Steve Jobs

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.