# Steve Jobs  ## Metadata - Author: [[Walter Isaacson]] - Full Title: Steve Jobs - Category: #books - Summary: Steve Jobs was inspired by a magazine that encouraged readers to "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." As he worked on new projects, he often pushed for radical changes and had a unique ability to inspire others, despite sometimes being difficult to work with. Jobs aimed to create a seamless experience with Apple products, but faced challenges in making them compatible with Windows, which conflicted with his vision. ## Highlights - The creativity that can occur when a feel for both the humanities and the sciences combine in one strong personality was the topic that most interested me in my biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to creating innovative economies in the twenty-first century. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j68htez5gfgqx3sjn85t5fxz)) - “I love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn’t cost much,” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j68hvkc0w0jfyrbbcmvrpvxk)) - Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j68j87cc8wk3w2g5rtwrym85)) - Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat,” he said. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.” So he had the Pixar building designed to promote encounters and unplanned collaborations. “If a building doesn’t encourage that, you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity,” he said. “So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j68jbcem1w33gnnja7108jdh)) - 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 the Mac after appreciating the power of graphical interfaces in a way that Xerox was unable to do, and he created the iPod after grasping the joy of having a thousand songs in your pocket in a way that Sony, which had all the assets and heritage, never could accomplish. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j68je4awchhk42tmyvma8j2v)) - Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power. Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01j68jghs5c56wqe3hkekb9aed))