ARTIST
He was an artist and master in product.
He had a strong urge to express his idea in product. This is pretty much a trait of artist. Because of this, he tended to ignore the customers’ voice. He believed that “the customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them”.
Even after he started Apple and involved in business, the goal was always product, it was never to beat the competition , or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.
He had a great sense of Aesthetics. In all of Jobs’s products, technology would be married to great design, elegance, human touches, and even romance. The most legendary design feature is simplicity and minimalism.
Another feature is the use of material. Material is important to product, it gives people special touch and visual feelings, like anodized aluminum, gorilla glass used in Apple products.
He liked design of Bauhaus, Raymond Loewy, Herbert Bayer style, which he thought was great at that time.
He also indulged his sense of aesthetics in building designs, like the design of Apple Store.
He also loved music, Bob Dylan and the Beatles are his all time favorite musicians.
CREATIVITY
Jobs believed that creativity and great ideas came from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. “You run into someone, you ask what they are doing, you way ‘Wow’, and soon you are cooking up all sorts of ideas”.
He didn’t invent many things outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas, art, and technology in ways that invented the future.
He designed Mac after the power of graphical interfaces in a way that Xerox was unable to do.
He created the iPod after grasping the joy of having a thousand songs in pocket in a way that Sony never could accomplish. However, he was the person invented iTune and changed the music industry.
He didn’t create any movies, but he integrated technology with movie industry, supported and helped those artists in Pixar (He was the largest stakeholder and also the CEO in Pixar, later he sold Pixar to Disney and became the largest shareholder in Disney at that time). As a result, Pixar made many blockbusters, opened up the miracle of digital imagination.
He didn’t invent the tablet, but he hated tablets with stylus and knew what a real tablets would look like.
He didn’t invent smartphones, but he knew what a great smartphone would look like: touch screen centered, easy to use, etc.
By the way, he hated the idea of App Store because he don’t want third party to screw up his products, but eventually he was convinced by the Apple board.
CONTROL
“If you have an extreme passion for producing great products, it pushes you to be integrated, to connect your hardware and your software and content management. You can take full advantage of the specific OS and hardware feature. It makes the product easy to stand out and make a difference from others.
If you want to allow your products to be open, you can mass scale the production and easily gain large market share, but you have to give up some of your vision.”
You also loose focus and get distractions because the need to consider different hardwares, vendors, compatibility, portability. Besides, you loose control on some parts of the products.
However the fact that Apple controls everything in its product annoys a lot of people. They can’t customize the theme, user interface, they can’t watch porn content, they can’t even change a battery on their own.
BINARY and PERFECTIONISM
His view toward the world was binary: A person was either hero or shithead, something was either “the best thing ever”, or shitty, brain-dead, inedible. He would declare a design “completely suck” until he suddenly pronounced it “absolutely perfect”.
FOCUS, INTENSITY and MIND FILTER
He was able to dive into great depth of things he was interested, and he willfully filter out anything else as distraction.
COMPULSION and REALITY DISTORTION FIELD
Jobs distorted reality not only to himself, but also others, this was so powerful that people could get something done which he/she originally thought impossible.
OTHER
“Just because he feel it this way today doesn’t mean he feel it tomorrow. If you tell him a new idea, he’ll tell you that the thinks it’s stupid. But then if he actually likes it, exactly one week later, he’ll come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it.”
Jobs was masterful at cajoling, stroking, persuading, flattering, and intimidating people.
He was good at making great presentations.
He knew exactly what your weak point is. It’s a common trait in people who are charismatic and know how to manipulate people.
He was impatient because he can’t restrain his will and desire of expressing his feeling.
He was mean to people in a lot of times.
“I came of age at a magical time,” he reflected later. “Our consciousness was raised by Zen, and also by LSD.”
He was a vegetarian, when he was young, he learned that he could induce euphoria and ecstasy by fasting.
About college, Jobs said: “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay.”
PS: 571 pages, 1455 new words found in the book. It took me more than 2 months to finish reading it, starting in the end of December 2011, ended on March 9th, 2012. Painful but great learning experience, good practice for english learning.
(Notes after reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson)
