Author: Robin

From a recent interview with Tim Cook (Apple’s CEO):

Tim Cook: “Steve [Jobs] felt that most people live in a small box. They think they can’t influence or change things a lot. And more than anybody I’ve ever met, Steve never accepted that. He got each of us to reject that philosophy. Through his actions, way more than any preaching, he embedded this nonacceptance of the status quo into the company. [And] his selection of people helped propel the culture.”

“He’s not given credit as a teacher. But he’s the best teacher I ever had by far. There was nothing traditional about him as a teacher. But he was the best. He was the absolute best.”

Interviewer: Do you fear that your strategy of vertical integration is becoming too complex, too unmanageable, too big a job?

Tim Cook: “No, because we don’t live in the box. We are outside of that. What I see is that we have to continually have the discipline to define the problem so that it can be done. If you try to engineer to the complexity, then it does become the impossible dream. But if you step back and think about the problem differently, think about what you’re really trying to do, then I don’t think it becomes an impossible task at all.”

–

Define the problem so that it can be done. See past the complexity. Think differently.

I think that’s a pretty good definition of leadership.

–

“Invention fights specialisation at every turn. Human nature and human progress are polymathic at root. And life itself is various — you need many skills to be able to live it.”

-Robert Twigger, Master of Many Trades

 

“The systems that best exemplify direct manipulation all give the qualitative feeling that one is directly engaged with control of the objects — not with the programs, not with the computer, but with the semantic objects of our goals and intentions.”

-Hutchins, Hollan, and Norman, “Direct Manipulation Interfaces” (1985)

Apple and others have demonstrated that one of the best ways to be successful over the long term is to focus on the customer: to prioritize customer needs over all else. (I’ve also called such efforts a focus on quality.) But achieving that requires, by definition, focusing less on other things, including the success of the business itself. For example, you might decide to simplify an existing feature instead of adding a new feature that will attract new customers and new revenue.

That is the paradox: If you really care about succeeding in business, the best way to actually get there is to stop caring so much about succeeding in business (so you can focus instead on the customer needs). The more you want it, the harder it is to achieve it! It becomes a sort of mind trick of fooling yourself into wanting something else, in order to actually get the thing you really wanted.

Prioritizing customer needs, of course, is not sufficient to succeed in business — many other pieces must also fall into place. But I think this basic paradox helps to explain why it has been so rare for other technology companies to imitate Apple’s long-term success.

“Every great creative performance […] has been in some measure a bringing of order out of chaos. It brings about a new relatedness, connects things that did not previously seem connected, sketches a more embracing framework, moves toward larger and more inclusive understandings.”

-John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society

“It may be that the creative individual could not tolerate such a wild profusion of ideas and experiences if he did not have profound confidence in his capacity to bring some new kind of order out of this chaos.”

-John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society

“To be fully free to create, we must first find the courage and willingness to let go:

• Let go of the strategies that have worked for us in the past…
• Let go of our biases, the foundation of our illusions…
• Let go of our grievances, the root source of our victimhood…
• Let go of our so-often-denied fear of being found unlovable.

You will find that it is not a one-shot deal, this letting go. You must do it again and again and again. It’s kind of like breathing. You can’t breathe just once. Try it: Breathe just once. You’ll pass out.

If you stop letting go, your creative spirit will pass out.

Now when I say let go, I do not mean reject. Because when you let go of something, it will still be there for you when you need it. But because you have stopped clinging, you will have freed yourself up to tap into other possibilities — possibilities that can help you deal with this world of accelerating change.”

-Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball

“Being infinite, the whole of reality is too much for the conscious human mind to grasp. The best any one of us can do is to take the biggest slice of Infinite Reality that we can hold — intellectually, spiritually and emotionally — and make that slice our personal sense of what is real. But no matter how broad it is, any human perception of reality can be no more than a tiny sliver of Infinite Reality.”

-Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball

John Gruber, “Apple Watch: Initial Thoughts and Observations“:

The most intriguing and notable thing about Apple Watch’s design, to me, is the dedicated communication button below the digital crown. […] Apple is notorious for minimizing the number of hardware buttons on its devices… The only explanation is that Apple believes that the communication features triggered by that button are vitally important to how we’ll use the device.

I had that same thought when viewing the Apple Watch unveiling and noticing the unusual dedicated button: Apple must consider those communication features vitally important.

It took me a little while to get used to the idea, but it now seems quite natural to virtually tap loved ones on the wrist and send them little drawings and heartbeats. Perhaps in five years we’ll be wondering how we ever got by without that capability.

“Breaking down a complex thing into understandable chunks is essential for understanding, perhaps the essence of understanding.”

-Bret Victor, Learnable Programming