What I learned from reading I, Steve: Steve Jobs In His Own Words by George Beahm.

People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you're doing and it's totally true.

And the reason is because this is so hard that if you don't, any rational person would give up.

It is really hard and you have to do it over a sustained period of time.

So if you don't love it, if you're not having fun doing it, and you don't really love it, you're going to give up.

If you really look at the ones that ended up being successful in the eyes of society and the ones that didn't, Oftentimes it's the ones who were successful loved what they did so they could persevere when it got really tough and the ones that didn't love it quit because they're sane.

Who would want to put up with this stuff if you don't love it?

It's a lot of hard work and it's a lot of worrying constantly.

And if you don't love it, you're going to fail.

That was Steve Jobs talking about the importance of passion.

And it's an excerpt from the book I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is I, Steve, Steve Jobs in his own words.

So I counted the other day and I think I've done 13 different podcasts on Steve Jobs.

I will link them all with episode numbers in the show notes.

Most of those, he's the main character, like there were biographies or books exclusively dedicated to him.

In a few it's about like his partners like Johnny Ive or like Ed Catmull at Pixar.

But even after reading all these books on Steve Jobs I didn't know the book that I'm holding my hand even existed.

I walked into a small used bookstore the other day and about after an hour of just going through all their shelves I walked out with 6 books for

I love used bookstores and not only because they're usually fantastic values but because you just find books that you didn't even know existed and this book is a great example of that.

It is just quotes organized by topic from Steve Jobs.

So consider this a bonus episode of Founders.

Most of this is just gonna be Steve Jobs talking directly to you and I.

He's talking about it's normal to have anxiety before you introduce a new product.

He's talking about the way he felt right before he debuted the iPad.

And I thought this was remarkable because it's the last product he ever introduced and you just think about how many groundbreaking products he had created up until this point of his career and he's still anxious.

Even though we've been using these internally for some time and working on it for a few years, you still have butterflies in your stomach the week before, the night before the introduction, the day before the launch.

You just never know until you get it into your customers hands.

This is Steve on the fact that the core of your company is the quality of employee you have.

He repeats this over and over again that the founders most important job is recruiting is to assemble the greatest concentration of talent that you possibly can.

That's what keeps us going to work in the

morning, to hang around these great bright people.

I've always thought that recruiting is the heart and soul of what we do.

Most of us can't wait to get to work in the morning.

But it's not like Apple has somehow morphed into a mass-market consumer electronics company.

It's that mass-market consumer electronics is turning into Apple.

Then he talks about his goal has always been to be the best.

Not to be the biggest, not to be the first.

the first to this party but we're going to be the best and then Steve talks about what you do after you recruit great talent it's not just recruiting after recruiting it's building an environment that makes people feel they are surrounded by equally talented people and their work is bigger than they are.

The feeling that their work will have tremendous influence and is part of a strong clear vision." Obviously he means the founder is

the 1 that sets that strong clear vision.

So he talks about recruiting usually requires more than you alone can do.

So I found that collaborative recruiting and having a culture that recruits the A players is the best way.

Any person he's interviewing is gonna speak to

a bunch of different people in the company.

And he says the reason he does that is because the current employees can veto a candidate.

And then this is Steve on the importance of communicating a feeling to your customers.

We don't stand a chance of advertising with features and benefits and with rams and with charts and comparisons.

The only chance we have of communicating is with a feeling.

And then he, there's another quote on branding, this is actually from 1997 when he, just when he returned to Apple the second time.

Most people would put Apple in that category.

You could spend billions of dollars building a brand that's not as good as Apple.

Yet Apple hasn't been doing anything with this incredible asset.

Apple is about people who think outside the box.

People who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things and make a difference, and not just get a job done.

And this is Steve on what his company focuses on.

And then this is about who he's building for.

I think this is 1 of his best insights actually.

The roots of Apple were to build computers for people, not for corporations.

The world doesn't need another Dell or Compaq.

This is Steve on the importance of simplifying your product line.

This is again is right when he came back to Apple.

What I found when I got here was a zillion and 1 products.

And I started to ask people now why would I recommend a 3400 over 4400?

When should somebody jump up to a 6, 500 but not a 7, 300?

And after 3 weeks, I couldn't figure this out.

If I couldn't figure this out, how could our customers figure it out?

And then As we go through this, you're going to notice that he just has a handful of ideas that he just repeats over and over again in different ways.

I was actually texting with my friend Richard the other day because he was asking, he's like, why do you say on your podcast repetition is persuasive?

He's like, I have noticed Jeff Bezos repeats himself a lot.

I was like, nearly all the founders that I've read about have a handful of ideas and principles that are important to them and they just repeat and pound away at them forever.

And the fact that this tiny little book that you could probably read in 2 hours, It's just a great illustration of that because you can read in such a condensed amount of time and you see him Decade after decade just repeating ideas are important to him.

He'll put he'll place the ideas in different contexts He'll apply it to different parts of the company But there is just a small handful of ideas and principles that were extremely important to him.

And instead of getting fancy I think he just really focused on mastering the fundamentals of those core principles.

He's talking about consumer product design but really he's talking about his love of simplicity.

Look at the design of a lot of consumer products.

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there.

But if you keep going, and live with the problem, and peel more layers off of the onion, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.

Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there.

And even that phrase most people he's constantly comparing and contrasting what his company does compared to what most other companies and most other people do.

He says half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the unsuccessful ones is just pure perseverance.

Most people, most companies don't put in the time and effort to actually solve the complexity and not just ignore it.

Most people don't focus enough on recruiting and having extremely high standards of excellence.

And then there's just 1 quick sentence here that I really, I sat here and thought about this for quite a while because he's talking about, hey, it doesn't matter if I'm making an iPhone, I'm making an iPad, I'm making a computer, whatever it is.

He's like, at the fundamental level, what are they?

That tool may manifest itself in different physical forms, but at its core, it's a tool.

And that really resonated with me because that's how I think of founders.

I think of it as a tool for working professionals.

And what that tool does is it gets ideas from the history of entrepreneurship into your brain so then you can use them in your work.

It just so happens that a podcast is a great way to achieve that goal.

And then the book is obviously filled with maxims from Steve, here's 2 of them.

And then another 1 of his something he repeats over and over again is the journey is the reward.

But again, that's something he says even as he knew he was dying.

He talks about the journey is the reward.

And in fact, that made me think of this fantastic interview that I just heard with Ed Thorpe.

Ed Thorpe, I've talked about a bunch of the podcasts, as you probably know, but it's episode

If you haven't listened to it, he's my personal blueprint.

He was on Tim Ferriss' podcast, episode number 596.

But towards the end of the podcast, he talks about that a lot.

That you don't confuse the reward as the main objective.

But listening to that podcast and hearing it at Thorpe at 89 just reaffirmed the fact that I really do think he's the blueprint.

Going back to this book, we'll see that Steve's going to repeat himself here.

This time he's talking about applying simplicity to the organization, like the actual structure, the way your company is set up.

The organization is clean and simple to understand and very accountable.

This is Steve Jobs when he was still in his 20s and he's talking about setting up Apple as the David to IBM's Goliath.

It's curious to me that the largest computer company in the world IBM couldn't even match the Apple 2 which was designed in a garage 6 years ago.

And so that's something he'll repeat over and over again.

He's like, listen, it's not about the size of your R&D budget.

It's the quality of the people that you have working there.

Keep in mind he's about 9 years into Apple.

At this point I think that's 1 of the Apple's challenges really.

When 2 young people walk in with the next thing, are we going to embrace it and say this is fantastic?

Are you going to be willing to drop our models?

And really, he's just describing what happened to him when he was younger.

He was at 1 time the 2 young people that are walking in with the next thing.

And so he knew from experience, you're more likely to actually dismiss it because you already have something that's working and you're focused on that.

This is Steve on what's important to him.

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me.

Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful, that is what matters to me.

In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer.

It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa.

But to me nothing could be further from the meaning of design.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

Keep in mind he's saying this 4 years before the iPhone comes out.

Some people think design means how it looks but of course if you dig deeper It's really how it works.

The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like although that was part of it Primarily it was how it worked.

To design something really well you have to get it You have to really grok what it's all about.

It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something.

Most people, there's that phrase again, most people don't take the time to do that.

And then this is his comment on the essential difference.

This 1 really hit me hard and I've read a lot about both the creation of the Lisa and the original Mac and he said the Lisa people wanted to do something great and the Mac people wanted to do something insanely great.

And then on these 2 pages I essentially just underlined everything.

So it says, we attract a different type of person.

A person who doesn't want to wait 5 or 10 years to have someone take a giant risk on him or her.

Someone who really wants to get in a little over his head and make a dent in the universe.

This is on maximizing employee potential.

People judge you by your performance, so focus on the outcome.

Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.

And then Steve talks about part of having an environment dedicated to excellence means that the founder is going to have to do editing.

It's painful when you have some people who are not the best people in the world and you have to get rid of them

but I found my job has sometimes it's been exactly that to get rid of some people who didn't measure up and I've always tried to do it in a humane way but nonetheless It has to be done and it's never fun.

People think focus means saying yes to the thing that you've got to focus on.

It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.

I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done Innovation is saying no to a thousand things Then he extends this and he's talking about focusing on product And so he's asked this question What can we learn from Apple's struggle to innovate during the decade before he returned in 1997, he is answering this question in 2004.

You need a very product-oriented culture, even in a technology company.

Lots of companies have tons of great engineers and smart people, but ultimately, there needs to be some gravitational force.

But ultimately, There needs to be some gravitational force that pulls it all together.

Otherwise you can get great pieces of technology all floating around the universe but it doesn't add up to much.

has on focus, this time focusing on the right thing.

Sure, what we have to do has to make commercial sense, but it's never the starting point.

We start with the product and the customer experience.

And then Noah left myself on that page, was the founders with this philosophy, because he's essentially saying, yeah, it has to make money, right?

But if you can't start with the goal in mind is I just want to make the most money.

You start with the product and the actual experience that

The founders of this philosophy wind up getting the money anyways.

This is Steve on the role of the founder forcing the issue, the important issues in the company.

What happened that he's talking about the design of the iPhone.

What happened was the designers came up with this really great idea.

take it to the engineers and the engineers go, nah, we can't do that.

Then they take it to the engineers and the engineers go, nah, we can't do that,

Then they take it to the manufacturing people and they go, we can't build that.

Sure enough, when we took it to the engineers, they said, oh, and they came up with 38 reasons, meaning why I can't do it.

And I said, because I'm the CEO and I think it can be done and so they kind of begrudgingly did it but then it was a big hit this is Steve Jobs on the importance of forward thinking what really right Why this really resonated with me is because he sang this when he was 30 years old.

He had no idea what the next 25 years of his career, what he was able to produce.

His biggest hits were so far in the future.

If you want to live your life in a creative way, you have to not look back too much.

You have to be willing to take whatever you've done and whoever you were and throw them away.

I think my favorite Steve Jobs biography is Becoming Steve Jobs,

the Evolution of a reckless upstart into a visionary leader.

It was episode number 19 because that's what the book is focused on.

The person he was at 30 is vastly different than who he's going to become when he's 45, 55.

When he's the person that is capable, that has the skills and has built the organization to create some of the greatest products that humans have ever seen.

And evolution is a fantastic description of that process of the process of Steve becoming Steve Jobs.

When we first started Apple, we really built the first computer because we wanted 1.

We designed this crazy new computer with color and a whole bunch of other things called the Apple 2, which you've probably heard of.

We had a passion to do this 1 simple thing, which was to get a bunch of computers to our friends so they could have as much fun with them as we were.

And that's really important, because he's saying, I wasn't trying to build the biggest company.

I wasn't trying to build a trillion dollar company.

Those things happened later as a by-product of what I was actually focused on, which is just building the best computer that I wanted to use.

And then he has a quote about testing people and putting them under pressure to test them.

This comes from the book in the company of giants.

If you haven't listened to that episode yet.

Many times in an interview I will purposely upset someone.

I'll do my homework, find out what they worked on, and say, God that really turned out to be a bozo product.

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.

And then here's Steve on the importance of studying great ideas.

Really, this is just a giant ad for Founders Podcast if you really think about it.

to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you're doing.

Picasso had a saying, good artists copy, great artists steal.

And we've always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

And then he goes back to what are you focused on?

I want to build great products, and in order to build great products, I have to build a great company that has the capability of building great products.

My philosophy has always been very simple.

My philosophy is that everything starts with a great product.

I obviously believed in listening to customers, but customers can't tell you about the next breakthrough that's gonna happen, that's gonna change the whole industry.

So you have to listen very carefully, but then you have to go out and sort of stow away.

You have to go hide away with people that really understand the technology but also really care about the customers and dream up this next breakthrough.

And that is my perspective that everything starts with a great product.

Then he talks about the importance of hard work.

Keep in mind when he's writing this or when he's saying this, this is right when he came back to Apple, this is in

And so he says, I've never been so tired in my life.

I come home at about 10 o'clock at night and flop straight into bed.

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#249 Steve Jobs In His Own Words