I don’t really care about being right, I just care about success.
“i dont think the very best people i have worked with have worked with computers for the sake of working with computers. they worked with computers because they are the medium that is best capable of transmitting some feeling that you have that you want to share with other people. before they invented these things all of these people would have done other things. but computers were invented and they did come along and all these people did get interested and they said “hey this is the medium i think i can say something in”.
We read about this story in esquire magazine about this guy named captain crunch who could supposedly make free phone calls. we were at stanford linear accelerator center one night and way in the bowels of their technical library, way down in the last bookshelf, in the corner bottom rack we found the ATT technical journal that laid out the whole thing. []
well you might ask: what’s so interesting about that? — what was interesting was we were young and what we learned was that we could build something ourselves that could control billions of dollars of infrastructure around the world. that is what learned. that us… two.. ya know we didn’t know much… that we could build this little thing that could control a giant thing. and that was an incredible lesson. i dont think there would have ever have been an apple computer if there wasn’t a blue box.
there was something beyond what you see everyday. there’s something going on here in life. beyond just a job and a family and two cars and a career and a garage. there’s something more going on. there’s another side of the coin that we don’t talk about much. and we experience it when there are gaps. when everything’s not ordered and perfect, you experience this in-rush of something.
it’s the same thing that causes people to want to be poets instead of bankers, you know? and i think thats a wonderful thing and i think that — that same spirit can be put into products. and those products can be manufactured and given to people and they can sense that spirit.
if you talk to people that use the macintosh they love it, you don’t hear people living products very often. but you could feel it in there, there was something really wonderful in there.
i dont think the very best people i have worked with have worked with computers because for the sake of working with computers. they worked with computers because they are the medium that is best capable of transmitting some feeling that you have that you want to share with other people. before they invented these things all of these people would have done other things. but computers were invented and they did come along and all these people did get interested and they said “hey this is the medium i think i can say something in”.
there’s a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. as you evolve that great idea it changes and it grows… and it never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it and you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs you have to make. i mean, there are just certain things you can’t make electrons do. there are certain things you can’t make plastic do or glass do or factories do or robots do. a and as you get into all these things, designing a product is keeping 5000 things in your brain — these concepts — and fitting them all together and kind of continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.
And it’s that process that is the magic.
And so we had a lot of great ideas when we started [the Mac]. But what I’ve always felt that a team of people doing something they really believe in is like is like when I was a young kid there was a widowed man that lived up the street. He was in his eighties. He was a little scary looking. And I got to know him a little bit. I think he may have paid me to mow his lawn or something.
And one day he said to me, “come on into my garage I want to show you something.” And he pulled out this dusty old rock tumbler. It was a motor and a coffee can and a little band between them. And he said, “come on with me.” We went out into the back and we got just some rocks. Some regular old ugly rocks. And we put them in the can with a little bit of liquid and little bit of grit powder, and we closed the can up and he turned this motor on and he said, “come back tomorrow.”
And this can was making a racket as the stones went around.
And I came back the next day, and we opened the can. And we took out these amazingly beautiful polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in, through rubbing against each other like this (clapping his hands), creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise, had come out these beautiful polished rocks.
That’s always been in my mind my metaphor for a team working really hard on something they’re passionate about. It’s that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together they polish each other and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these really beautiful stones.
I don’t really care about being right, I just care about success.
