Why did Steve Jobs live in an empty box?
Well, an empty house. According to Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, for most of his life, the tech giant led a pretty spartan existence. Even before his austere signature style, he was excessively strict about every aspect of his life, like his ascetic home, which he never fully furnished. In fact, for the longest time, it contained only a chest of drawers, a mattress, a card table, and some folding chairs for guests.
John Sculley, Apple’s former CEO, recalls a visit there: “I remember going into Steve’s house and he had almost no furniture in it. He just had a picture of Einstein, whom he admired greatly, and he had a Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed. He just didn’t believe in having lots of things around but he was incredibly careful in what he selected.”
Even after he had his own family, Jobs and his wife continued to debate furniture selection for more than eight years, often with discussions leading to questions such as “What is the purpose of a sofa?”
It is not particularly surprising to encounter some level of unusual thinking patterns coming out of a person with such out-of-the-box imagination; however, considering that he was responsible for creating some of the most iconic consumer products in the history of the world, it would have been natural to assume his own home would be filled by equally marvelous objects of strict simplicity and beauty.
Why not?
Possibly because going furniture shopping takes a lot more time when you are a perfectionist. And taking time away from real work would have been out of character.
But wait, there’s more.
For one, adding more “stuff,” be it tools, resources, or even something as basic or necessary as furniture, does not automatically resolve issues or ameliorate a situation. In reality, the opposite can be said more often. It takes less energy, in the words of Jeff Bezos, to remove something that does not work vs. adding something completely new (he was referring to processes, but we can easily expand on that principle). So maybe taking the necessary time selecting the perfect furniture collection was not a priority for the person whose plan was to “put a dent in the universe.”
In a similar vein, it takes a special kind of person to appreciate a space so painfully blank that it almost begs for attention — which most people naturally would have given it. But Jobs was after extreme levels of focus and clarity, not adding more distractions. Only a mind starved of relentless interruption can focus hard enough to birth ideas into existence — seemingly out of thin air.
Obviously, it was Job’s personal aesthetic, and tenacious mindset, that led to product creations so fundamentally stripped down that no prior associations could be formed. They provoked interest and curiosity, yet, at the same time, were uniquely simple and breathtakingly functional. And no one could help but love them. But that’s what great brands do. They stand out not only because they are unique (and separate), but also because they tap into a collective consciousness that most people find relatable.
So why?
I remember listening to Isackson’s book on a long drive across the continental divide, and I could not stop thinking about it. I could not understand why the house remained empty. Indecisiveness was not the issue, though some tend to think Job’s obsessive personality would often get in the way of getting things done in the traditional way.
But even for someone as particular as Jobs famously was, a decade is long enough time to find any type of furniture, even invent a new type. But he was focused on inventing the iPhone instead.
Saying no to so many things, just so you can focus on the one thing that matters the most, requires a tremendous amount of discipline. And that is how unparalleled depths of mastery are reached and extraordinary levels of achievement are attained.
This article started as a note exploring how minimalism could relate to business, yet that word did not even come up once before now. That’s because minimalism is a mindset as much as it is a discipline. And mindset is a hard term to pin down.
Minimalism does not refer only to simplicity in design or living with fewer possessions. It’s closer to the idea of “less is more” as it applies to (surprise!) everything. That same framework of stripping off all the things that don’t add value can be applied to any problem-solving situation, be it running effective meetings or running billion-dollar companies.
One could almost argue the idea lends itself to other similar schools of thought. For example, minimalism could carefully attempt to touch on the very blade of Occam’s Razor and the discussion on unnecessary complexity. It even brings to mind Einstein’s quote that if you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough. Could it be we that we all could use a little less complexity, our version of an empty box?
