly because it's a symphony of things of coming together of thousands of different components and parts coming together to create something.
Interviewer: What sacrifices do you feel like you've had to make to get to where you are now?
Tim: Sleep. And fortunately, I love coffee.
Interviewer: How much coffee are you drinking a day?
Tim: Many cups, I'm... Please do not benchmark that. (Tim laughing)
Interviewer: So tell me about your morning routine. How do you start your day?
Tim: You know, I get up very early, and I quickly go to the Mac and begin to go through the emails that have come in for the last several hours. A lot of what I'm reading are from customers that are telling me how they're using our products and what it's doing for them. And so I get notes both that are positive and some that are not so positive because people feel free to reach out and voice their opinion. And I think this is great because it keeps my hand on the pulse of the company.
Interviewer: How do you deal with some of that criticism?
Tim: I have relatively thick skin, and so I try to internalize it and ask myself, "Well, is that accurate or not?" And not just quickly put up a defensive shield and say, "Why? What we've done is right."
Interviewer: What do you think people don't realize about your job?
Tim: How much fun it is. At times, I hear some other CEOs talk about how terrible their jobs are. Mine is fantastic. I love it.
Interviewer: Do you think that the Tim who was throwing papers, saving money to go to Auburn, did he have any idea that he would be sitting here today?
Tim: Zero. You know, I did a 25-year plan when I was in graduate school at Duke, and the first year or two was reasonably accurate. After that, it wasn't worth the paper it was written on. You know, life has a way of happening and throwing you off from some well-crafted plan, and I think the most important thing is to roll with it and make sure that you recognize when doors are opening, that they're opening, and you choose the one to walk through.
(jaunty music)
(mellow music)
MIT Sloan Distinguished Speaker Series 1992