Steve Jobs
An AI built from 20 public sources about Steve Jobs's work. It is not Steve Jobs and is not endorsed by them.
Shape a product, a pitch or a plan the way Steve Jobs did: cut to a few things, make them simple and beautiful, and sell the values before the specs.
Big ideas
- Focus means saying no: Jobs thought focus was a choice about where to put your love and effort, and that choosing well meant turning down a lot .
- Beauty costs no more than ugliness: At a design conference in Aspen in 1983, Jobs said most computers looked like junk, and that making them beautiful would cost no more money .
- Simplicity is the goal: Jobs kept pushing Apple toward simpler products .
- Technology married to the liberal arts: Jobs said he wanted to work where the humanities meet the sciences, an idea he took from Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid .
- Marketing is about values: In a 1997 speech to Apple staff, Jobs said marketing should tell people what you stand for, not list speeds and specs .
- Quality starts with people: Jobs called recruiting the most important thing you do, and told business students in 2003 to hire people better than they are .
Hire Steve Jobs for
- A business that has too much going on: Cut the list down to the few things that are great.
- A product or design: Push for simple, beautiful and finished.
- Marketing and your message: Say what you stand for, not what the spec sheet says.
- Hiring: Find people better than you and let them choose the route.
- A launch or a pitch: Build the story and the reveal.
- A bad idea you love: Decide whether to kill it, even if it has fans.
- Taste and craft: Judge work that isn't in tech at all.
- Your own path: Decide whether you're doing work you love.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words, Steve Jobs Archive, ed. Leslie Berlin (2023)
- Steve Jobs Stanford commencement speech transcript, 2005, Steve Jobs (transcript by Rev)
- On the origin of Make Something Wonderful, Steve Jobs Archive
- Steve Jobs, Wikipedia
- Steve Jobs Resigns as CEO of Apple (press release, 24 August 2011), Apple
- Think different, Wikipedia
- Speech to Apple employees, 23 September 1997 (in Make Something Wonderful, Part III), Steve Jobs
- Email exchange with Avie Tevanian, August 1997 (in Make Something Wonderful, Part III), Steve Jobs and Avie Tevanian
- Email to Apple employees: Newton protest today, 6 March 1998 (in Make Something Wonderful, Part III), Steve Jobs
- Speech at Macworld, July 1998 (in Make Something Wonderful, Part III), Steve Jobs
- Speech at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, 29 May 2003 (in Make Something Wonderful, Part III), Steve Jobs
- Speech to Apple employees, January 2007 (in Make Something Wonderful, Part III), Steve Jobs
- Speech at Macworld, 9 January 2007 (in Make Something Wonderful, Part III), Steve Jobs
- Email exchange with Andy Grove and an Intel engineer, 1995 (in Make Something Wonderful, Part II), Steve Jobs and Andy Grove
- Interview for In the Company of Giants, 1990s (in Make Something Wonderful, Part II), Steve Jobs
- Interview at the All Things Digital D5 conference, with Bill Gates, May 2007 (in Make Something Wonderful, Part III), Steve Jobs
- Apple Launches the iTunes Music Store (press release, 28 April 2003), Apple
- Pixar: The Early Days (introduction to a 1996 interview), Steve Jobs Archive
- Stay hungry, stay foolish (exhibit on the 2005 commencement address), Steve Jobs Archive
- Steve on Pixar's early days, and on becoming majority shareholder in Pixar (in Make Something Wonderful, Part II), Steve Jobs