Steve Jobs ' 16 video interview

1995 was a low ebb in jobs ' career. The 16-year-old documentary , which was left in the garage , was found and published only shortly after the death of jobs. Through it, our last space in the "Jobs password" is filled with .

The team that makes the noise will make a beautiful stone

Whenever a [new product plan] starts, we have a lot of ideas that are very, very creative, and the team is skeptical about their ideas. This time, I will think of what happened when I was a child.

There's a widowed man on the street, he is 80 years old, I remember he paid me to help him weed, one day he said, come to my garage, I have something to show you, he pulled out the old stone grinder, on the shelf only a motor, coffee cans and a belt connecting both.

We went to the backyard to check some stone, some ordinary, old, small and insignificant stone, we throw the stone into the jar, pour some water, add some coarse sand powder, put the jar shut up, he turned on the motor said, "See you tomorrow."

I came back the next day and opened the jar and took out a stunning, beautiful stone!

Originally just ordinary stone, through mutual friction, mutual, make a little noise, the result becomes beautiful smooth stone, this thing I keep in mind.

In my heart, this metaphor is the most representative of a team to strive for the ideal. Assemble a group of talented partners, let them collide, quarrel, or even noisy, this will make some noise, but, in the process of work, they will make the other person better, and make the idea become better, and finally will produce these beautiful stones.

Then I joined a group of HP (HP). When I was 12, I called Hewlett-Packard's Hewlett (Bill Hewlett, HP founder), which revealed my age, when there were no hidden numbers in the phone book, so I opened the phone book to check his name. When he answered the phone, I said, "Hi, my name Steve Chobs, you don't know me, I'm 12 years old, I'm making a frequency counter, I need some parts." ”

He talked to me like this for 20 minutes, and I will not forget it for the rest of my life.

I worked at HP 12 years old that summer, and HP was the only company I'd ever seen at my age, shaping my concept of the company and letting me know how well they treat people.

People didn't know about cholesterol at 10, they rolled out a big cart of donuts and coffee every morning, and everyone would rest for a doughnut and coffee, and it was a little thing like that. It is clear that the company recognizes that the real value of the company lies with its employees.

A level of talent's self-esteem, do not need your care

I noticed something early in apple, and I often thought about it, but I didn't know how to explain it.

Most things in life, the gap between mediocrity and the top is usually only 2:1, if the average driver in New York car, compared with the best drivers, the best driver may be able to give you 30% of the time to reach the destination.

What's the difference between a regular car and a top car? Maybe 20%. What is the difference between a top-level CD player and a general CD player? I don't know, maybe 20%. Therefore, 2:1 is already a great difference in life. However, in terms of software, the difference between mediocrity and the top may be 50:1, or even 100:1, which is rarely seen in life, and I am fortunate enough to spend my life in this field.

So most of my success comes from finding people who are really talented. Not B-Class, C-class talent, but the real a-class talent.

When you gather enough top talent, you find five people, they really like to work together, they never had the opportunity, they don't want to be with the second talent, it becomes a self-discipline behavior, they only want to hire more top talent.

If you find really great people, they know they're really great, you don't have to take care of their self-esteem, what's really important is your performance, and it's important to work.

I think the most important thing you can do for them is to tell them where it's not good enough, to make it very clear, explain why, and then pull them back on track.

You have to say something that doesn't make them think you're questioning their abilities, but you can't leave them much room to explain why things aren't good enough. It's hard, so I always use the most direct method, and if you talk to people I've worked with, those who are really outstanding, they will find this method beneficial to them, and some people really hate it.

I sometimes scold someone for their work as a stool, but generally only point out that they are far from good enough.

If you ask the Macintosh team, many people will say that they have not worked so hard, and some may say it was their happiest time, but everyone would say that this is certainly the most powerful and precious experience of their lives.

The real magic is to grind out a product with 5,000 ideas

One of the most damaging things about Apple after I left was that Scully (the former CEO of Apple) had a serious problem: that when there was a great idea, it was 90%. All you have to do is tell the others that there is a good idea and they will go back to the office and make it happen.

The problem is that good ideas turn into good products and require a lot of processing.

When you constantly improve the original "great idea", the concept will continue to grow.

Change, the result is usually different from what you start thinking: The more you go into the details, the more you learn.

And you'll find. You have to make a difficult choice to achieve your goal: some of the functions are not suitable for electronic products, some functions are unsuitable for plastic, glass materials to do, or the factory is not.

To design a product, you may want to remember more than 5,000 things in your mind, put these concepts together, and make these ideas work together in a whole new way to achieve the results you want.

Every day you will find something new. This at the same time represents new problems, and new opportunities. Let the final combination be a little bit different, this is the real "process", but also the real magic.

The key to making good products is not the management of processes

We hired a bunch of people from HP in 1984 (Designing a Graphics-interface computer), and I remember arguing with some of them. They think the coolest user interface is to add a soft keyboard to the bottom of the screen, they don't have the same concept of proportional spacing fonts, and no concept of the mouse.

They yelled at me and said the mouse would take five years to design and cost as much as 300 dollars. In the end, I had enough, and went outside to find Kelly (David Kelly) design, which resulted in a 15-dollar mouse and a reliable function within 90 days.

I find that Apple lacks this talent in some way, and can be more oriented to the people who hold the idea. It is true that there is a core team, but the team made up of HP is obviously not.

This has nothing to do with the dark side of the profession, because people lose their direction (the HP team can't think more), and as the company grows larger, they want to replicate their initial success. Many people think that the success of the process, there must be something wonderful, so they began to try to make the successful experience of the year into a system.

Soon people were confused, why did the system itself become the answer? That's why IBM failed. IBM has the best system managers, but they forget that the purpose of the design process is to find the best answer.

Apple also has a bit of a situation, we have a lot of people are very good at managing the process, but do not know how to find the answer. The best people can get the best answers, but they are the hardest to manage and you have to tolerate them.

Will find the answer-this is the key to a good product, not the management process but the answer itself.

We're not shy about stealing great ideas.

You asked me where my intuition about the product came from?

It boils down to taste, which is a matter of taste. The point is to get yourself in touch with the human essence and try to integrate it into what you are doing. I mean, Picasso once said, "good artists know how to replicate, great artists are good at stealing," and we're not shy about stealing great ideas.

I think the reason for the Macintosh's success is that its creators are musicians, poets and artists, zoologist and historians, who are also the world's best computer scientists, if they are not involved in computer science, they will have outstanding achievements in other areas, and we have to bring the human atmosphere of the computer, This humanistic attitude allows us to introduce ideas from other areas, and narrow vision is impossible.

We can make a small thing to control huge things.

My first contact with the computer was about 10 years old and was seen at NASA's Ames Research Center. At that time, the computer does not have image display, that is actually a printer, is a keyboard fax typing printer, you can type instructions, wait a while, the machine will start to work, and then tell you the answer. But even that is remarkable.

You've heard the story later, we read it in Esquire magazine. There's a guy named Captain Cecchi, who says he can make free calls. We are again fascinated by this: how can anyone do this? One night, at the center of the Stanford Linear Accelerator, at the bottom of a bookshelf in a corner, we found At&t's technical journal, which lists the whole theory. That's the moment I'll never forget!

This is amazing! We made these little boxes, which are called "blue boxes" and we add a little note at the bottom. Our slogan is "Master the whole World".

You can use the public telephone, through the network trunk to the White Plains, then the satellite to Europe and Turkey, and then through the cable back to Atlanta. You can travel around the world five. Because we learn how to connect a satellite, you can call the public phone next door, and then yell at the phone, a minute later the sound will appear in the next door. It's amazing!

You might ask, what's so interesting about this? The funny thing is we were young and we learned that we could build a device that would control billions of of billions of dollars. With two of us, you know we don't know much, and it's a valuable experience to make a small thing control a huge thing.

Without the blue box, I don't think there would be an Apple computer.

We did call the pope for a free international call for the test blue box. We found the Vatican phone, and then Wozniak (the founder of Apple) pretended to be Kissinger to call the pope, and the whole church was awakened.

I don't know what the Cardinal is. When they woke the pope, we finally couldn't help laughing when they realized we were not Kissinger. We never talked to the pope, but it was very interesting.

I never started a business for money.

The company has an exclusive market position, it is impossible to succeed again, so the people who can make the company more successful are the business and the marketing personnel, so finally become they run the company, and the product personnel is driven out of the decision-making circle, and the company forgets to make the good product the importance. It was a product of the sharp and creative, let them dominate the market, but then because the operators and disappeared. They have no concept of product quality, do not understand the good idea into a good product process, they do not really want to help the customer's heart-

After all these years of rolling around in the industry, I often ask people why you do something, and the answer is: That's the way it is. No one knows why they did it.

No one in business will really deliberate, this is my experience and understanding. So if you are willing to ask questions, think carefully, and work hard, you will soon be able to learn how to do business, which is not so difficult.

I was 23 years old when I was worth more than 1 million dollars, 24 was worth more than millions of dollars, and 25 was more than billions of dollars. But money is not that important, because I never started a business for money. Of course, money is great, because it gives you the ability to do a lot of things.

You can invest in ideas and ideas that can't be recycled in the short term, and the most important thing is the company, the people, the products that we produce and the benefits people bring to them, so I don't often put my money at heart. You know I did not sell a stock, I really believe that the company will be very long-term development.

When I was a child, I read an article in the Journal of Science to measure the efficiency of the species on Earth, bears, chimpanzees, raccoons, birds, and fish-how many calories do they spend per kilometer? Humans have also been tested.

The result is that the Vulture wins, it is the most efficient species, and the human performance of the people of the universe is not very visible, ranking only to the first one-third or so. However, some people are very smart, know how to measure the efficiency of human cycling, which makes the vulture defeat, dominate the entire list.

I remember how much it affected me: I remember that man is the builder of tools, and the tools we build can greatly enhance our innate abilities. Early in the Apple really have such an advertisement, that the personal computer is the soul of the bicycle. I sincerely believe that in all human inventions, the computer rankings must be high, in the future it must be so, it is the best tool we invented. Lucky to be able to Shing in Silicon Valley to see its shape.

Misses in space travel. If you can adjust your course slightly when you go, there is a great difference in space. I think we are still at the beginning of the fairway, and if we can adjust in the right direction, it will develop into something better, and we have this opportunity to make several adjustments, which is very satisfying to all concerned.

I'm obviously a hippie, and the people I work with are hippies.

If I had to choose, I was obviously a hippie and the people I worked with were hippies.

What do you mean, hippie? It's an old word with a lot of meaning.

There is one side of life that people don't often talk about: when there is a gap in life, we will experience it, when everything seems to be chaotic, as if there is a gap. Many people will ask you to find out what that is, whether it is Thoreau or the Hindu mystics, and the hippie movement has a little taste, and they want to find out what that is, the answer to life.

I think it's a wonderful thing that people want to be poets rather than bankers, because life is not the way of parents. I want to put the same spirit into the product, these products come out to people's hands, they can feel this spirit.

People who use the Macintosh will love it, and you rarely hear people fall in love with goods. You can feel it, there is some kind of wonderful spirit inside. Most of the top people I've worked with are not in the business of computers, they're in the computer because it's the best medium for feeling, because you want to share it with others.

[Wen/Wang Yukun (blog)]