Book: "I, Steve: Steve Jobs in his Own Words" by George Beahm | Episode #172

Daniel Scrivner (0:02)

Apple has a core set of talents, and those talents are, we do, I think, very good hardware design. We do very good industrial design, and we write very good system and application software. We're really good at packaging that all together into a product. We're the only people left in the computer industry that can do that. That was a quote by Steve Jobs from December 2003 That's part of the very short book that I'm going to cover today, which is I, Steve, Steve Jobs in his own words. Over the next couple of months, I'm going to cover a few books about Steve, including his latest book, Make Something Wonderful, and some of the autobiographies and biographies that have been written about him.

But I thought I would start here. I'm treating this as a short, yes, it's technically a book, but it's relatively short and it's mostly quotes.

The reason that I wanted to share this book is Steve Jobs is one of my heroes. I know he's one of many people's heroes.

I was fortunate enough to get the chance to work at Apple, so I've seen a lot of how the culture actually works from the inside of the company. Hopefully, I have some useful things to add. But today, this is mostly just about meditating on Steve's approach at Apple and some of the values that have helped him build such an incredible company.

If you're interested in buying the book, there's going to be a link in the show notes below, and you can go and find all of these quotes in a post at outlieracademy.com/stevejobsquotes so we can also find a transcript of this episode. You can listen to it. You can share it at any time. Let's go ahead and jump in. As you'll see, if you're watching the video, I've got a crazy system I'm using here for a bunch of sticky notes all over the book. I've tried to pick out the best, and these are probably 10% or less of the quotes inside here. So we're going to go across a range of different topics. Let's go ahead and dive in.

One of the things that I think most people that study Steve Jobs realize is that he's fanatical about getting the best people. I mean, he's fanatical about recruiting, and he believes that recruiting is the number one job of the CEO, and it's also how great companies are built. And here's a quick quote of some of that perspective. All we are is our ideas or people. That's what keeps us going in the morning to hang around these great, bright people. I've always thought that recruiting is the heart and soul of what we do.

This is a little bit of an extension, just thinking about recruiting a little bit further. It's not just recruiting. After recruiting, it's then building an environment that makes people feel they are surrounded by equally talented people, and that their work is bigger than they are. The feeling that the work will have tremendous influence and is part of a strong, clear vision, all of those things. Recruiting usually requires more than you alone can do. So I found that collaborative recruiting and having a culture that recruits the A players is the best way. Any interviewee will speak with at least a dozen people in several areas of his company, not just those in the area that he would work in. That way, a lot of our A employees get broad exposure to the company, and by having a company culture that supports them, if they feel strongly enough, the current employees can veto a candidate.

So on branding, as I think of it, a huge part of branding is to help you escape competition. We don't stand a chance of advertising with features and benefits and with rams and charts and comparisons. The only chance we have of communicating is with the feeling.

Just to talk a little bit more about this idea of escaping competition, I think one of the things that's really insightful about this quote is, if you think about the computer industry, especially when Apple entered it, the path to ultimate brutal competition was to try to play the game that everyone else was playing, which is to, again, we don't say a chance of advertising with features, benefits with rams, with charts, with comparisons. That is how you enter a field of endless competition. I think one of the wisest things that Apple did was to escape competition by focusing on competing against a very different vector. I think a great way of describing that's almost competing on a feeling, trying to create a holistic product experience that is remarkably better in revolving more around narrative and the stories you tell about the products you create as opposed to just the technical benefits, which is obviously going to appeal to, in the broadest sense, a very small portion of the market.