Make something wonderful

Creativity equals connecting previous unrelated experiences and insights that others don’t see.

You have to have them to correct them. Creative people feel guilty that they are simply relaying what they “see.” How do you get a more diverse set of experiences? Not by traveling the same path as everyone else.

But one has no way of knowing which of these paths will lead anywhere in advance. That’s the wonderful thing about it, in a way. 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 working life.

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’s 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.

Everything that makes up what we call life was made by people no smarter, no more capable, than we are; that our world is not fixed — and so we can change it for the better.

I remember almost every day the air being crystal clear, where you could see from one end of the valley to the other. It was really the most wonderful place in the world to grow up.

I would say that gave one several things. It gave one an understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked, because it would include a theory of operation. But maybe even more importantly, it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things are not mysteries anymore. I mean, you looked at a TV set, and you would think, “I haven’t built one of those — but I could. There’s one of those in the Heathkit catalog, and I’ve built 2 other Heathkits, so I could build a TV set.” Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation, not these magical things that just appeared in one’s environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous degree of self-confidence that, through exploration and learning, one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way.

I didn’t realize how different California was than the middle of America, and even to some extent the East Coast, until I traveled to those places. California has a sense of experimentation about it, and a sense of openness about it — openness and new possibility — that I really didn’t appreciate till I went to other places.

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.

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 can’t argue about that anymore. You can argue about how long it will take, but you can’t argue about it anymore.”

We thought if we could just get what’s called a printed circuit board, where you could just plug in the parts instead of having to hand-write the whole thing, we could cut the assembly time down from maybe 50 hours to more like an hour.

It’s a domesticated computer.

Computers are really dumb. They’re exceptionally simple, but they’re really fast. The raw instructions that we have to feed these little microprocessors are the most trivial of instructions.

One of the reasons I’m here is because I need your help. If you’ve looked at computers, they look like garbage. All the great product designers are off designing automobiles or buildings.

When I was going to school, I had a few great teachers and a lot of mediocre teachers. And the thing that probably kept me out of jai was the books. I could go and 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 to the destination without anything in the middle.

We’re about 5 years away from really solving the problems of hooking these computers together in the office. And we’re about 10-15 years away from solving the problems of hooking them together in the home. A lot of people are working on it, but it’s a pretty fierce problem.

We started with nothing. So whenever you start with nothing, you can always shoot for the moon. You have nothing to lose. And the thing that happens is — when you sort of get something, it’s very easy to go into cover-your-ass mode, and then you become conservative and vote for Ronnie. So what we’re trying to do is to realize the very amazing time that we’re in and not go into that mode.

I don’t think finance is what drives people at Apple. I don’t think it’s money, but feeling like you own a piece of the company, and this is your damn company. We always tell people, “You work for Apple first and your boss second.” We feel pretty strongly about that.

The neatest thing about it was that, in addition to allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing. It allowed you to intone your words with meaning beyond the simple linguistics.

Dealers initially welcoming IBM with open arms now fear an IBM-dominated and controlled future. They are increasingly and desperately turning back to Apple as the only force that can ensure their future freedom.

Just a bunch of little things: wine labels, paintings in galleries. Just simple things. Not anything real profound, just lots and lots of little things. I don’t think my taste in aesthetics is that 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 know they can be. That’s the only difference.

Your aesthetics get better as you make mistakes. But the real big thing is: if you’re going to 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. Not that much more. And a willingness to do so, a willingness to persevere until it’s really great.

To me, Apple exists in the spirit of the people that work there, and the sort of philosophies and purpose by which they go about their business. So if Apple just becomes a place where computers are a commodity item and where the romance is gone, and where people forget that computers are the most incredible invention that man has ever invented, then I’ll feel I have lost Apple.

But it was also late to market and expensive — and it sold poorly. Within 6 years of NeXT’s launch, the entire founding team, other than Steve, had resigned.

This stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t.

Character is built not in good times, but in bad times.

I was forced to go to humanities lectures — it seemed like every day. I studied Shakespeare. And at the time, I thought these were meaningless and even somewhat cruel endeavors to be put through. I can assure you that as the patina of time takes it toll, I thank God that I had these experiences here. It has helped me in everything I’ve ever done, although I wouldn’t have ever guessed it at the time.

That was a very painful time, but you just march forward, and you try to learn from it. One of the things I 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’s 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 usually believe that if one group of people didn’t do something, within a certain number of years, the times would produce another group of people that would accomplish similar things. We happened to be at the right place, at exactly the right time, with the right group of people. We did some wonderful work. I think our major contribution was in bringing a liberal arts point of view to the use of computers.

It’s not something that should be relegated to 5% of the population over in the corner. It’s something that everybody should be exposed to, everyone should have a mastery of, to some extent, and that’s how we viewed computation, of these computation devices.

The first one was a real belief that there wasn’t a hierarchy of ideas that mapped onto the hierarchy of the organization. In other words, great ideas could come from anywhere and that we better sort of treat people in a much more egalitarian sense, in terms of where the ideas came from.

And Apple was a very bottom-up company when it came to a lot of its great ideas. And we hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies — I know it sounds crazy — but a lot of companies don’t do that. They hire people to tell them what to do. We hired people to tell us what to do. We figure we’re paying them all this money, their job is to figure out what to do and tell us. And that led to a very different corporate culture, and one that’s really much more collegial than hierarchical.

Now, as you live your arc 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 wish you could do over again. In some you were a fool, in others you were scared, in others you hurt someone else. Some mistakes are deep, others not. But if your intent was pure they are almost always enriching in some way. Regrets are most often things you didn’t do, and wish you did.

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.

If you don’t have any of these feelings, called dreams, then you’re in trouble. Before you “spend” 4 or more years of your life going in a direction your heart may or may not want you to go, you need to recapture them.

Be a creative person. Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights that others don’t see.

You have to have them to connect them. Creative people feel guilty that they are simply relaying what they “see.” How do you get a more diverse set of experiences? Not by traveling the same paths as everyone else.

I’m not a filmmaker. I don’t direct our films. What I try to do is help create the environment where all these incredible people can make films.

Hollywood uses the stick, which is the contract. And Silicon Valley uses the carrot, which is the stock option.

When you make a live-action film, a director typically shoots between 10-25 times as much footage as will end up on the screen. They take that into the editing room and they build their film. And hopefully they can do a good job, because if they can’t, it’s too late — the actors are gone, the sets are down.

Walt Disney realized many decades a go 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, you have to edit your film before you make it. Disney pioneered a lot of techniques for doing that, and they’ve refined those over the last 60 years.

Working with Disney gave us access to that wisdom that you can’t buy for love or money. And I think we learned a tremendous amount.

There are no shortcuts around quality, and quality starts with people. Maybe shortcuts exist, but I’m not smart enough to have ever found any.

I spend 20% of my time recruiting.

Ultimately it comes down to your gut feeling. Your gut feeling gets refined as you hire more people and see how they do. Some you thought would do well don’t, and you can sense why. As you hire people over time, your gut instinct gets better and more precise.

What I look for is someone to come right back and say, “You’re dead wrong and here’s why.” I want to see what people are like under pressure. I want to see if they just fold or if they have firm conviction, belief, and pride in what they did. It’s also good every once in a while to really piss somebody off in an interview to see how they react because, if your company is a meritocracy of ideas, with passionate people, you have a company with a lot of arguments. If people can’t stand up and argue well under pressure, they may not do well in such an environment.

I don’t know. People are package deals; you take the good with the confused. In most cases, strengths and weaknesses are 2 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.

In certain cases, my weaknesses are that I’m too idealistic. I need to realize that sometimes best is the enemy of better. Sometimes I go for “best” when I should go for “better,” and end up going nowhere or backwards. I’m not always wise enough to know when to go for the best and when to just go for better. Sometimes I’m blinded by “what could be” versus “what is possible,” doing things incrementally versus doing them in one fell swoop. Balancing the ideal and the practical is something I still must pay attention to.

I’m not sure I’d chalk that up to charisma. Part of the CEO’s job is to cajole 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 dod their best and you don’t think it’s enough, you tell them straight: “This isn’t good enough. I know you can do better. You need to do better. Now go do better.”

As CEO of Apple and Pixar, he saw his job as “number one, recruit; number two, set an overall direction; and number three, inspire and cajole and persuade.” He said, “You’re not grabbing the pencil out of the 25-year-old’s hand to do it better than they are. If you’re smart, you’re hiring 25-year-olds who are smarter than you.”

“A risk-taking creative environment on the product side requires a fiscally conservative environment on the business side. Creative people are willing to take a leap in the air, but they need to know that the ground’s going to be there when they get back.”

At Apple, making sure the ground was still there meant streamlining, a skill Steve had mastered in the lean years at NeXT and Pixar. His second tenure at Apple was a study in focus.

You’ve got to choose what you put love into really carefully.

And for the 1st time in 10 years I don’t even feel like challenging your ideas when I disagree — which scares me because I believe as a “team” we work best when we challenge each other and come out all-the-better for it.

Please continue to challenge me. It’s the way we get to the right decisions, and I enjoy it too.

We’re having to make guesses 4 or 5, 6 months in advance, about what the customer wants.

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.

Here are proposed key 1998 milestones for us as a senior management team. The purpose of this list is to remind us of the “forest” from time to time, and to help prod us into taking corrective action when we get off track.

I used to think this was a bad thing. I thought, “Oh, jeez, when are they ever going to believe that we’re going to be able to 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 onto the next one.

So I thought, “Well, let’s get ahead of the game. Let’s try to figure out what all the questions are going to be and map out where we are.”

10 years ago, the average American owned 1 watch. Because of design entering the watch market, today the average American owns 7 watches. 7 watches because of design. Because of fashion.

This land and building and grounds cost just shy of $100M, about the same as it costs to make 1 of our films. This equals around 1 year’s salary and benefits for everybody in our studio: to build this whole place, to buy the land, to build the grounds. We are making this investment in our future because we want the best place in the world to support the best talent in the world making the best animated features in the world.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

In every aspect of our studio, I see the kind of sprouting that signals Springtime — and I think the world, which is already amazed at what we have done so far, is going to be even more amazed at what’s in store for them in the coming years.

Tonight is a night for celebration, but don’t forget to pause for a moment and realize that this is what it feels like to be living in — and creating — a Golden Age.

He just had a lot of soul. And I think he was the soul of Intel. Gordon Moore and Andy Grove are fantastic, but I think Bob, Bob was the soul of that place.

One of my favorite quotes from him is where he says that optimism is the essential ingredient for innovation.
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 gonna give up if you’re a sane person — because it’s super hard. I’m sure it was extremely hard for him at times.

When you get into your 50s, you’re not grabbing the pencil out of the 25-year-old’s hand to do it better than they are. If you’re smart, you’re hiring 25-year-olds who are smarter than you. You know things that they don’t know, and they know things that you don’t know, and it all works.

It shouldn’t have been Bob that was designing the breakthrough chips, and if it was, then the ain’t running the company. His job was to, number one, recruit; number two, set an overall direction; and number three, you know, inspire and cajole and persuade. And if that’s what he’s known for, that means he’s doing the job.

I called up him and Andy and a few other people, Jerry Sanders [the founder of AMD]. I just called them up and said, “Look, I’m young and I’m trying to run with this company. I’m just wondering if I could buy you lunch once a quarter and pick your brain.”

And everybody I ever asked said yes.

He who lives to see 2 or 3 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.

If Apple comes up with a dozen innovations in a year, we can maybe advertise 4 or 5 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 on TV. What do you do with the other half-dozen innovations you come up with? You have to communicate those with the customer at the point of sale. And the existing distribution channel was not capable of that. So we decided to start our own. So that’s why we got into retail.

It’s worse than you’d ever imagine. In SV, most people think the creative process is a bunch of guys in their early 30s sitting on a couch, drinking beer, and thinking up jokes. Really. They really do.

And yet I’ve watched people at Pixar making these films, and they work as hard as I’ve seen anybody in a technology company ever work. The creative process is as disciplined as any engineering process I’ve seen in my life. And they’re as passionate about it as any technical person I’ve ever seen.

On the other hand, the content companies have no appreciation of the creative process in the technical companies. They think that technology is something that you write a check for and buy. That’s it. And they do not understand that there’s a wide, dynamic range of capability and elegance. They don’t understand the creativity in the process.

But it turns out that when they work with each other, they’re not prima donnas. They really like it.

I did learn a lot from that. And as a matter of act, there would have been no Pixar if that hadn’t happened. Life’s funny in this way. Sometimes your greatest strengths are your greatest weaknesses. Sometimes your greatest adversities, you learn the most from. I don’t know.

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 bozo doesn’t be the manager — and ruin the group you care about.

There’s a lot of management techniques. I’m sure you study a lot of management techniques. When I was younger, it was management by objective. It’s all a crock. They’re all after-the-fact management techniques.

He called it management by values. What that means is you find people that want the same things you want, and then just get the hell out of their way.

What happened at Apple was that Apple’s goals used to be to make the best personal computers in the world. And then the 2nd goal was to make a profit so we could keep on doing number one. Right?

What happened was that, for a time, those got reversed: “We want to make a bunch of money, and so, Ok, to do that, we’re going to have to make some good personal computers.” But it didn’t work. It never works. And so things start to fall apart.

Recruiting is the most important thing that you do. Finding the right people — that’s half the battle.

A wise observer of the economic scene once commented that “what can be left to later, usually is — and then, alas, it’s too late.”

You can’t plan to meet the people who will 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 it when it happens, and have the courage and clarity of mind to grab onto it.

So rather than invest in better cars, or better apartments, or our bank accounts, we decided to invest in ourselves.

And when I remember this, I realize that all of 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 intuition, even if I embarrass myself or fail in the eyes of others.

Sic transit gloria. All glory is fleeting.

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, or most of the technology I work with.

I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.