Visakan Veerasamy Profile picture
Dec 18, 2018 17 tweets 7 min read Read on X
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

archive.fortune.com/magazines/fort…
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 this!!! This is why Twitter rules
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

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More from @visakanv

Jul 22
a lot of loneliness plays out like this: people accumulate past grievances that they feel have not been appropriately heard. they front-load interactions with this (eg complaining about ex on first date), which makes other people feel unheard. this perpetuates the wretched cycle
a lot of solutions to the loneliness problem begin by finding some way to metabolize the grievances, whether it’s through therapy, or drugs, or art

partial solutions are possible and better than nothing; and most people do live in some state of leaky compartmentalization
how that plays out is you keep it together well enough to not complain about your ex on the first date, but it slips out in a fight maybe six months later, “that’s the thing with you men/women…”
Read 7 tweets
Jul 21
nonpartisan tweets about framing: scrolling through @joebiden's timeline, which i assume is run by his team, i can't help but notice just how many of the tweets are about trump, with pictures of trump, videos of trump. look at trump, think about trump. imagine trump as president

Image
Image
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@JoeBiden I remember @HillaryClinton doing the same thing. imagine trump as president. picture trump in the oval office
Image
meanwhile @teamtrump wants you to also imagine trump as president. pictures of trump. videos of trump. trump trump trump Image
Read 5 tweets
Jun 28
a critical skill if you wanna walk through the walls of culture, and/or “see the matrix” of social reality, is to de-fixate on who the winners or losers of some social exchange are, who’s higher status or lower status, whose group is better or worse, who’s allied with who, etc
the way to de-fixate is to be curious

curious about the truth, curious about how things look from the other side, about how you might be wrong, about what is or is not technically possible, about what the material constraints are, about what the alternate narratives might be,
this sort of thing ordinarily feels redundant to me to say out loud, since it’s kind of been my natural operating system for as long as I can remember. I’m usually only reminded of it when I bump into someone who doesn’t seem to have access to curiosity
Read 6 tweets
Jun 23
met a couple of different friends yesterday and today for lots of good conversation and I wanna try and remember stuff that came up, so- a thread of kinda disjointed thoughts
one of the most powerful magical forces we’re all in thrall of is how mundane and inert everything appears to be. this is an illusion our minds generate to make things easier to navigate, but it also blocks us from seeing possibilities in plain sight
2. people who are looking for incremental solutions to a problem will often ignore or disregard solutions that eliminate the problem entirely (often requires upstream reconceptualization)
Read 6 tweets
May 24
chaos-surfing well requires understanding a buncha things

1. how things appear to me are not necessarily how they are

2. what people say is not necessarily what they mean

3. what is said/shown is not necessarily all there is

4. what is true for me may not be true for you
5. the same words mean different things to different people

6. people often don't even read what is there, they often see a few words and assume what they thought they saw. you can ask them to repeat things back to you and they'll make up completely different phrases sometimes
7. what is salient (striking, important) to me about some situation or conflict is not necessarily what will be salient to you. each of us have had a lifetime of experience that the other doesn't have a lot of information about, and that experience informs what we each pick out
Read 9 tweets
Apr 19
I’ve gotten thousands of DMs over the years from people telling me about their problems. Here’s one interesting pattern/cluster I’ve noticed, which I’d loosely describe as

“anxious self-flagellating ambitious guy who desires greatness but refuses to learn from his mistakes”
they tend to say something like, “I know perfect is the enemy of the good but I can’t bear to do merely good so I keep trying to do perfect and keep failing. how do you deal with not being perfect?” and- I’ll prob have to explain this but the vibe is very similar to-
the question I ask in return is something like, “how do you deal with accomplishing nothing over something? that seems like it would be harder to deal with than failing to be perfect, which is the default condition of all human beings from day 1”
Read 13 tweets

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