SPECIAL: Steve Jobs (Part 2)

yeah i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a go less travel never looking back alright we've got a special episode here this is from ben wilson ben wilson a producer for my first but on the side he's got a podcast called how to take for the world and i love it it was actually in my top like spotify wrap up podcast name with sean and so we air some of his episodes on our feed because we think it's amazing and so this episode is with steve jobs there's actually a two part series so this is well you could be listening in one or two right now but it's a two part series and give it a listen he does a really good job of saying the background of who steve was and what motivated him but he also does a really good job of explaining what you can learn from him in the world of business so incredibly fascinating check it out how to take over the world's the name of the podcast and here is steve jobs and we show you oh man without highly power just one second following me hard i'd like to take this chance to apologize absolutely nobody hello and welcome to how to take over the world i'm your host ben wilson this is part two of two about steve jobs if you haven't listened to part one yet you'll probably wanna go back and do that and you can find that in this feed that's just the podcast previous as a quick reminder of where we're at steve has been kicked out of apple his next ventures pixar next are flounder and he's nearly broke this time period is the early to mid nineties nineteen ninety five is the year when things really start to turn around for steve jobs and for the past ten years he's basically had a string of one failure after another and now he's about to have an unparalleled fifteen year streak of success after success and how does he pull this off how does he have such a titanic shift in fortune what was it that finally turned things around for him well it started with a cartoon steve bought pixar as a computer company and as a computer company its performance was dismal the hardware they produced was a financial catastrophe and the software was only ever mildly successful and never really even came close to making them profitable but he didn't give up on them he kept pumping money into the company to keep them a afloat the original pixar executives always wanted to produce a full length three d animated movie they built this company to do that and everything else they did building the computers creating the software and all that was in their minds just a step a way to make enough money to keep the lights on keep things going so they could make their movie that was their great passion and with that in mind they had hired a very gifted animator from disney by the name of john las and he was in charge of making little animations to help sell their technology at first the executives of pixar had to hide this hire from steve jobs they gave john las a bogus title that made him sound like a technical employee rather than an animator but once steve jobs saw the animations that john las had produced he becomes supportive of his hiring and of having him around and he continued to fund the animation part of pixar even as he was forced to make cuts and slash budgets in other parts of the company well as i said the executives at pixar really believed that a three animated film could be successful but they weren't in the animation studio and they didn't have the human resources or the money to pull this off so they're just chugging along being a software company and waiting for their opportunity well john las this animator that they have hired makes a short film to show off their technology and it wins an academy award for best short film disney sees that this guy that they let go is really talented and they try to hire him back but he thinks that pixar is the only place for him he loved the culture there and he loved being there so he says no to disney and so steve jobs comes in and helps negotiate a deal with disney that they will help pixar make a three d animated movie and they're going to do this by lending some of their employees to pixar helping to make the movie and also a large part of it is funding and distributing the film because pixar like i said was not profitable they did not have the money to make a full length feature film a movie and what they're going to make is the world's very first three d animated film everything before this was two d and mostly hand drawn cartoons like snow white or lion king this is the first film to use computers to animate objects that appeared three dimensional on the screen and steve was very supportive of this remember he's way more hands off at pixar than he ever was with any of his other companies and this becomes even more true once they start making a movie he really respected artistic people so whenever he had some criticism of their first movie toy story he always started off with now i'm not a filmmaker but it seems to me and of course this is a very different line of criticism than his usual one at apple or at next which started not with i'm not a computer maker but it seems to me but rather you asshole this is all wrong why are you so stupid in fact as far as been able to read the only people who steve was ever truly defer differential to or artists he really respected them and the artist and creators at pixar responded really well to this freedom and trust they performed magnificent they produce a masterpiece in toy story steve sees an early cut of the movie and realizes wow this is great he shows it to some critics and they agree this movie is gonna be a hit which is of course amazing for both steve jobs and pixar but there is one problem one fly in the ointment they're basically not gonna to make any money from it the deal they had made with disney gave disney all the power and profits why well because disney had put up all the money to make the film so pixar in this deal only gets twelve point five percent of the profit and disney has the option to make toy story sequels afterwards with or without pixar so steve realizes hey we can't keep relying on disney for financing or will never become a truly successful company in our own right and that's not the future that he wants for pixar he wants them to become a big animation studio something that could potentially rival a studio like disney here we see another instance of steve questioning the hand that he's dealt instead of just accepting the deal he comes up with a bold plan he wants to take pixar public the week after toy story comes out taking a company public means you're basically going to take a portion of the company and sell it on the stock exchange you lose some ownership but the company gets a bunch of money that they can use the plan is to take the company public and then take all the money they get from this and go back to disney and renegotiate their deal this time as equals and as partners they can say hey we don't need you anymore disney we have the money to produce our own movies now so this is gonna be on even footing that we're negotiating but of course this is also a big risk remember this is a completely new kind of movie that no one has ever done before if it comes out and it flops no one wants to see it well the initial public offering of stock is scheduled for the week after and it's gonna flop it's gonna go horribly so steve is betting big that this movie toy story is going to be a hit and is going to do really well well of course toy story isn't just successful it is one of the most successful movies of all time it made three hundred and sixty two million dollars worldwide so just a weekend after this massive success pixar has their initial public offering and it goes great the stock doubles on its first day and so in a year pixar has gone from a company that was basically worthless and almost dead to being a massive success and with the money they raised from the ipo steve is able to renegotiate the deal with disney to get fifty percent of the profits which is obviously a lot more than twelve point five percent this secures their financial future and ensures that pixar is going to be able to continue and realize their vision of becoming a great animation studio it's not just a massive success it's a huge turnaround from the isaac and biography quote earlier that year jobs have been hoping to find a buyer for pixar that would let him merely recoup the fifty million dollars he had put in by the end of the day the shares he had retained eighty percent of the company were worth more than twenty times at and astonishing one point two billion dollars and by the way this is an underrated success for steve jobs he buys pixar for ten million dollars puts in forty million more and eventually makes billions off of it steve eventually sold pixar to disney and when he died he was the largest shareholder of disney he held more ownership of disney than anyone else in the world and few people realize that in fact while steve is best known for leading apple and i think rightly so but when he died almost eighty percent of his wealth came from owning disney stock which he got from selling pixar pixar was quite frankly the company that made steve jobs most of his money and more important to steve than the financial success was what they had created as his wife would later say steve's love of beauty per his life he was thrilled to have helped in the creation of something that was artistic great as toy story was toy story is acknowledged by most critics as an all time great movie it has a hundred percent rating on rotten tomatoes dot com and if you've seen it it is it's it's really really good and steve loved that he was able to help make a masterpiece this process of making a movie was more than just a massive success it was a place where steve jobs was able to learn a ton as well he always thought that he could do everyone's job better than they could before this he was a total control freak who always knew what was right well now for the first time in his career something really great happens where he's involved and he absolutely loves it it but he can't pretend like it was his idea or he in any way shape or form created it he did help but this was a new relationship for him he was very hands off he negotiated and funded he would meet with and control upper management a little bit otherwise he basically let pixar do their thing and in this case it paid off magnificent and so i think this is when he starts to realize that he could be successful by being an enabler of great creators and this was a major turning point for him and is one of the biggest contributors to his success when he returns to apple for the first time he's starting to see the value in loosening up his control freak a little bit and letting other really smart people do great work and so you see a string of geniuses that just so happened to work under steve jobs steve was the act john las ed cat and later avi and johnny iv tony fide vidal and so on no one finds greatness by doing it themselves the great ones always help enable a team of geniuses around and under them and steve really learns to do that for the first time here with pixar well toy story would be just the first in a string of successes is stretching the next fifteen years the next where he would amazingly figure out a way to turn things around was at his computer company next and things were dark at next in nineteen ninety three they laid off about half of all their employees and stopped producing computers which is a bad thing when you are a computer company they were still making software but like pixar that software was nowhere close to making them profitable next seemed in the mid nineties like an mobile blu was well on its way to failure but remember how i said they had a great operating system well this is where that becomes very very important in the beginning of the personal computer wars windows was viewed as the much lower quality but cheaper alternative to apple but during the nineties when steve jobs is away apple is unable to innovate when it comes to their operating system and the result is that it starts to become less and less clear how much better apple is than windows if at all and as the operating systems get closer and closer fewer and fewer people are willing to pay the extra money at costs to buy an apple computer so market share has been consistently falling for apple until by the mid nineties apple was basically an afterthought they have less than one percent market share almost all the rest of the computers you know ninety nine percent of computers are running windows apple tries to come up with a new operating system but somewhat for a computer company are unable to do so they had become so paralyzed so unable to innovate that they literally can't even produce a new operating system let alone a good one and they're so far behind at this point that in nineteen ninety six they realized they just need to buy a new operating system in order to be able to keep up with microsoft well who just so happens to have a company with an incredible beautiful innovative operating system is the one and only steve jobs so apple approaches steve about buying next from him in order to acquire his operating system and steve may have harbor some ill will towards some of the people back apple who had you know fired him about ten years ago but not so much though so that he was going to turn down the opportunity to pull the rabbit out of the hat and make next a successful venture remember it was basically dead before this at the very least it was totally irrelevant so they work out a deal and steve is a great negotiator and there were not many other potential operating systems to be bought so steve is able to get a good deal out of it and apple buys next for about four hundred million dollars pixar should have been dead and next should have been dead but somehow he turned them both around steve had officially pulled the rabbit out of the hat twice in a row well since apple had acquired next there was an expectation that steve jobs would take some kind of role at apple at first position apple is poorly defined they're mostly thinking it will be an advisory role with no real day to day responsibilities the first title they gave him is adviser to the chairman which was a role that was as meaningless as it sounds the ceo of apple at the time was a guy by the name of gil emilio emilio was not well suited for the job of ceo of apple he wasn't an inspiring leader he was bumbling and frankly when you read about him he comes across as kinda clueless there's a great story that i think illustrates the kind of leader that gill emilio was he meets a journalist gina smith at a party and gina asks how apple is doing and emilio answers quote you know gina apple is like a ship that ship is loaded with treasure but there's a hole in the ship and my job is to get everyone to row in the same direction and smith looks perplexed and says yeah but what about the whole and it really illustrates why he was a failure and in the end why jobs succeeds after him emilio was focused on the people and what they thought of him and he's making sure that they were doing what he wanted or in his analogy that they were all rowing in the same direction he fell into the popularity pit fall trying to be popular is stupid goal but it's also ineffective as a goal people who focus on doing great things attract the most interest in the end people who try to be popular often come across as desperate and pathetic you know the type but people who focus on doing great things attract the most interested in the end and emilio was not interested in doing or or or most interested in doing great things he was more interested in the people rowing in the direction that he said was the right direction and he wasn't plugging the whole of his ship that's something that steve jobs understood the whole matters more than the people rowing in the right direction and that's something that gill emilio did not well steve you know even though he's rejoined apple he's not really trying to become ceo he was kind of ambivalent about whether apple even could be saved so he's not that interested in taking over but his personality gets the best of him when he's in a situation he just can't help but take control so as emilio continues to stumble more and more steve is taking over more and more control at apple eventually it becomes clear that gill emilia can't lead apple and he's let go steve jobs is named interim ceo exactly twelve years after he had been kicked out one of the first things he does as ceo is having an all hands on deck meeting with all the employees in the company and he comes on stage and immediately sets the tone for how he's gonna manage apple he says okay tell me what's wrong with this place some people mu some answers and he says it's the products so what's wrong with the products so people mu more answers he says the products suck there's no sex in them anymore so the first thing steve jobs tries to do is fix the products and one of the main problems was that there was too many of them apple was known for creating the whole widget in the early days they produced the operating system as well as the physical computer the hardware well in the time since these jobs left they had started licensing their operating system to outside manufacturers and the result was a big confusing product lineup that was redundant and rod and many of the computers being sold by outside manufacturers were poorly built and not at all up to apple's standards steve realized they needed to simplify this weighed down so he tears up the licensing agreements from now on apple computers are only going to be produced by apple and he also does a giant product review there were over a dozen computers in production they were all called the macintosh and then a number and not easy to remember numbers that would make sense they stretch from the macintosh fourteen hundred to the macintosh ninety six hundred so he has someone come in and present about each product and he reviews them all one of the things that i love about few jobs at this point is he wouldn't let them use powerpoint slides he said and i quote people who confront a problem by creating a presentation i want them to engage to hash things out at the table rather than show a bunch of slides people who know what they're talking about don't need powerpoint and this is something i've tried to adopt powerpoint slides are almost never the answer when you're the one being presented to and it's because for some reason slides let people create this alternate reality i've been in some product pitch meetings where someone presents slides and you're following the slides and you're nodding in your head and you're going along with this product and you're saying okay yeah yeah this makes sense this this is great and the presentation ends and you'd ask one question and they answer and that they're trying to build absolute garbage this is a terrible product it's interesting that steve jobs hated having slides presented to him but he always used them when he introduced a new product and that's because he was trying to create an alternate reality so slides are great if you're trying to present other people because it helps build this world get them very engaged and go along with it but when they are presenting to you try to get them outside the slides make them work without them if at all possible it lays me the truth really quickly and helps you cut to the heart of a matter and also if you are trying to pitch something and you're not just trying to sell it you're not just trying to than someone but you are actually trying to figure out if this is a good idea or not stay away from slides because again they tend to create the sort of alternate reality world when you just have to say it without any backup you get to the truth much faster and you learn a lot about your ideas well in these slide free product reviews he cuts out seventy percent of the computers that they had been making and of course this made some engineers really mad because he was killing their products and sometimes laying people off or laying them off after a few weeks of this killing off more and more products he's in another product review session and he shouts stop this is crazy and he grabs a marker and he goes up to a whiteboard and draws a square grid with four sections he labels the columns consumer and pro and labels the rows desktop and portable he then said we're gonna make one computer for each quadrant a desktop for consumers and for pro users and a portable computer for consumers and for pro users the room goes silent some people actually gasp every time he presents his new product strategy it creates a stir some people think it's genius others think it's crazy again try to take yourself out of what you already know about apple think of how this would sound there's a reason that you have all these different types of computers they each appeal to a very specific customer type it seems simple to say we're only going to make one desktop computer for normal consumers but then you start thinking about it and it gets a little more complicated what if it's an elderly couple who really just wants to send emails to their grandkids kits they only need something cheap and and inexpensive but what if it's someone who's not a pro user but it's nevertheless very tech savvy maybe they're really into photo editing and making movies or they need a ton of power for big games or something like that from the grandparents to this heavy user of this desktop those are two totally different people with different needs but they're both captured under the market segment of consumers looking for a desktop so you can see why making only one desktop consumer computer would be a big risk and some people would think it's crazy the apple board of directors aren't too sure about this new path and many of the engineers aren't sure about it but the jobs is so that's what they do they press forward and it actually is genius it works the result is you have all the intelligence talent and effort of the entire company focused on these four things and making them insanely great and that's what real focus is you know i've already touched on focus as one of the key traits of steve job success and one of his superpower but i wanna point out one more thing about it many people think that focus me cutting out distractions and bad thing things you shouldn't have in your life and that's a start but that's nowhere close to what real focus is the kind of focus that steve jobs had that lets you achieve unbelievable world changing results steve jobs type results did not come from cutting out the obvious things there was this device the apple had back then it was a tablet called the newton and listen to what steve jobs said about cutting the newton quote my gut was that there was some really good technology it was messed up by mismanagement by shutting it down i freed up some good engineers who could work on new mobile devices and eventually we got it right when we moved on to the iphones and the ipad the iphone and the ipad came you know more than ten years later so in other words he was saying we had some pretty good technology but we put it off for more than a decade because we had to focus on the most important things real focus doesn't come from cutting out wasting time on social media or drinking too much on the weekend or ending an abusive relationship though obviously those are all things you should definitely cut out of your life if you have them start with those things for sure but if you wanna be a world beater you got to achieve the level of focus that comes from cutting out things that are okay things that are pretty good for see jobs that meant cutting out computers and devices that were perfectly good profitable computers things like the newton really focused people cut good things out of their life in order to be able to focus on the best and most important things and for you maybe that means quitting a club or a team eliminating an extra side project that's a really good idea but it's just not as good as an as something else that you're working on and what you really need to focus on at that time i see this all the time with morning routines i see these ideas of things you should do in the morning to boost your productivity work out stretch meditate pray journal keep a gratitude diary eat a certain type of breakfast jump on a tram lean drink tea take a gold bath go for a walk the list goes on and the thing is if you do all of these things that people say are great morning routines then by the time you get started for the day it's ten am and you sent a bunch of effort on a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't materially contribute to the main thing you're trying to accomplish in life so you just gotta pick a couple of those things for your morning routine and focus on that everything i mentioned is i am sure a perfectly good thing to add to your morning routine tried most of them and they are they're perfectly good but true focus means cutting out some of the perfectly good things in your life so you can focus on the great the most important thing the thing that makes you special and that's gonna contribute most to your productivity and your mission in life one more example from steve jobs career that illustrates this there's an exercise he would do with top managers he would take them on a retreat and they would have a brainstorm meeting where steve was standing at the whiteboard and so he would ask what should we be working on that we're not already working on and at first you know people could say anything anything that came out of someone's mouth went on the whiteboard that included crazy wild ridiculous stupid ideas then once all the ideas were there they would cut down the stupid and obvious ones and he'd to say okay we need to get this down to ten ideas ten things that we should be working on and it would take a whole lot of work and effort they would argue and debate over about which ten they should keep from that list and it would take them an hour or two but after a bunch of debate they would finally get it down to just ten things ten solid realistic ambitious important things that they should be working on which for a company the size of apple seemed like a good sized list then he would say okay we've gotta cut it down to three and at that point every idea they were cutting out felt like it was a great idea i think something that they you know why wouldn't we do this but they had to narrow it down to just three they had to cut out all the good ideas steve only wanted to be working on great ideas and so many people and companies stop at the ten once they've got their ten good idea they're all good ideas they go after through those ten things but the real power of focus comes when you make that final cut we'll see has started the process of saving apple but there's a problem he's got everyone focused on moving together on the right things but producing new products takes time a year at least and he doesn't have a year sales are slump the company has a ton of debt it's on the very verge of bankruptcy they need to stop the bleeding now if he's gonna have enough time to release these products that they're working on so he does two things few people know this but apple would not have survived if it weren't for one company that swoop in and absolutely saved them what company was this that swoop in and saved apple well it's probably the last company you would think of it was their rival microsoft there was a long lawsuit between apple and microsoft alleging that microsoft had copied their technology and was imp on apple's patents so steve jobs rings up bill gates in his own words here's what happened quote i called the bill and said i'm going to turn this thing around bill always had a soft spot for apple we got him into the application software business the first microsoft apps were excel and word for the mac so i called him and said i need help microsoft was walking over apple's patents i said if we kept up our lawsuits a few years from now we could win a billion dollar patent suit you know it and i know it but apple's not going to survive that long if we're at war i know that so let's figure out how to settle this right away all i need is a commitment that microsoft will keep developing for the mac and an investment by microsoft in apple so that it has a stake in our success here's how bill gates described it quote it was classic i'd been negotiating this deal with gill emilio and gil wanted six things most of which were not important gill was complicated and i'd been calling him on the phone fax stuff over the haul days and then when steve comes in he looks at the deal and says here are the two things that i want and here's what you clearly want from us and we had that deal done very quickly well in the final deal microsoft invested a hundred and fifty million dollars in apple and promise to keep developing microsoft office applications for apple computers this gave them enough money and investor confidence to stay alive if it weren't for this deal apple would have probably died at this point steve jobs really had to swallow his pride to make this deal with microsoft but in this case swallowing his pride saved his company but he also had to restore confidence in the company among employees and consumers they were losing employees to other companies and losing customers who had given up on apple we're now deciding to buy a pc instead so steve jobs said that they had to quote prove the apple is still alive and that it still stands for something special he called up lee k from his old favorite ad agency in china day and and tells him he needs his help they're gonna create an ad campaign to restore customer confidence and is still a sense of pride and confidence in their own employees steve j has a great quote about what they were trying to do and how they did it where they got the inspiration he said quote and we at apple had forgotten who we were one way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are that was the genesis of this campaign the end of the quote so this is gonna be an ad that wasn't for sales per s of macintosh computers but was to rally the troops they didn't want an add that celebrated apple computers and what the computers could do but apple computers as an idea and what it stood for so they try it day come up with an idea for an advertising campaign called think different and it turns out to be really great steve when he first saw them present the idea for the advertisements he said quote every once in a while i find myself in the presence of purity purity of spirit and love and i always cry that always just reaches in and grabs me that was one of those moments there was a purity about that i will never forget i cried in my office as he was showing me the idea and i still cry when i think about it all these advertisements are is a set of posters with pictures of people people like einstein gandhi john lennon picasso bob dylan amelia air heart martin luther their king jr these risk takers innovators rebels mis fits most of them were actually heroes out steve jobs and it's a photographic portrait to them and in the it has the apple logo and the words think different and that's it that's literally it they also created a television ad it's got footage of these people and richard dreyfus na a monologue or that lee k and his team worked with steve jobs to write here's the monologue i'll do my best richard dreyfus impression here's to the crazy ones the mis fits the rebels the trouble makers the round peg in square holes the ones who see things differently they're not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo you can quote them disagree with them glorify or vi verify them but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things they push the human race forward and while some may see them as the crazy ones we see genius because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do i know i already told you to go look up the nineteen eighty four ad in the last episode but you should really look this one up as well it's quite moving it's another stroke of genius apple is be but with one advertising campaign they change the conversation and shape public perception no longer is apple failing they're holding out they're the rebel alliance they stand for something the conversation is no longer about which operating system is best windows or macintosh but it's about who you are as a person with one advertisement steve jobs makes it unthinkable that any apple fan would switch from a mac to a pc because they're are the ones who think different it'd be like debating between writing in the millennium falcon or star destroyer it's not about the ship as larry ellis would point out steve jobs is the first person to create a lifestyle brand in the tech industry well with these moves steve has bought himself enough time to make these four products he has a meeting with his top managers and staff and he tells them quote what we're trying to do is not high we're trying to get back to the basics of great products great marketing and great distribution apple has drifted away from doing the basics really well and the basics are of course enormously important that makes me think of john wooden let legendary basketball coach who every season on the first day of practice would teach his basketball players do think the first thing first day of basketball practice what do you think that you would teach basketball players what would you have them do shoot dr what's the fundamentals no he would teach them how to tie their shoes the right way he really believed that great basketball started from the bottom up so he started with the very very basic fundamentals and worked up from there or think of picasso people don't realize how good picasso was at just drawing and painting but he could draw a figure with the best of them he didn't invent cub biz right away first he mastered the basic art of drawing and painting you can't skip to the high strategy you have to get the basics right first in fact really i mean most high strategy is in fact figuring out how to execute on the basics better than your opponent look at fast food a lot of fast food chains are struggling and what are they trying in the face of these struggles you know they're trying tacos made out of bacon and new health food options and faster free wifi and all this supposedly strategic stuff meanwhile you know what companies are growing companies like in and out and five guys who make good hamburgers at a fair price and have clean restaurants and that's what high strategy often amounts to and that's what apple is getting back to in this time period great computers great marketing great distribution period well that might be simple to say but it's not easy to do it can be really difficult to execute on the basics and the pressure is enormous steve has bought himself enough time to produce this new line of products but if they flop apple is still toast so during this time period steve is killing himself he's working the hardest he has ever worked in his entire career to make sure that all this is going to work steve's working all day and when he said he got home every night quote all i could do was watch a half hour of tv and veg and then fall asleep by the way i like knowing that even steve jobs in his busiest time of life made time for a half hour of tv per night before he fell asleep i might have like a p streak in me or something but when i feel like i'm really busy and i have a lot to get done i feel bad taking any time to veg out and just you know surf twitter or watch tv or whatever if finding out that steve jobs edged out for a half hour even at his busiest time help me be more realistic you have to make that kind time for yourself to unwind neuro relax so don't beat yourself up over it if you do take an hour hour and a half to relax every night and do something that is a total waste of time well the first of these computers to come out is the desktop for consumers and that's gonna be the flagship it's gonna be the most important computer and they decide to call it the imac for the design of the imac originally steve wanted to work with an outside design firm but he's walking through the in house design lab and he sees this clear plastic clams shell design that an apple designer by the name of johnny iv had designed and he's immediately drawn to it so he gets the idea that they're going to design an all in one computer and it's gonna have a blue see through shell he works with johnny iv to come up with the design first johnny was sort of the steve jobs whisper he had an amazing way of calming his temper and working with him he becomes one of the top guys of apple and he still is if you ever seen an apple introduction video he's the british guy saying something about how the latest laptop is made with the the most perfect top grade aluminum and by the way steve jobs also like to make fun of johnny i've for the way that he said aluminum or aluminum and so steve jobs takes this plastic see through design to his engineers he said quote when we took it to the engineers they came up with thirty eight reasons they couldn't do it and i said no no we're doing this the design was fundamental to him it was non negotiable i love how steve described why design was so important to him he said quote in most people's vocabularies design means v 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 the design meant everything to him the plastic shell costs sixty dollars three times what a normal case would cost and at any other computer company that probably would sunk the idea how do you justify tripling the cost on something that will provide no tangible benefit for the customer especially when you have no market research to prove that it will increase sales but to steve it defined the way a customer would interact with the computer the blue see through case would make the computer exciting but friendly futuristic but also approachable it would draw people to it and make them more eager to use it so that's why he makes his engineers work with the design that they have well they develop the computer this new imac and steve holds an event to introduce the computer and when he's on stage the whole world's eyes are on they're waiting to see if apple's gonna make it comeback back and become important in the computer world again or this is going to be their last death rattle when he's finally ready to reveal the imac he shows a slide of some old pcs they all look exactly the same there are these beige boxes and he says this is what computers look like today and i'd like to take the privilege of showing you what they're going to look like from today on and he pulls off the cloth to reveal the imac the spectacle is breathtaking no one had ever seen anything like it i remember when these came out they were totally revolutionary everyone wanted to see one it really was a statement and it made a computer cool in a way that had never been done before i mean what kind of person would show off their computer just to look at but i remember my across the street neighbors were the first ones in our neighborhood to have the imac and i went over there to check it out and there were like ten other kids from the neighborhood it was like a piece of art it was so cool looking i loved it her and it comes out and i wasn't the only one that felt that way it comes out in may of nineteen ninety eight and it sells two hundred and seventy eight thousand machines in its first six weeks and sells eight hundred thousand by the end of the year making it the fastest selling computer in apple history with the success of the imac apple no longer had to worry about their survival they were gonna make it after the steve's next big breakthrough is the ipod music was undergoing a huge transformation i remember this time period it's hard to get all nostalgic on you guys but it was a great time for music m mp threes were just starting to become a thing and they were the main way that people listened to music or at least the way that teenagers listen to music but there was no real official infrastructure around digital music to take advantage of this this is the time of naps so everyone at least everyone my age myself included we were all just illegally downloading all the music we wanted from naps and the way you discovered stuff was from mixtape cds a friend would create a cd with all the music they loved and hand it off to you and you would listen to it and take some of those songs and just you know is word mouse stuff it was just an incredible way i thought to discover music but it was also totally disorganized it was really the wild wild west i mean i i i remember i had songs that were my favorite songs and i didn't even know who they were actually by or what the song was supposed to be called i just had made up a title for it in my music library so m mb threes are becoming a thing but they're totally disorganized and the way that people are sharing them is also disorganized there were m p three players around but there weren't any good ones and so not very many people use them and around this time steven and his team start to think about creating an mp three player so they go through all the existing ones and decide that they all suck and i was there so i tell you they were right they did all suck they were extremely c clunky and complicated to use and they just weren't worth it for most people so most people were still using cd players so steven and the apple guys aside okay we're gonna make our own and steve from the beginning of the process of creating this m p three player was obsessed and i mean obsessed with making it simple and easy to use steve applied a strict test if he wanted a song or a function he should be able to get there in three clicks or less and setting aside what you know about the solution that they came up with if you just think about it from the standpoint of those engineers that's impossible remember they don't have effective touch touchscreen technology yet so they're gonna have to use buttons and let's just say that you want to get to the fifth track on an album then once you get to the album you're going to have to press the down button four times those are just the facts of life three clicks are less seems totally impossible but steve is insist that there has to be away and because they have no other choice they achieve a breakthrough the scroll wheel you just spin it around to go up or down it doesn't count as a click and it's a way more efficient and intuitive then up down or left right buttons it's a totally innovative ingenious solution and it's the effect of these good old reality distortion field coming back once again but even with a scroll wheel it's hard to do very many things on an ipod on an m mp three player so they had to outsource most of the functions to a desktop computer so for example you couldn't create a playlist on the original ipod you had to do it on your computer and then transfer it over to me the ipod is interesting to think about because it was more expensive and less functional and often had less storage than most of the competing m p three players out there and yet it was by far the most successful it was a huge phenomenon and that all comes down to user experience who's much easier to use and more intuitive than the competition and to me that just goes to show really how powerful great design is and understanding your customer and what matters most to them one of the main competitors to eventually come out was a microsoft product called the zoom but the zoom failed pretty hard here's what steve jobs said about why the zoom failed but the ipod succeeded quote the older i get the more i see how much motivations matter the zoom was crappy because the people at microsoft don't really love music or art the way we do we won because we personally love music we made the ipod for ourselves and when you're doing something for yourself your best friend or family you're not going to cheese out if you don't love something you're not going to go the extra mile work the extra weekend challenge the status quo as much end quote it shows the power proper motivation this is one of the big themes throughout these life always was harp on the idea that you shouldn't start a company or make something create a new product in order to make money you should do it because you care and because you love it and i think the ipod really demonstrates how that can be effective so the ipod is released in late two thousand one and it was of course massively successful in as many iterations apple would go on to sell over four hundred million ipod and counting they're still producing them now truly these runner of producing great products is hard to wrap your mind around there are so many of them that we don't have time to go into them all especially some of the more minor ones but i'll give them a quick shout out before we move on to talk about his next truly transformative world changing product the iphone but between two thousand one when the ipod was released and two thousand seven one iphone was released apple produced the power book the ib book the macbook and the macbook pro all very successful laptops they produced the mac mini the power mac g five and new versions of the imac all very successful desktop computers they produced the ipod shuffle the ipod nano which is personally my favorite apple device ever and the ipod mini and they created the itunes music store and every single one of these things was successful some of them wildly so he also sold pixar to disney in two thousand six for seven point four billion dollars and before he did they had a similar string of unbelievable successes before he sold them here the movies pixar maiden in in order toy story a bugs life toy story two monsters inc finding ne and the incredibles they were all extremely well reviewed personally i love every single one of those movies i think they're gray and adjusted for inflation the least profitable of those movies which is bugs life made three hundred million dollars so these are really good years for steve jobs but as i said the next truly world changing product the steve jobs would create is one that in two thousand seventeen were familiar with the iphone why did the iphone come about well as art levin one of the board members of apple put it quote he was always ob about what could mess us up and steve realized that the thing that could mess up the ipod was phones phones cell phones were becoming more and more ubiquitous and they're gaining more and more functionality so he decides to beat phone makers to the punch and develop a phone for himself they start to design a phone and they're trying two major approaches at the same time one was a touch screen and the other was a quick wheel now a quick wheel is obviously definitely clumsy to use and not as good of the user experience but the problem with the touch touchscreen was no one was sure if they could actually pull it off if they could get the engineering right they could create a touchscreen device right but they weren't sure if they were gonna be able to make it small enough to fit in a phone so they're creating both trying both approaches and there are two teams and steve is basically pitting them against each other they each make a presentation to him and the executive team once a week finally after a few months of pitting the doable scroll wheel against the ambitious touchscreen and weighing the merits of each approach steve points to the touch screen one and says quote we all know this is the one we want to do so let's make it work and there we have it reality distortion field back again and so that is the one they get to work on making the touch touchscreen iphone and of course it works they are able to figure out the engineering and fit it all into a phone speaking of reality distortion in order to produce the iphone they need a type of glass for the front called gorilla glass only one company could produce it a company called corn and corn says look this is just a niche product for us we can't produce it on a massive scale we can't manufacture it anywhere close to the scale that you are asking for and what steve jobs response to this he looks their ceo in the eye and says don't be afraid and the ceo explains to steve no no it's not just fear we just really can't do this and steve says quote yes you can do it get your mind around it you can do it and guess what they did it they had to put all their best minds and resources towards solving how they would produce this glass on the scale that they were asking for but they found a way to scrape by and on the day that the iphone came out steve jobs sent the ceo of corn and email it was just one sentence we couldn't have done it without you and of course to say that the iphone was successful would be a massive understatement by many measurements it was the most successful product of all time let that sink in the most successful product of all time of any type there have been more than a billion sold making it the most sold product of all time and it's not close second place is harry potter books at four hundred fifty million copies sold it's less than half it's the most profitable device of all time with apple joy unheard of margins has incredible approval ratings among users and is one of those rare products joined by the likes of the model t that truly revolutionized the world by changing the way that people live now the iphone is another example of design taking priority over engineering but there was one instance in which this almost went disastrous wrong when apple released the iphone four which by the way i still think is the most beautiful and best designed iphone there was a problem with the antenna they had built it into the steel and casing of the phone itself in order for this to work there had to be a tiny gap in the rim and if a person accidentally covered the gap the phone could accidentally drop calls it occurred with maybe one in a hundred calls but the media got a hold of this information and turned it into a major new story and this story gets bigger and bigger so steve had to respond at the time it seemed like this was going to become a major issue that could possibly sync the iphone four steve assembles a team of marketers p people and trusted advisors and has a war room for an afternoon to try and figure out what to do regis mckenna suggested he just lay out the data explain what was going on and be confident he said to not go into the press conference with his tail between his legs others thought steve should be more ap and humble to and mckenna response as hilarious he basically says yeah i'm not sure making steve seem humble is really an option on the table so in the end steve ops for mckenna straightforward approach he had an event to address the issue at the event he got on stage and made a presentation he said quote this has blown so out of proportion that it's incredible he also said quote we're not perfect phones are not perfect we all know that but we wanna make our users happy so he pointed out that every cell phone drops calls from time to time and the iphone is actually better than other phones in that department but yes just one the iphone four drops a tiny bit more calls than his normal for an iphone he said that if anyone was unhappy they could return it no questions asked or get a free bumper case from apple which would resolve the issue he was not ap he was straightforward and basically framed it as having the same problems as everyone else who manufactures cell phones and this works the iphone four had one of the lowest return rates of any iphone the wait time for the iphone four jumped from two weeks to three weeks after this event the iphone four became the fastest selling product ever people started talking about how much other phones dropped calls and comparing the models instead of talking about you know how often the iphone four dropped calls it was a master class and effective p some observers could barely believe it michael wolf of news dot com wrote quote this is level of modern marketing corporate spin and crisis management about which you can only ask with simplified inc and awe how do they get away with it or more accurately how does he get away with it scott adams the cartoon behind dill wrote quote apple's response to the iphone four problem didn't follow the public relations playbook because jobs decided to rewrite the playbook if you wanna know what genius looks like study jobs words if jobs had not changed the context from the iphone four to all smartphones in general i could make you a hilarious comic strip about a product so poorly made that it won't work if it comes in contact with a human hand but as soon as the context has changed to all smartphones have problems the humor opportunity is gone nothing kills humor like a general and boring truth this incident is i think an underrated display genius it demonstrates what a master ability he had to persuade people and what an effective communicator he was well after the iphone the next major product apple created was the ipad in two thousand ten after the unparalleled success of the iphone the success of the ipad looks modest in comparison and truth be told for most people if they release the ipad it would be the crown achievement of their career it was a very successful product in its own right there have been more than three hundred fifty million sold and while it hasn't revolutionized the way we live in the same way that the iphone and the creation of touchscreen smartphones have it has suddenly shifted a number of industries from retail to education the release of the ipad is the last major product release of steve jobs life it makes a big splash immediately sells well and in the subsequent years continues to develop and become even more important in the public consciousness it's almost effortless and to me it's a huge contrast to his early career especially the effortless of it it's like changing the world wasn't even hard for him anymore since the apple two all the products he introduced before his return to apple were impractical too expensive and ultimately failures so what changed that he was able to introduce hit after hit after hit i mean he was basically on fire for fifteen years straight we already went through his long string of successes and now in addition to that he got four versions of the iphone the way he changed retail with apple stores and the complete revolution of apps with the creation of the app store and the ipad it's unbelievable so again what changed that enabled this let's take a step back and look at the things that changed and enabled this transformation in see jobs life and in his career one thing we haven't really talked about that i think was really important for him was his family steve got married in nineteen ninety one and i think that's something that really calmed him down and mellow him out i won't go to in depth about his wife will other than to say that she's a woman who was smart and strong enough to go toe to toe with steve jobs but at the same time secure and laid back enough to not always have to i think she was really a perfect match for him i'd like to read what steve wrote to her on their twentieth wedding anniversary he said quote we didn't know much about each other twenty years ago we were guided by our intuition you swept me off my feet it was snowing when we got married at ao years passed kids came good times hard times but never bad times our love and respect has endured and grown we've been through so much together and here we are right back where we started twenty years ago older wiser with wrinkles on our faces and hearts we now know many of life's joys suffering secrets and wonders and we're still here together my feet have never returned to the ground steven and lore created a beautiful life together it's a little surprising but they had a sweet happy normal suburban life it's an off repeated ac axiom that creative geniuses often have boring personal lives and that seems to be the case here steven lore had three kids and they tried to give their children as normal life as they could they lived in a really nice palo alto neighborhood but it was actually relatively normal they lived on a street not community they had no personal staff or bodyguard no helicopters or stretch limo there's a story i love as i've mentioned steve was good friends with larry ellis who was another very famous silicon valley founder and billionaire and larry has a very extravagant lifestyle in one day steve jobs son reid was talking and you referred to larry as our rich friend his dad was worth billions and billions of dollars but he didn't really realize it because their life was so normal by comparison to him larry ellis was their rich friend i think creative geniuses often have a boring home life for a reason in steve jobs life i think the stability and comfort of his family life allowed him to be creative and adventurous in his professional life obviously situations will vary but for this reason i generally advocate for marriage and a simple and stable family life seeing as i'm not married i'll avoid giving any advice here but i will just say that i find his relationship with lorraine very touching and it seems to me that in some way his relationship was instrumental to his success it's interesting to me to think about him and napoleon bonaparte heart and both of them achieved enormous success while they had marital happiness and stability and both of them fa when they lacked marital happiness and stability i'll let you draw your own conclusions from another thing that helped mellow out steve was his battle with cancer i know that might sound weird to say but jobs for diagnosed with cancer in late two thousand three he beat it back and enjoyed full health for a few years but the cancer returned and eventually killed him but he was changed after his first cancer scare andy hertz one of those early engineers who worked with steve for a long time said about the first battle with cancer quote before if you asked steve for a favor he might do the exact opposite that was the per in his nature now he actually tries to be helpful i think it probably made him more willing to listen to others and less heads strong i also think it focused his mind because he realized he had so little time left another thing that changed was his willingness to let people do great work without him i think pixar taught him something valuable which was that he could achieve success by re some control and enabling others rather than micro managing and contributing to that was also the role that steve had to apple steve was someone who couldn't help but micro manage sometimes but being the ceo removed him a little and having some sort of distance between day to day operations and himself was really helpful i think it's weird to say but he may have been better qualified to be the ceo of apple than he was to be the manager of the macintosh team one other thing is that tea jobs was just incredibly lucky with his team he had in later years they were perfectly suited to compliment his strengths and make up for his weaknesses i think walter isaac summed it up pretty well he said quote they all knew they were expected to be to jobs while also pushing back on his ideas and being willing to argue a tricky balance to maintain but each did it well i realized very early that if you didn't voice your opinion he would mow you down said tim cook he takes contrary positions to create more discussion because it may lead to a better result so if you don't feel comfortable disagreeing then you'll never survive and his team did feel comfortable they were able to push back just the right amount i think the early apple team and next employees lacked that but he found it or you know maybe stumbled upon it in the team that he surrounded himself with in his later years one more thing i wanna say about how steve grew and changed he did change he grew less pet and brat more willing to compromise and listen he grew more pragmatic less focused on his own ego and even more focused on creating insanely great products but he did relapse and quite often he could still sometimes be completely brat and pet some people have taken that to mean that he didn't actually change they point to some incident of him acting like a jerk from two thousand ten and say we'll see he was still acting like this late in life so he didn't really change and i think this is unfortunate because i think we often do the same thing to ourselves we try to change and then the second we mess up in any way we say well i guess that change wasn't real after all i didn't change or at least i know i've done that to myself on occasion the other week i heard the skydiving talking he was a an alcoholic and he used the phrase that i hadn't heard before he said relapse is a part of recovery he he made the point that just because you relapse that doesn't mean you're not recovering it's just a part of the process it's a small setback and i think that applies beyond addiction it's helped me with forming or trying to form new positive habits steve could relapse into his old ways if you try to change and create positive habits you'll do the same you'll relapse sometimes but it doesn't mean your change is ineffective or it's sincere or it doesn't count all it means is it's taking time one of the last things steve jobs said to his official biographer was quote i did learn some things along the way i did learn some things i really did the other thing i wanna mention really quickly is his commencement speech steve didn't really do public speeches for universities or conferences or anything like that but he did decide to do one commencement speech he gave it at stanford in two thousand five i think it was his way of giving back to the silicon valley community that had been so instrumental in his rise in success it's a really master speech i almost wanna just play it in full but that would be lazy i will say i know i keep referring you to youtube but if you have the time to go search it out on youtube it's worth your time i would go watch it and listen to it but steve started out by saying quote today i wanna tell you three stories for my life that's it no big deal just three stories at the first of his stories was going to college at reed he talked about how he dropped in on classes that he found interesting so he decided to drop in on a calligraphy class where he gained a great appreciation for different types of fonts and writing styles he said it was quote beautiful historical artistic subtle in a way that science can't capture and i found it fascinating it had no practical application for him in his career but years late when he designing the first macintosh it came back to him and gave him the inspiration to include options for different fonts which is something no other computer did at the time he concluded the story by saying quote you can't connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking backward so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your life you have to trust in something your gut destiny life karma whatever this approach has never let me down and has made all the difference in life and i think this is very true steve didn't look far into the future and have some grand master plan for his life he trusted his intuition and was opportunistic this lack of long term overarching plan gave him the freedom to seize opportunity when he saw it and when it was in front of him he didn't worry about connecting the dots he trusted the dots would connect in retrospect and they did the second story was about getting fired from apple he explained how things worked out for him in the end with his eventual triumphant return but he said quote i'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if i hadn't been fired from apple it was awful tasting medicine but i guess the patient needed it sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick don't lose faith i'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that i loved what i did you've got to find what you love and that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers you your work is going to fill a large part of your life and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work and the only way to do great work is to love what you do if you haven't found it yet keep looking don't settle as with all matters of the heart you'll know it when you find it and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on so keep looking until you find it don't settle the third story was about being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer he explained that it changed his outlook on life and refocus him on the most important things he finished by saying quote your time is limited so don't waste it living someone else's life don't be trapped by dogma which is living with the results of other people's thinking don't let the noise of others opinions drown out your own inner voice and most important have the courage to follow your heart and intuition they somehow already know what you truly want to become everything else is secondary that's a sentiment i strongly endorse and won't really try and echo because i'm not sure i can stay it anymore eloquently i'll also read the final two paragraphs of his speech quote when i was young there was an amazing publication called the whole earth catalog which was one of the bibles of my generation it was created by a fellow named stuart brand not far from here in men park and he brought it to life with his poetic touch this was in the late nineteen sixties before personal computers and desktop publishing so it was all made with type writers scissors and polaroid cameras it was sort of like google and paper back form thirty five years before google came along it was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions stuart and his team put out several issues of the whole earth catalog and then when it had run its course they put out a final issue it was the mid nineteen seventies and i was your age on the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road the kind you might find yourself hitch hiking on if you were so adventurous beneath it were the words stay hungry stay foolish it was their farewell message as they signed off stay hungry stay foolish and i have always wished that for myself and now as you graduate to begin a anew i wish that for you stay hungry stay foolish as i said steve ended up dying from cancer it was pancreatic cancer he took its toll on him for the last few years of his life but it also gave him enough time to transition leadership of apple to other executives and say goodbye to friends and family steve was obsessed with creating great things transforming the world creating a great company leaving a legacy so i find it very interesting what he was living for in the end he said he wanted to make it to his son reads high school graduation and happily he did live long enough to see it to wrap up i hope i've given you a good enough feeling for who steve jobs was and what made him great that you don't need a summary of takeaways but but there is one more thing i wanna tell you one final story from his life be final story from his life in his final moments as he lay dying he was surrounded by his family he looked at his sister and he looked at each of his children then he looked at his wife then his eyes got wide and he looked beyond them and said oh wow oh wow oh wow and those were his last words thank you for listening find more of my podcast podcasts and writing by going to h t t ot t w dot com that's the acronym for how to take over the world find me on twitter at h t ot t w thank you very much