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

Dec 21
Obama is still the only POTUS who was born after 1946. He was the only one born after the partition of India. Gandhi's assassination. the Berlin Blockade. the coinage of the term "Big Bang". Mao's proclamation founding the PRC. the signing of NATO. the Korean War. Image
only POTUS born after the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1952, after Everest was summited for the first time in '53, after the Fellowship of the Ring was published in '54, after the first Disneyland opened in '55, after Elvis dropped Heartbreak Hotel in 56, Sputnik launched '57
Barbie debuted 1959
Pantyhose also debuted 1959, big year for a particular kind of pervert
Muhammad Ali wins the gold at boxing in the 1960 olympics when Biden is ~18 years old
then JFK and Nixon have the first televised presidential debate also in 1960
Read 5 tweets
Nov 27
at almost every threshold there are a bunch of people who set up a basecamp where they discuss how to cross the threshold. some of those people do go on to cross the threshold, but those people tend to then become incomprehensible to most of those who are still in basecamp
one might say “not all thresholds”, but in the model I’m presenting here I’d argue that thresholds that are easily crossed are not real thresholds. it is useful to demarcate the thresholds at precisely the boundaries people fail to cross
often the reason for this is that the people before the threshold are operating with a set of beliefs/assumptions that are incompatible with life beyond the threshold. My instinct is to say “this maybe doesnt apply to physical things like sprinting” but then, Daniel Chambliss: Image
Read 13 tweets
Nov 22
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
Read 4 tweets
Nov 17
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,
Read 12 tweets
Nov 15
collection of 4chan posts that are extended criticisms or analyses of something, hit me up with whatever comes to mind

1. john oliver Image
2. harry potter Image
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 Image
Image
Image
Read 6 tweets
Nov 3
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:
Read 16 tweets

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