Make something wonderful

13 Mar 2025

This is a collection of texts from, and transcriptions of, Steve Jobs. There’s a lot of internal emails, interviews and transcriptions of speeches.

It’s interesting to get a more “insider view” of Steve, although I’m sure this book is heavily curated.

The texts span from the start of Apple to his time at NeXT and Pixar to his final resignation letter. It’s an OK book, probably mainly for fans of Steve Jobs.

Quotes

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.

Whatever it may be, I bet many of you have had some of these intuitive feelings about what you could do with your lives. These feelings are very real, and if nurtured can blossom into something wonderful and magical. A good way to remember these kinds of intuitive feelings is to walk alone near sunset—and spend a lot of time looking at the sky in general. We are never taught to listen to our intuitions, to develop and nurture our intuitions. But if you do pay attention to these subtle insights, you can make them come true.

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 working life.

People are package deals; you take the good with the confused. In most cases, strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin. A strength in one situation is a weakness in another, yet often the person can’t switch gears. It’s a very subtle thing to talk about strengths and weaknesses because almost always they’re the same thing.

Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

Technology should enhance human creativity. Process matters. Beauty matters. Details matter.

There’s a great quote by Schopenhauer. It’s a great quote. I should pull this up. I’ll get it all wrong. I’ve got to go up and get it. [Goes upstairs, grabs Schopenhauer’s On the Suffering of the World, and then reads from it on the stairs.] “He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer’s booth at a fair and 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.”

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. And what I found is that nobody in their right mind wants to be a manager. [Audience laughs.] 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 bozo doesn’t be the manager—and ruin the group you care about. Really. And if you’ve lived through a bad situation where you’ve had bad management, you’ll do anything to not have your group destroyed by that again. And you will even step up and be the manager yourself, even though you don’t want to do that.

[…] a teacher is someone who stands with you in the dark and holds their flashlight just long enough for you to find your own flashlight.

Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.