steve jobs said a bunch of really insightful things over the years, but it can be surprisingly tedious to find them because there's so much noise from people over-quoting the inspirational babble. I find myself thinking this a few times a year; probably worth making my own set
currently looking for the quote he has about how it takes time to really get "all of the possible things you can do with a product" inside your head, to have that information among a group of people... what you can do with the glass...
these are some of the better quotes, though still not what i'm looking for
people are really bad at selecting quotes
A people say insightful things, B people quote them (poorly), C people share the most mundane and tepid of those quotes
still looking...
hehe, frito-lay
"Apple is an Ellis Island company. Apple is built on refugees from other companies."
Anybody have an opinion on the best entry point for reading more about Edwin Land?
(still looking for my damn quote about making products, lol)
interesting bits from this interview:
- at age 21, took andy grove out to lunch
- 'one of my role models is bob dylan' – he never stood still
- 'if they keep on risking failure, they're still artists'
- was reading richard feynman re: cancer and death
since this is now basically a steve jobs thread, I want to contrast the "wow he sat in an empty room, so zen" picture with a few others
Getting annoyed that I haven’t been able to find this quote yet. 😅 Did I imagine it? Was it someone other than Steve? IIRC he said things like “you can’t defy the laws of physics, there are certain things you can’t do with glass... but eventually you figure out what you can do”
“It’s the meta-data.”
“The whole strategy for Apple now is, if you will, to be the Sony of the computer business.” – Steve Jobs, 1998 archive.fortune.com/magazines/fort…
OK so this is in the *spirit* of the quote I’m looking for – “go hide away with people that really understand the tech, but also really care about the customers, and dream up this next breakthrough”. But... did I hallucinate the extra details? I bet there’s a more recent version
THIS IS ALSO REALLY REALLY CLOSE
Why are you taunting me like this Steve
I am halting today’s search for now
This is a really interesting bit that I bet you’ve never seen unless you’ve watched the entire MIT lecture - Steve (then NeXT CEO) talking about relationships with suppliers
Btw future-Visa (👋🏾) if you’re wondering why I was looking for that quote, it was for this thread
It’s interesting that this quote was in 1995 - and you can see the two “almost there” versions of it earlier were from 1985 and 1990 respectively. By following those quotes you can see how Steve refined his thinking about his processes over time
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
over the years I’ve found there’s a discernable “signature” to the way people are confidently wrong vs the way people are confidently right. it’s hard to pin down to any one element though. it’s discerned more ecologically. confidently wrong has a clunky bluntness to it
the wrong tend to overuse words like “only” and “never” and often get kinda needlessly aggressive. it’s like they’re trying to bully you into accepting their position. the person who knows they’re right can be more chill and is often kinda laughing about it
A complication tho,
is when the person who’s right is also anxious, for whatever reason. This *does* happen often, and idk what the % of each quadrant is altogether. Probably domain-dependent too
I have a lot of thoughts about this, as someone who both tweets a lot and likes reading books
I think for starters a lot of people do themselves a disservice by comparing their current/adult selves with their tutorial zone kid selves who read when there was little else to do
second, I think as people accumulate socialization there’s a lot of “books I should want to read, books I’m supposed to read, books I ought to read” etc which muddy up the list of books you’ll actually read, which is the books you simply want to read
third, and this is related to the first point, I think people have this mental model of reading as something you set aside hours of uninterrupted time for. lots of ppl fantasize about reading books in 1-4 sittings. But they never quite have time for that. But funnily enough,
collection of 4chan posts that are extended criticisms or analyses of something, hit me up with whatever comes to mind
1. john oliver
2. harry potter
3. guy discovers that viktor from arcane looks just like him, then discovers the amount of porn of him, thirsty fangirls of him, and realizes that it's not his looks holding him back but his personality
connected a few dots i’ve been simmering on for years now
oversimplified: one of the reasons there arent ~“simple solutions to everybody’s human problems” is that what sets off a cascade of insight for someone at one tier of wretchedness can worsen things for someone below
the recent prevalence of the phrase “skill issue” is a useful example to gesture at. it’s a scissor that can cleave a peviously nebulous group into camps of people who feel energized and people who feel demoralized by it
for private individuals, this is basically a good thing. ish. mostly. sorta. you want to be at least mildly polarizing enough that the social reality around you rearranges itself to suit you.
or rather, we cant escape or avoid this. it’s always happening! similar pattern as:
I’ve increasingly gotten the sense that each person has some kind of “wretchedness floor” in their cached worldview. eg re: that viral tiktok girl who moved to Texas. I saw a comment saying “where are her friends?” some people struggle to imagine that someone might not have any
similar general phrasing in other situations is like “where were the parents?” oftentimes the answer is “not there!” or “contributing to the problem!”
most people have a sort of maybe 3-step algorithm (honestly 3 is generous lol it’s probably mostly 1 sometimes 2) abt how to deal with most problems, you get some all time hits like “cheer up”, “man up”, “get over it”, “it’s not so bad”, some fun new phrases like “skill issue”,
this^ makes me want to approach this from another angle... there's something to all of this about Time, and varying forms of time-blindness, and the scales of time that we are socialized to consider and not-consider
i'll try and speedrun a form of it in a few tweets. my first big rugpull shock was probably when the women who raised me, left me. i seem to remember feeling the world going white, cold, screeching, the abandonment felt like a kind of death