Author Richard Koch of The 80/20 Principle spoke about “Happiness Islands” in an interview:

I encourage people to think about the small chunks of time—this week, this year, the years during their whole lives—that have given them far more happiness than most of the rest of their time. I call these periods “happiness islands”. Try it for yourself. Ask what the happiness islands have in common—why were you unusually happy then. You can do the same for your “achievement islands”—and for the opposites too, the times when you were least effective (“achievement desert islands”) or happy (“happiness desert islands”).

I’ve been thinking about my Happiness Islands lately. What do they all have in common? Friends and family—people who understand me. And a lot of times, food. Playing sports, or getting exercise, too.

I finished reading Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, using iBooks, on my iPhone. Some thoughts and takeaways:

1. Importance of intuition, often times over rational thought.
2. Product, not profit. I remember being surprised at how profit-driven some of the business students were in my collaborative MBA/engineer class last year. Focus on making a great product, instead.
3. Less is more. Giving the user fewer features and fewer options means a more focused, elegant product and experience. I agree often times users don’t know what they want.
4. In some cases, Jobs took the approach of prioritizing design, and finding a way to engineer it later. Even better, make great engineering the essence of the design itself, so that a product’s aesthetic elegance is exactly its elegance in engineering or manufacture. It’s hard to decouple design and engineering, so arguably the best of both worlds would be an engineer who understands the importance of design.
5. The people you work with and quality of work. It’s not hard to differentiate great work from not-so-great work; I’ve been fortunate to have worked with a handful of people who produce great work in my time at school.
6. Take inspiration from nature. Make products that are harmonious, that take the path of least resistance.
7. Look at how the tools and products that humans create fit into the big picture. Then make a dent in the universe.