I have always believed that choosing good colleagues is the heart and soul of everything we do.
We may not be the first to do it, but we will be the best.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. Most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Innovation has nothing to do with how much money you have for research and development. It's about the people you have, how you lead them, and how well you understand the process...
I think all art lies in good observation of what is happening around us. In putting things together in ways that no one has thought of before and discovering ways to express and show them to others who are not as familiar with the events...
Many companies have decided to downsize, and maybe that was the right decision for them. But we chose a different path. We believe that customers will continue to open their wallets if we consistently offer them great products.
The main difference between a leading company and those that merely imitate it lies in innovation.
When I talk to colleagues, I often try to throw them off balance by slightly criticizing their past work. Of course, I do my 'homework' beforehand and find out what they have been working on. Then I say: "My god, that turned out to be a real bomb and a great product. Why did you bother with it?" I want to find out how people behave under pressure. I want to see if they just retreat or if they are firmly convinced of their work, trust it, and are proud of it.
We have strived only to make the best product possible. A carpenter who wants to make a really good chest of drawers doesn't use particle board for the back, even though that side faces the wall and no one will ever see it. But you know it's there. So he uses a nice piece of wood for the back as well. If you want to sleep well at night, you have to be consistent in aesthetics and quality to the end.
The problem with most companies is their inability to retain great people despite the fact that the work environment does not encourage individual achievements but rather hinders them. Great individuals leave, and the company has to settle for mediocrity.
If the market tells us we are making bad decisions, we listen.
If you think you've done something quite well, you shouldn't dwell on it for too long, but you should move on to something else, equally wonderful. You just have to figure out what the next successful product will be.
It's not just about choosing colleagues. It's also about creating an environment where people feel surrounded by equally talented people and that the work they do is important. The feeling that their work will have a big impact and be part of a strong and clear vision – these are all things that belong together. Choosing colleagues usually requires more than you can do alone. That's why I found that the best approaches are teamwork and cultivating a special culture in selecting top players. Every potential colleague must talk to at least a dozen of our colleagues who are employed in different parts of the company, not just in the one they are supposed to work in. This way, a top candidate gets a broad and in-depth picture of the company, and those already employed can also reject them – Apple supports a corporate culture where a strong sense of belonging to the company is important.
When dealing with a big problem, you first come up with solutions that are very complex, and most people give up. But if you persist and start living with the problem and slowly eliminate issue after issue, you can sometimes come up with very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don't invest enough time and energy to succeed. But we believe that customers are smart and want well-thought-out products.
Making a crazily excellent product is highly dependent on product development: how you learn and accept new ideas and let go of old ones.
It's hard when you have to deal with people who aren't the best in the world, which is why you have to get rid of them; still, I've realized that sometimes I have to do just that – get rid of people who aren't up to the tasks, and I've always tried to do it humanely. It has to be done, and it's never really fun.
People think that focus means concentrating on the idea you should focus on. But that's far from true. Focus means saying no to hundreds of other good ideas that are also available. So you have to choose very carefully. I'm actually proud of the things we haven't done as much as the things we have done.
We don't think that one company can do everything. So you have to connect with other people who are also experts... we don't strive to excel in finding partners, so we form partnerships with people who are very good at finding themselves.
If you want to live creatively and like artists, you shouldn't look back too much. You have to be ready to discard whatever you've done or become.
Instead of worrying about what happened yesterday, let's invent tomorrow.
Great business successes are never achieved by one person alone, but always by a group of people.
My job is to not let people off the hook and try to encourage them to do their best work.
You have to find out what you enjoy. This applies to both work and love. You spend a large part of your life working, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to believe that you are doing a great job. The only way to do a great job is to enjoy what you do... So never settle for just average results.
After tackling a problem... and finding it difficult, you usually settle for a complicated solution. Most people get stuck at this point, and the accepted solution usually works quite well for a while. But a truly great person continues to search for solutions and thoroughly explores the fundamental problem until they find an elegant solution that works on all levels.
Many times people don't really know what they want until you show it to them.
Every overnight success takes a long time.
When we create a new product, we listen to customers, consider their comments, and add what we would like to see in the product ourselves. That's how we invent new products. However, we never know if customers will like them as much as we do.
We bet on our vision and prefer to do that rather than make products that everyone wants to make. Let other companies do that. We always let ourselves be guided by our next dreams.
I am convinced that about half of what separates a successful entrepreneur from an unsuccessful one is simply perseverance... if you don't have enough passion for the activity, you won't survive, sooner or later you'll give up. So you have to have an idea, maybe you're bothered by a problem or injustice that you want to fix and that fills you with passion; otherwise, you don't have enough perseverance to withstand all the efforts.
It's downright crazy: we are all very busy, we have jobs and hobbies, and some of us also have children. In this constantly active society, we are all just getting busier and not less busy. We simply don't have time to learn something well. So everything is becoming more and more complicated... Neither you nor I have much time to learn how to use a washing machine or a phone.
Summary from the book Thoughts of Steve Jobs by George Beahm
