Steve Jobs

Right now, through a mess of tears and a runny nose, I've just finished Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson's biography, and I want to let the feeling linger a little longer, to burn into memory this moment and the jolt Jobs has given me.

This book has permanently changed a part of me. At the very least, in my Yale classes it has made me even less able to tolerate the ordinary and the mediocre; when I'm arranging music or writing scripts, it has made me trust my own instincts and taste more; and when I'm driving things forward, it has made me more direct and more honest.

I want to share two passages I love.

The first is the copy Jobs helped craft for the "Think Different" ad when he returned to Apple in 1997. It was also played at his funeral, in his own voice. As it drifted over the crowd, it felt both heartbreaking and piercing.

"To those who are a little mad.

They go their own way. They refuse to be tamed. They stir up trouble. They never quite fit in.

They look at things through different eyes. They have no taste for convention, and no wish to settle for how things are.

You can side with them or against them, sing their praises or tear them down — the one thing you cannot do is ignore them.

They push humanity forward. Others may see them as madmen, but to us they are geniuses.

Because it is only those mad enough to believe they can change the world who actually end up changing it."

The second is something I just want to read again and again and again — his own words, from the many times he talked about the legacy he hoped to leave behind:

My passion has been to build a company that lasts, where people are driven to make great products. Everything else comes second. Sure, making money is great, because that's what lets you make great products. But the motivation comes from the products, not the profits. Sculley got it backwards and made money the goal. It's a subtle difference, but it shapes everything: who you hire, who you promote, what gets talked about in meetings.

Some people say, "Give customers whatever they want." That's not how I work. Our job is to figure out, one step ahead, what they're going to want. I remember Henry Ford saying something like, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they'd have told me: 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you put it in front of them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read what isn't on the page yet.

Edwin Land of Polaroid used to talk about the intersection of the humanities and science. I love that intersection. There's a kind of magic there. Plenty of people are innovating, but innovation isn't the main thing that sets my work apart. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there's a deep humanity buried inside our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are alike: they both have a hunger to express themselves. In fact, some of the best people who worked on the original Mac were also poets and musicians. In the 1970s, computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Some great artists, like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, were also masters of science. Michelangelo knew a great deal about quarrying stone; he didn't just know how to sculpt.

People pay us to integrate things for them, because they can't think about all this stuff 24/7. If you have a huge passion for making great products, it pushes you toward integration — toward tying together your hardware, your software and your content management. If you want to break new ground, you have to do it yourself. If you want your products open to other hardware or software, you have to give up some of your vision.

In the past, different companies at different times have been the model for Silicon Valley. For a long time it was HP. Then, in the semiconductor era, it was Fairchild and Intel. I think for a while it was Apple, and then that faded. And today I think it's Apple and Google — a bit more Apple. I think Apple has stood the test of time. It's had its ups and downs, but it's still out in front.

It's easy to point out Microsoft's shortcomings. They've clearly lost their dominance and have become basically irrelevant. But I appreciate what they did, and I know how hard it was. They were very good at the business side. They never had the ambition about products that they should have had. Bill likes to describe himself as a product guy, but he really isn't. He's a businessman. Winning the business mattered more than making great products. He ended up the richest man around, and if that was his goal, he achieved it. But that was never my goal, and I doubt, in the end, that it was his. I admire him and the company he built — it's impressive — and I liked working with him. He's smart, and actually quite funny. But Microsoft never had the humanities and the artistic sensibility in its DNA. Even after they saw the Mac, they couldn't copy it well. They completely missed what it was about.

I have my own theory about why companies like IBM or Microsoft decline. A company like that does well, it innovates, it becomes a monopoly or close to one in some field, and then the quality of the product starts to matter less. The company starts valuing the great salespeople, because they're the ones moving the sales and changing the revenue numbers — not the product engineers and designers — so the salespeople end up running the company. John Akers at IBM was a smart, articulate, terrific salesman, but he knew nothing about product. The same thing happened at Xerox. When the sales people run the company, the product people stop mattering as much, and many of them lose their creative passion. That's what happened at Apple after Sculley came in, which was my mistake, and it's what happened when Ballmer took over Microsoft. Apple was lucky enough to come back, but I don't think Microsoft will get anywhere as long as Ballmer is at the helm.

I hate a certain kind of person: people who call themselves "entrepreneurs" when what they really want is to start a company and then sell it or take it public, so they can cash out and walk away. They're not willing to put in the effort to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. That's the only way you truly contribute and add to the legacy left by those who came before. You build a company that will still be standing a generation or two from now. That's what Walt Disney did, what Hewlett and Packard did, and the people who built Intel. They created companies that last, not just money. That's what I want for Apple.

I don't think I'm harsh with people, but if someone screws something up, I'll tell them to their face. It's my job to be honest. I know what I'm talking about, and it usually turns out I'm right. That's the culture I've tried to build. We're brutally honest with one another — anyone can tell me they think I'm full of shit, and I can say the same to them. We've had some ferocious arguments, yelling at each other, and those were some of the best times of my life. I don't feel bad saying, in front of other people, "Ron, that store looks like crap." Or saying, "God, we really fucked up this process," right in front of the person responsible. That's the rule here: you have to be super honest. Maybe there's a better way, like a gentlemen's club where everyone wears a tie and speaks in refined, polite language full of elegant euphemisms, but I'm not very good at that, because I'm a middle-class kid from California.

Sometimes I've been tough on people, maybe tougher than I needed to be. I remember when Reed was six, he came home on a day I had just fired someone, and I was thinking about how a person tells his family and his little kid that he's lost his job. It was hard. But someone has to do it. I've always felt it was my responsibility to make sure the team was excellent, and if I didn't do it, no one would.

You have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could have kept singing protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn't. He had to move on, and when he brought electric sounds into folk in 1965, he alienated a lot of people. His 1966 European tour was his peak. He would come out first and play acoustic guitar, and the audience loved it. Then he'd bring out The Band, all on electric instruments, and sometimes the crowd would boo. Once, just as he was about to play "Like a Rolling Stone," someone in the audience shouted "Judas!", and Dylan said, "Crank it up, loud as hell!" And they did. The Beatles were the same. They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That's what I've always tried to do — keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan put it, if you're not busy trying to live, you're busy dying.

What drives me? I think most people who create things want to express gratitude for being able to build on what came before us. I didn't invent the language or the math I use. I make hardly any of my own food, and not a single item of my own clothing. Everything I do depends on the rest of humanity, on their contributions and achievements. Many of us want to give something back to society, to add one more stroke to the long river of history. We can only express it in the way that most of us know how — because we can't write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use whatever talent we have to express our deepest feelings, to express our gratitude for everything those before us contributed, and to add a little something to the stream of history. That's what drives me.