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Starting and building

Steve Jobs

Subtract

Steve Jobs (Contemporary · 1955–2011) — Subtract.

Starting and buildingModernSubtract

What actually happened?

In 1985 he lost a board fight and left the company he had started. He has said the twelve years that followed were the most creative of his life, and the arithmetic supports him: NeXT built the operating system Apple eventually bought to save itself, and Pixar changed what an animated film was. Neither was a detour back to Apple. Both were the thing itself, done properly, by someone who no longer had a large company's permission to worry about.

Simplicity is expensive

Making something simple is not removing features until it is thin. It is understanding the thing well enough that the shape becomes obvious. That takes longer than adding, which is why most products are complicated: complication is what you ship when you ran out of time to understand.

The settings screen with forty switches is not generous. It is a record of forty arguments nobody was willing to settle.

The product is every point of contact

He treated the box, the shop, the repair counter and the advertising as parts of the product, because the customer does not experience them separately. A company that is excellent in the object and careless at the counter has not made a good product; it has made a good component.

Unboxing designed as a small ceremony does more for how the thing feels than another processor generation.

Belief is a resource, and it is borrowed

The famous distortion field was not a trick. People delivered work they did not believe possible because somebody credible refused to accept it was not. Used well it raises what a group thinks it can attempt; used badly it is a way of demanding miracles and blaming people for the shortfall.

The same sentence, this has to be twice as fast, is either the best week a team ever had or the reason three of them leave. The difference is whether the person saying it is also in the room at two in the morning.

How do I use it today?

List everything you are currently working on and ask which half you would keep if you could only keep half. Then stop the other half today, and write down who is accountable for having stopped it.

Deep read

Focus is what you say no toThe things you cut are the good onesHe came back to dozens of product lines and drew a box with four squaresThe dots only connect backwardsCollect first, connect laterA calligraphy class he sat in on after dropping out, in the Mac ten years later

Read alongside

Jeff BezosCut to four products; the other man expanded into everything and won too. Andy GroveJobs disrupted other people on instinct and taste; Grove disrupted himself on process and data. The same act performed by two temperaments.

Further

Peter Thiel Jeff Bezos Paul Graham Huo Qubing Andy Grove Ren Zhengfei

Lines to keep

Simple can be harder than complex; you have to work to get your thinking clean.

Design is not just how it looks. Design is how it works.