#398 Steve Jobs In His Own Words (Make Something Wonderful)

**David Senra** (0:00)
The best way to understand a person is to listen to that person directly. And the best way to understand Steve is to listen to what he said and wrote over the course of his life. His words in speeches, interviews and emails offer a window into how he thought, and he was an exquisite thinker. Much of what's in these pages reflects guiding themes of Steve's life, his sense of the worlds that would emerge from marrying the arts and technology. His unbelievable rigor, which he imposed first and most strenuously on himself. His tenacity in pursuit of assembling and leading great teams, and perhaps above all, his insights into what it meant to be human. Steve once told a group of students, You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, and then you disappear. He gave an extraordinary amount of thought to how best to use our fleeting time. He was compelled by the notion of being part of the arc of human existence, animated by the thought that he and that any of us might elevate or expedite human progress. It is hard to see what is already there, to gain a clear view. Steve's gift was greater still. He saw clearly what was not there, what could be there, what had to be there. His mind was never a captive of reality. Quite the contrary. He imagined what reality lacked and set out to remedy it. His ideas were not arguments, but intuitions, born of a true inner freedom and an epic sense of possibility. In these pages, Steve drafts and refines. He stumbles, grows and changes. But always, always, he retains that sense of possibility. I hope these selections ignite in you the understanding that drove him, that everything, that everything that makes up what we call life was made by people no smarter and no more capable than we are, that our world is not fixed, and so we can change it for the better. That was the introduction written by Steve's wife, Laureen Powell Jobs, of the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is available for free. The Steve Jobs Archive put this book available for free. You can read it online at their website for free. I'll link all this down below. You can read it on Apple Books or you can download the file and send it to your Kindle, which is what I did. It is Make Something Wonderful, Steve Jobs in his own words. And so I'm going to go back through that introduction because I took a bunch of notes. One, I think it's one of the most beautifully written introductions that I've read. And not only that, it hits you. If you think about it, that was her husband, the father of her children, somebody she was building her life with. And to have him gone so early and such an exquisite person and so early, it's just absolutely devastating when you think about it. And so I thought her introduction was really touching. I thought there was a lot of ideas that are tied into that. But what was interesting is the book actually starts out right before the introduction. There's a quote from Steve in 2007 I'm gonna read this whole thing to you. And a lot of this, what I love about this book, and I'm so glad they put this together, and then not only they put it together, but anybody can read it for free all over the world. That's just absolutely incredible. It really is like a gift to the next generation of entrepreneurs is the fact that a lot of this is just Steve in his own words. And so it's like Steve Jobs speaking directly to you. And so it's already obvious that this is going to be a book I'm going to reference and read over and over again throughout my life. So here's Steve in 2007 There is a lot of ways to be as a person. And some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there. And you never meet the people. You never shake their hands. You never hear their story or tell yours. But somehow, in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something's transmitted there. And it is a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation. So we need to be true to who we are and remember what's really important to us. So this idea, it's the act of making something with a great deal of care and love. And so in addition to reading this book, I went back through and deep into the Steve Jobs rabbit hole. There's this interview of him that was lost and then found after he died. And it was an interview given about a year before he came back to Apple. It's called Steve Jobs, The Lost Interview. I have never found it anywhere else except on YouTube. And you have to buy it. So I think I paid like 10 or 15 bucks for this or something. But it's just Steve unfiltered talking for, I don't know, an hour and 20 minutes. And so there's something he says in the interview that is very similar. And that interview was given about 11 years, 12 years before this quote, where he's like, it's the act of making something with a great deal of care and love. So that is Steve's implicit advice to you and I, right? Actually care. Do you actually care about what you're putting out to the world? And if you do, it'll show. Are you just doing it just to make money? And what I love about Steve is no one's ever going to say that this guy was motivated by money, right? There's no reading of his career where that's possible. And obviously, he became incredibly wealthy. But it's the idea of, hey, I'm going to make something people love, something that's wonderful. And you'll see how much I care for the product that I make. And so in that talk, the opposite of this is something Steve hated. Steve hated where there was no spirit, no taste, no humanity in the products. And so he was talking about in 1996, he said, listen, Microsoft, you have to admire what they built. They're extremely aggressive. He's like, they just keep coming. They're great opportunists. And he said in the interview, he's like, that's not an insult. But he goes, I have no problem with their success. I have a problem that they make really third rate products. Their products have no spirit to them. They are very pedestrian. They are McDonald's. That's the quote from Steve Jobs. And I'm glad I re listened to that after I had read this because I'm like, oh, it's the exact same idea. He's just saying the opposite. Make something with a great deal of care and love from the product that you're making to the company that you're building. It'll be obvious if you actually care. I think that's the advice that Steve would give us. So let's go back to the introduction written by his wife. I just want to pull out a couple of things when I was reading this that popped my mind. So one of the lines that she says is, much of what's in these pages reflect guiding themes of Steve's life. His sense of the worlds that would emerge from marrying the arts and technology. So the reason this is so important to you and I, something you and I have discussed over and over again, is ideas are extremely powerful, right? Your mind is a powerful place which you feed it, it affects you in a powerful way. There's an idea, that one idea, Steve learned when he was in his early 20s. The idea is that you should build a company at the intersection of arts and technology. That is Edwin Land's idea. That is an idea that Steve Jobs learned from Edwin Land, that Steve used when he was in his 20s, his 30s, his 40s until he died. The reason I want to resurface that is because if Steve was here today, he would tell you to study Edwin Land.