- There’s lots of ways to be, as a person. And some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there.
And you never meet the people. You never shake their hands. You never hear their story or tell yours. But somehow, in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something’s transmitted there. And it’s a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation. So we need to be true to who we are and remember what’s really important to us.
──Steve, 2007
Introduction by Laurene Powell Jobs
Much of what’s in these pages reflects guiding themes of Steve’s life: his sense of the worlds that would emerge from marrying the arts and technology; his unbelievable rigor, which he imposed first and most strenuously on himself; his tenacity in pursuit of assembling and leading great teams; and perhaps, above all, his insights into what it means to be human.
It is hard enough to see what is already there, to gain a clear view. Steve’s gift was greater still: he saw clearly what was not there, what could be there, what had to be there. His mind was never a captive of reality. Quite the contrary: he imagined what reality lacked and set out to remedy it. His ideas were not arguments, but intuitions, born of a true inner freedom and an epic sense of possibility.
Preface: Steve on His Childhood and Young Adulthood
He had a workbench out in the garage where, when I was about five or six, he sectioned off a little piece of it and said, “Steve, this is your workbench now.” And he gave me some of his smaller tools and showed me how to use a hammer and saw and how to build things. It really was very good for me. He spent a lot of time with me, teaching me how to build things, take things apart, put things back together.
──从小学习动手能力I grew up in Silicon Valley. My parents moved from San Francisco to Mountain View when I was five. My dad got transferred, and that was right in the heart of Silicon Valley, so there were engineers all around. Silicon Valley, for the most part, at that time, was still orchards—apricot orchards and prune orchards—and it was really paradise. I remember almost every day the air being crystal clear, where you could see from one end of the valley to the other. It was really the most wonderful place in the world to grow up.
──居然是原住民I would say that gave one several things. It gave one an understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked, because it would include a theory of operation. But maybe even more importantly, it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore. I mean, you looked at a television set, and you would think, “I haven’t built one of those—but I could. There’s one of those in the Heathkit catalog, and I’ve built two other Heathkits, so I could build a television set.” Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation, not these magical things that just appeared in one’s environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous degree of self-confidence that, through exploration and learning, one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way.
School was pretty hard for me at the beginning. My mother taught me how to read before I got to school, and so when I got there I really just wanted to do two things: I wanted to read books, because I loved reading books, and I wanted to go outside and chase butterflies. You know, do the things that five-year-olds like to do. I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came this close to really beating any curiosity out of me.
And I looked at her like, “Are you crazy, lady? Nobody’s ever done this before!” And of course I did it. She basically bribed me back into learning, with candy and money. And what was really remarkable was before very long I had such a respect for her that it sort of reignited my desire to learn. She was remarkable. She got me kits for making cameras. I ground my own lens and made a camera. It was really quite wonderful. I think I probably learned more academically in that one year than I’d ever learned in my life.
I didn’t know enough about what I wanted to do, and besides that, I figured I could drop out and then drop back in and take the classes anyway and learn just as much. So I dropped out after six months, and then I dropped in for a little over a year.
I spent about a year and a half there, maybe close to two years. And I enjoyed it greatly. It was a hard time in my life, but I enjoyed it a lot. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. And Reed was a very intense place, very bright people—everyone out to change the world, but not knowing quite how.
──高级白嫖课程，哈哈哈The idealistic wind of the sixties was still at our back, and most of the people that I know that are my age have that ingrained in them forever. They have that idealism in them, but they also have a certain cautiousness about sort of ending up working in a natural food store behind the counter when they’re forty-five years old, which is what they saw some of their older friends [doing]—not that that’s bad in and of itself, but it’s bad if that’s not what you really set out to do or what you really wanted to be doing.
──追逐自己想做的This was California. You can get LSD fresh-made from Stanford University. You can go sleep on the beach at night with your girlfriends and whatever meaningful others. You could… I didn’t really realize how different California was than the middle of America, and even to some extent the East Coast, until I traveled to those places. I’d never been to any of those places until my early twenties. California has a sense of experimentation about it, and a sense of openness about it—openness and new possibility—that I really didn’t appreciate till I went to other places.
──成长环境的开放性与包容性So I volunteered to go; well, they asked me if I’d go, and I said I definitely would love to, but I’d like to take a leave of absence when I was there. So they let me do that, and I ended up in Switzerland and flew from Zurich to New Delhi. And I spent some time in India.
──带薪旅行！！！Coming back was more of a culture shock than going. All I really wanted to do [after returning to California] was to go find a grassy meadow and just sit. I didn’t want to drive a car. I didn’t want to go to San Francisco or do all these things. I didn’t want to do it.
──回来后就被印度宗教深深冲击，哈哈哈So I didn’t, for about three months. I just read and sat. When you are a stranger in a place, you notice things that you rapidly stop noticing when you become familiar. I was a stranger in America for the first time in my life, and so I saw things I’d never seen before. And I tried to pay attention to them for those three months because I knew that gradually, bit by bit, my familiarity would be gained again.
──重新审视熟悉的事物
Part I, 1976–1985 “A lot of people put a lot of love into these products.”
When Apple launched, Steve was twenty-one, precocious but inexperienced and unpolished. At Apple’s first board meeting, he put his bare feet on a conference room table, earning a quick rebuke from the board chair. The company’s breakthrough came with the introduction of the Apple II, a machine that could run right out of the box, with cassette storage and a built-in color screen. Within a year, Apple was one of the fastest-growing companies in America—and by the time Steve turned thirty, he was the public face of a Fortune 500 company.
──原来人家30岁就已经是财富500强Later, when he talked about these first years at Apple, Steve focused on one thing: Macintosh, the computer that he and a tight-knit team introduced to the world in 1984. To Steve, Macintosh was everything technology should be. It was streamlined and practical, simple and sophisticated, a tool for enhancing creativity as much as productivity.
In another age, Steve believed, the people on the Macintosh team would have been writers, musicians, or artists. “The feelings and the passion that people put into it were completely indistinguishable from a poet or a painter,” he said. He called their work a form of love and their product “a computer for the rest of us,” with a mouse as well as arrow keys, desktop icons instead of programming commands, and, at startup, instead of a blinking cursor: a smile.
Macintosh also represented the first time Steve led a team developing a product that he believed had changed the world. “It ushered in a revolution,” Steve recalled twenty-three years later, during the rollout of another world-changing innovation: the iPhone. “I remember the week before we launched the Mac, we all got together, and we said, ‘Every computer is going to work this way. You can’t argue about that anymore. You can argue about how long it will take, but you can’t argue about it anymore.’”
──在看到Apple Vision Pro的时候，我也有那个想法The reason we [Woz and I] built a computer was that we wanted one, and we couldn’t afford to buy one. They were thousands of dollars at that time. We were just two teenagers. We started trying to build them and scrounging parts around Silicon Valley where we could. After a few attempts, we managed to put together something that was the Apple I. All of our friends wanted them, too. They wanted to build them. It turned out that it took maybe fifty hours to build one of these things by hand. It was taking up all of our spare time because our friends were not that skilled at building them, so Woz and I were building them for them.
──创新发生在充满热情但还买不起的时候“We started a little personal-computer manufacturing company in a garage in Los Altos in 1976. Now we’re the largest personal-computer company in the world. We make what we think of as the Rolls-Royce of personal computers. It’s a domesticated computer. People expect blinking lights, but what they find is that it looks like a portable typewriter, which, connected to a suitable readout screen, is able to display in color.
“There’s a feedback it gives to people, and the enthusiasm of the users is tremendous. We’re always asked what it can do, and it can do many things, but in my opinion the real thing it is doing right now is to teach people how to program the computer.”
──Jobs构想中，电脑中最开始的用途/好处是，让人们先适应编程How many of you are over thirty-six years old? You were born pre-computer. Computers are thirty-six years old. I think there’s going to be a little slice in the timeline of history as we look back, a pretty meaningful slice right there. A lot of you are products of the television generation. I’m pretty much a product of the television generation, but to some extent starting to be a product of the computer generation.
──好深刻的开场白。1983年的演讲，所以Jobs严重，计算机诞生是1947年，ENIACBut the kids growing up now are definitely products of the computer generation, and in their lifetimes the computer will become the predominant medium of communication, just as the television took over from the radio, took over from even the book.
──媒介的变化But here’s the key thing: let’s say I could move a hundred times faster than anyone in here. In the blink of your eye, I could run out there, grab a bouquet of fresh spring flowers, run back in here, and snap my fingers. You would all think I was a magician. And yet I would basically be doing a series of really simple instructions: running out there, grabbing some flowers, running back, snapping my fingers. But I could just do them so fast that you would think that there was something magical going on.
──1983年的洞见！！！！One of the reasons I’m here is because I need your help. If you’ve looked at computers, they look like garbage. All the great product designers are off designing automobiles or buildings. But hardly any of them are designing computers. If we take a look, we’re going to sell 3 million computers this year, 10 million in ’86, whether they look like a piece of shit or they look great. People are just going to suck this stuff up so fast no matter what it looks like. And it doesn’t cost any more money to make them look great. They are going to be these new objects that are going to be in everyone’s working environment, everyone’s educational environment, and everyone’s home environment. We have a shot [at] putting a great object there—and if we don’t, we’re going to put one more piece-of-junk object there.
──核心目的是找优秀设计师来帮他设计Mac, 有趣 （他还吐槽了下优秀设计师可能还在设计汽车或建筑物）By ’86, ’87, pick a year, people are going to spend more time interacting with these machines than they do interacting with automobiles today. People are going to be spending two, three hours a day interacting with these machines—longer than they spend in the car. And so the industrial design, the software design, and how people interact with these things certainly must be given the consideration that we give automobiles today—if not a lot more.
──不止两三小时！If you take a look, what we’ve got is a situation where most automobiles are not being designed in the United States. Televisions? Audio electronics? Watches, cameras, bicycles, calculators, you name it: most of the objects of our lives are not designed in America. We’ve blown it. We’ve blown it from an industrial point of view because we’ve lost the markets to foreign competitors. We’ve also blown it from a design point of view.
乔布斯关注的这几个，都是消费电子And I think we have a chance with this new computing technology meeting people in the eighties—the fact that computers and society are out on a first date in the eighties. We have a chance to make these things beautiful, and we have a chance to communicate something through the design of the objects themselves.
──Ive joined Apple in September 1992, and was promoted to senior vice president of industrial design in the late 1990s after the return of co-founder Steve Jobs to the company. 演讲的时候Jobs还没有找到IvyWhen I was going to school, I had a few great teachers and a lot of mediocre teachers. And the thing that probably kept me out of jail was the books. I could go and read what Aristotle or Plato wrote without an intermediary in the way. And a book was a phenomenal thing. It got right from the source to the destination without anything in the middle.
──Jobs哲学里，有个很重要的点也是，直接将电子产品传达给消费者，而不是向500强一样，需要向中间人、管理层兜售The problem was, you can’t ask Aristotle a question. And I think, as we look towards the next fifty to one hundred years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit, or an underlying set of principles, or an underlying way of looking at the world, then, when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life—his or her whole life—and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday, after this person’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, “Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?” And maybe we won’t get the right answer, but maybe we will. And that’s really exciting to me. And that’s one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing.
──乔布斯在83年的时候，就展望到了2023年，AI在帮他完成他的心愿产品随想注：Speech at the International Design Conference in Aspen
“Computers and society are out on a first date.”
此篇建议全文背诵Now, Apple’s strategy is really simple. What we want to do is put an incredibly great computer in a book that you carry around with you, that you can learn how to use in twenty minutes. That’s what we want to do. And we want to do it this decade. And we really want to do it with a radio link in it so you don’t have to hook up to anything—you’re in communication with all these larger databases and other computers. We don’t know how to do that now. It’s impossible technically.
──然后乔布斯2008年拿出了MacBook Air （是在演讲的25年后），原来MacBook中的Book是这么来的！！！！We’re trying to get away from programming. We’ve got to get away from programming because people don’t want to program computers. People want to use computers.
──确实，普通人并不以编程为乐，而以使用电脑为乐We [at Apple] feel that, for some crazy reason, we’re in the right place at the right time to put something back. And what I mean by that is, most of us didn’t make the clothes we’re wearing, and we didn’t cook or grow the food that we eat, and we’re speaking a language that was developed by other people, and we use a mathematics that was developed by other people. We are constantly taking.
And the ability to put something back into the pool of human experience is extremely neat. I think that everyone knows that in the next ten years we have the chance to really do that. And we [will] look back—and while we’re doing it, it’s pretty fun, too—we will look back and say, “God, we were a part of that!”
We started with nothing. So whenever you start with nothing, you can always shoot for the moon. You have nothing to lose. And the thing that happens is—when you sort of get something, it’s very easy to go into cover-your-ass mode, and then you become conservative and vote for Ronnie. So what we’re trying to do is to realize the very amazing time that we’re in and not go into that mode.
I can’t tell you why you need a home computer right now. I mean, people ask me, “Why should I buy a computer in my home?”
──就像现在很多人在问，为什么我需要买一台Apple Vision Pro“You can hook up to the source and, you know, do whatever you’re going to do. Meet women, I don’t know. But other than that, there’s no good reason to buy one for your house right now. But there will be. There will be.”
──需求还没出来，但乔布斯坚信会有让人不得不买的理由出来，里面的段子也很有趣，社交与情色真的能大大加快技术的发展When you have a million people using something, then that’s when creativity really starts to happen on a very rapid scale. […] We need some revolutions like [the] Lisa [computer], but we also then need to get millions of units out there and let the world innovate—because the world’s pretty good at innovating, we’ve found.
One of the things I love is that with Macintosh, you can write memos that are Times Roman or Helvetica, or you can throw in an Old English if you want to have a little fun for a party, you know, for a volleyball announcement. Or you can use a very serious font for something very serious. And you can express yourself.
But it wouldn’t have worked. It wouldn’t have worked. And the reason it wouldn’t have worked was because you would have had to learn this whole sequence of strange incantations—Morse code in this case, dots and dashes in this case—to use the telegraph. And it took about forty hours to learn how to use Morse code. And a majority of people would never have learned how to use Morse code.
We’re in the same exact parallel situation today. Some people are saying we need to put an IBM PC on every desk in America to improve productivity. But it won’t work. The special incantations you have to learn this time are slash-qz’s and things like that. Most people are not going to learn slash-qz’s any more than they’re going to learn Morse code.
──人们不想学习使用命令行，这也是Linux在桌面端普及还不够好的原因And that’s what Macintosh is all about. It’s the first “telephone” of our industry. But the neatest thing about it to me is, the same as the telephone to the telegraph, Macintosh lets you sing. It lets you use special fonts. It lets you make drawings and pictures or incorporate other people’s drawings or pictures into your documents.
And it’s more fun. There’s always been this myth that really neat, fun people at home all of [a] sudden get very dull and boring and serious when they come to work, and it’s simply not true. So if we can again inject that liberal-arts spirit into this very serious realm of business, I think it would be a worthwhile contribution.
──确实，在工作的时候，不怎么开心It is 1958. IBM passes up the chance to buy a young, fledgling company that has invented a new technology called xerography. Two years later, Xerox is born. And IBM has been kicking themselves ever since.
──发现一个特点，乔布斯在公司内部与外部的讲话，基本是一样的例子，一样的内容，并没有做过太多的润色
It is ten years later, the late sixties. Digital Equipment [DEC] and others invent the minicomputer. IBM dismisses the minicomputer as too small to do serious computing, and therefore unimportant to their business. DEC grows to become a multi-hundred-million-dollar corporation before IBM finally enters the minicomputer market.
It is now ten years later, the late seventies. In 1977, Apple, a young, fledgling company on the West Coast, invents the Apple II, the first personal computer as we know it today. IBM dismisses the personal computer as too small to do serious computing and unimportant to their business.It is now 1984. It appears IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers initially welcoming IBM with open arms now fear an IBM-dominated and controlled future. They are increasingly and desperately turning back to Apple as the only force that can ensure their future freedom.
Well, we’re around automobiles our whole lives. I’ve never been a car guy, but I’ve always loved Volkswagen Beetles. I’ve always loved Volkswagen vans, actually, too.
Just a bunch of little things: wine labels, paintings in galleries. Just simple things. Not anything real profound, just lots and lots of little things. I don’t think my taste in aesthetics is that much different than a lot of other people’s. The difference is that I just get to be really stubborn about making things as good as we all know they can be. That’s the only difference.
──84年的乔布斯，居然喜欢的是甲壳虫车Well, things get more refined as you make mistakes. I’ve had a chance to make a lot of mistakes. Your aesthetics get better as you make mistakes. But the real big thing is: if you’re going to make something, it doesn’t take any more energy—and rarely does it take more money—to make it really great. All it takes is a little more time. Not that much more. And a willingness to do so, a willingness to persevere until it’s really great.
But aesthetics? I think aesthetics are a lot like singing. Joanie [Baez] has a beautiful voice, but the reason her voice is beautiful isn’t because her voice is just beautiful. It’s because she has an incredibly good ear. She can listen to somebody speak for thirty seconds and imitate their voice almost perfectly. Her ear is superb. And I think, in the same way, good aesthetics result from just your eye. An instinct of what you see, not so much what you do.
──过往的错误与自己的眼睛观察，能帮助你提升审美I want to build products that are inherently smaller than any of the products on the market today. And when you make things smaller, you have the ability to make them more precisely. Obviously, a perfect example of that is a watch. It’s beautiful, but the precision has to be the scale of the object itself, and so you make it very precise. And as our products get smaller, we have the opportunity to do that. So, obviously, I would like everything to be smaller.
I also think that it’s really nice to be able to carry products around. Even if they’re not portable, it’s very nice to be able to have a handle on them that says, “Pick me up and move me when you want to change where I am.” Carry them from room to room, or from office to office. Lisa’s too heavy to carry from office to office, or room to room, or home on the weekends. So the question is, “How do we find a way to package that same functionality into something that we can carry around with us and that is smaller, obviously—and be able to express the form of that more precisely?” That’s where we’re going in the future, those directions.
──好深的设计哲学，乔布斯已经都提出来了Yeah—pick any car before three years ago, you know? Pick most cars today. Anything. Just look around the room. Tables, chairs: all ugly. You can ask me, what am I doing in this office? But anyway, most things are not very nice.
The telephone’s a perfect example. The only telephone that’s ever been any good is the original one and the Trimline. The Trimline is the only decent one. What they’ve done to the new stuff is just garbage.
──因此乔布斯自己家里，没有家具Have you ever seen HP’s buildings over on Page Mill Road, the original ones? They’re really neat. They’ve got these scalloped roofs, and they face the glass north, and you can actually put solar collectors on them, if you wanted to. They stick out. In a building, they make a whole glass wall. And so people work down there, and they get tons of natural light coming in. Just tons.
The problem with these buildings [at Apple] is there’s no light. I mean, you spend five minutes outside, and you walk in here, it’s really dark, and you can’t see anything. And we’re all sort of like living in these little tiny caverns.
I just want a ton of natural light.
──Apple Park的设计理念！！这本书里，透露了好多！！！Well, the best response to that was the response given, I think, in Fortune, which was, “If seeing Big Brother in 1984 connotes IBM to a large number of people, that says more about IBM’s image problem than our intentions.”
In truth: of course, we saw the analogy. And I think that we were saying two things. I think the first thing we were saying was, this image of computers as sort of a centralized group of people having control of very powerful machines to keep track of us, that iconic fear in our minds—we were commenting on that cultural fear that we have.
And of course, one couldn’t—you’d have to be an idiot not to see the parallels to IBM.I personally, man, I want to build things. I’m thirty. I’m not ready to be an industry pundit. I got three offers to be a professor during this summer, and I told all of the universities that I thought I would be an awful professor. What I’m best at doing is finding a group of talented people and making things with them. I respect the direction that Apple is going in. But for me personally, you know, I want to make things. And if there’s no place for me to make things there, then I’ll do what I did twice before. I’ll make my own place. You know, I did it in the garage when Apple started, and I did it in the metaphorical garage when Mac started. ✂︎
Though the outside world looks at success from a numerical point of view, my yardstick might be quite different than that. My yardstick may be how every computer that’s designed from here on out will have to be at least as good as a Macintosh
To me, Apple exists in the spirit of the people that work there, and the sort of philosophies and purpose by which they go about their business. So if Apple just becomes a place where computers are a commodity item and where the romance is gone, and where people forget that computers are the most incredible invention that man has ever invented, then I’ll feel I have lost Apple. But if I’m a million miles away and all those people still feel those things and they’re still working to make the next great personal computer, then I will feel that my genes are still in there.
──感动You know, I’m not a sixty-two-year-old statesman that’s traveled around the world all his life. So I’m sure that there was a situation when I was twenty-five that if I could go back, knowing what I know now, I could have handled much better. And I’m sure I’ll be able to say the same thing when I’m thirty-five about the situation in 1985. I can be very intense in my convictions. And I don’t know—all in all, I kind of like myself, and I’m not that anxious to change.
──Jobs依然坚持他年轻时候的做法没有问题Yeah, yeah. I’m glad I didn’t do that. I know this is going to sound really, really corny. But I feel like I’m an American, and I was born here. And the fate of the world is in America’s hands right now. I really feel that. And you know, I’m going to live my life here and do what I can to help.
──潜意识里，总觉得美国人会拯救世界
Part II, 1985–1996 “You never achieve what you want without falling on your face a few times.”
Around the same time, Steve invested $10 million in a small company called Pixar. It was a tiny computer graphics operation, newly spun off from filmmaker George Lucas’s empire. The technical expertise at Pixar attracted Steve; its initial product was a high-end graphics computer that cost more than $100,000.
──居然Pixar第一款产品是电脑Both NeXT and Pixar quickly ran into trouble. The NeXT computer system, which debuted in 1988, was powerful and packed with the humanistic touches Steve loved. It was visually striking and intuitive to use, with high-quality audio and the complete works of Shakespeare built in. But it was also late to market and expensive—and it sold poorly. Within six years of NeXT’s launch, the entire founding team, other than Steve, had resigned.
──没钱的人，很难坚持自己的爱好Pixar, meanwhile, was eking out an existence selling computers and software and, later, animating commercials. The company was also making award-winning short films that charmed Steve. This use of technology in service of brilliant storytelling embodied one of his favorite things: work at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. The short films fired Steve’s enthusiasm and kept him writing check after check to Pixar, ultimately investing some $60 million.
──work at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. 科技与人文的十字路口，慢慢能懂得一些了Steve learned how to hone a company to its essence, even when it was painful. He shifted NeXT’s focus to selling software. The shift meant closing a factory and laying off more than two hundred of NeXT’s five hundred and thirty employees. Meanwhile, Pixar stripped away its advertising and hardware businesses and entered into an agreement with Disney, all to pursue what sometimes seemed an impossible dream: to make fully computer-animated feature films.
After nearly a decade of difficulty, the streamlined NeXT and Pixar both transformed into unlikely success stories. At the end of 1995, Pixar premiered Toy Story in the same month it held its initial public offering. A year later, Apple, in need of operating-system software, bought NeXT for $427 million. “If you really look closely,” Steve liked to say, “most overnight successes took a long time.”
──深以为然，即使强大如乔布斯，也花了10年的时间，才让人仿佛“一夜成名”I had been reading some biochemistry, recombinant DNA literature. [I had recently met] Paul Berg, the inventor of some of the recombinant techniques. I called him up, and I said, “You remember me. I’m ignorant about this stuff, but I’ve got a bunch of questions about how it works, and I’d love to have lunch with you.” So we had lunch at Stanford. He was showing me how they were doing gene repairing. Actually, it’s straightforward, it’s kind of neat. It smells a lot like some of the concepts you find in computer science. So he was explaining how he does experiments in a wet laboratory and they take a week or two or three to run. I asked him, “Why don’t you simulate these on a computer? Not only will it allow you to run your experiments faster, but someday every freshman microbiology student in the country can play with the Paul Berg recombinant software.” So his eyes lit up. And that was sort of a landmark lunch. Because that’s when I started to really think about this stuff and get my wheels turning again.
──原来乔布斯如此早也发掘了计算机对DNA、生化实验模拟的重要性I met Ed Catmull, who was running the computer division of Lucasfilm, in 1985. […] I’d been involved in graphics most of my life. The Apple II, though most people don’t remember, was the first real color computer that you could get your hands on. The Macintosh, obviously, was graphics. The LaserWriter was graphics. But it was all 2-D. We’d done some 3-D work at Apple, and I was certainly aware of the field—but the stuff that Ed and his team were doing was way ahead of anything I’d ever seen anyone do.
──乔布斯知道3D动画是好东西Our strategy in the early days of Pixar was: find a way to pay the bills. In the background, we were developing animation software, and John [Lasseter] was making the succession of short films on the way to Toy Story. But we were trying to pay the bills and just buy time. That strategy really turned out not to work. Probably if you look back in the rearview mirror, we would have been better off just funding the animation efforts and not trying to pay the bills through these other products, such as the Pixar Image Computer and software, but that was our best attempt to try to keep the company going. In the end, I just ended up writing checks to keep the company going—and that basically went on for ten years.
──能坚持写10年支票，也不容易......心理上、经济上You could see there was magic in [a Pixar animated short film], right from the beginning. With the rest of Pixar’s technology, you had to be an expert to understand it. [… But] you didn’t have to know anything about the technology to enjoy the film. It was incredibly refreshing and really pointed the way to where we wanted to go. We didn’t want to have to convince people that our technology was great—we knew it was great. We wanted to use our technology to make something where nobody needed to know anything about the technology to love it. And that’s what we ended up doing.
NEXT MEMO
17 March 1986
Our company is founded on the principal that a few good people can produce a tremendous product if they are not fettered by:
a) having to convince a larger organization of what they know is right, and
b) if they can devote their personal time to designing, marketing or what have you, rather than managing others to do these tasks less well.
To stay true to this principal, I propose the following two ideas:
1）We all need time for uninterrupted individual work. Meetings (vendors, interviews, ..) are eating into our individual time, and the productivity of our engineers is suffering.
propose we set aside every Thursday as a day with no mcetings of any kind. Thursday is our day, a day when we metaphorically lock the doors to the outside world and quietly work individually.
- In revising our headcount requirements (and subsequently budgets) downwards, I encourage you to remember that there is a very subtle line, which, when crossed in increased headcount, causes you to be a manager instead of a contributor/team leader. I believe that if we turn ourselves into managers instead of "do-ers", both our schedule and the "greatness" of our product will suffer. Let's not let this happen! Itis better to have fewer people, even if it means doing less. Let's build our company slowly and carefully.
Let's discuss these two ideas at our Staff meeting tommorrow. Thanks.
SJ
Well, we did it again. Congrats to all for a real TEAM effort. And, Pixar did it too.
For those of you who didn’t see the Academy Awards last night, Pixar won an award in the category of short animated films: for their computer generated film Tin Toy
Tin Toy is the first computer generated film to ever win an award, and was competing against several very good traditionally animated (non-computer-animated) films!
The computer graphics industry just achieved a major milestone, and Pixar led the way!
──好自豪啊I’ve always thought that people’s spark of self-consciousness turns on at about fifteen or sixteen. So if we normalize age to fifteen or sixteen, then most of you are two or three or four years old here, as freshmen. I’m about twenty. So that maybe puts in perspective what it’s like to return to Reed after so many years. But a few things stick in my mind that I wanted to pass on that maybe could be of some value. The first was that, as you will be shortly, I was forced to go to humanities lectures—it seemed like every day. I studied Shakespeare with Professor Svitavsky. And at the time, I thought these were meaningless and even somewhat cruel endeavors to be put through. I can assure you that as the patina of time takes its toll, I thank God that I had these experiences here. It has helped me in everything I’ve ever done, although I wouldn’t have ever guessed it at the time.
──人文The second experience that I remember from Reed is being hungry. All the time. The cafeteria here taught me quickly to be a vegetarian. I didn’t have so much money, so I would gather up Coke bottles and take them up to the store to find out how to eat. I discovered the cheapest way to eat was Roman Meal. Have you ever heard of this? It’s cereal. It was invented by a Harvard professor who was a history professor who one day wondered what the Roman legion took with them to eat as they conquered and pillaged these villages, and he found out through his research that it’s Roman Meal. And you can buy it at the local store, and it’s the cheapest way to live. So I lived for many months on Roman Meal.
The last experience I wanted to recount for you: there is a man—I think he’s here today—named Jack Dudman, who used to be the dean of the school. He was one of the heroes of my life while I was here, because Jack Dudman looked the other way when I was staying on campus without paying. He looked the other way when I was taking classes without being a formal student and paying the tuition. And oftentimes, when I was at the end of my rope, Jack would go for a walk with me, and I would discover a twenty-dollar bill in my tattered coat pocket after that walk, with no mention of it from Jack before, during, or after.
I learned more about generosity from Jack Dudman and the people here at this school than I learned anywhere else in my life. So I wanted to thank this community, because the things I learned here stayed with me. Character is built not in good times, but in bad times; not in a time of plenty, but in a time of adversity—and this school seems to manage to nurture that spirit of adversity, and I think does build some character. So I thank you for teaching me how to be hungry and how to keep that with me my whole life.
──逆境培养品性Andy Grove：(1995)
You may remember, that from time to time I offered suggestions that pertained to your business. Examples range from porting NextStep to the 486 - - which was in our interest too - - to my presentation to your staff on repositioning NextStep beyond that. I am not suggesting that these are comparable in value to your expertise in graphics, but I gave what I had, put some thought into the problem I saw you were facing - - and it never entered my mind to charge for it. In my view, that’s what friendly companies (and friends) do for each other. In the long run, these things balance out.
──────
Steve Jobs：
I have many faults, but one of them is not ingratitude. And, I do agree with you that “In the long run, these things balance out.”
Therefore, I have changed my position 180 degrees - - we will freely help [Engineer 1] make his processors much better for 3D graphics. Please ask [Engineer 1] to call me, and we will arrange for a meeting as soon as the appropriate Pixar technical folks can be freed up from the film.
Thanks for the clearer perspective.
Steve
──注意其中的时间，1995年，苹果是从2005-2006启动到Intel处理器的转换，直到2009年转换完成，说明苹果至少提前10年在规划、构思自己的Mac芯片
──Mac transition to Intel processors：https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_transition_to_Intel_processors?useskin=vectorI think most large companies and medium-size companies (and even small companies) are starting to look at the web as the ultimate direct-to-customer distribution chain, bypassing all middlemen, going directly from the supplier to the consumer. That’s a pretty powerful concept when you think about it. One of the things that I love is that a very small company, if they invest a lot in their website, can look just as formidable and just as solid on the web as a very large company can. As a matter of fact, some of the smaller companies are more hip on the web, getting more hip to the web sooner, and so they actually look better than some of the large companies do right now. It’s going to be this very leveling phenomenon, but I think a tremendous amount of goods and services is going to be sold, or at least the demand created for such things, over the web. （产品随想注：1996年）
──亚马逊是1994年出现的，大多数生产货物的公司，并没有直接建立网站面向消费者，而是选择了中间商亚马逊，说明大部分还是觉得门槛有点高SJ: It’s not just shopping for goods and services. It’s shopping for information. I mean, you’re going to find out … Already, when I want to find out the movies that are playing around Silicon Valley, I just go up on the local web page and check it out. It’s a lot faster than going through the newspaper, and a lot faster than calling the theaters, et cetera. More and more, we’re shopping for information on the web. I just recently bought a Sony, one of the new Sony camcorders. I went on Sony’s web page, and I found out all about the ones they offer and picked the one I wanted right from that web page before I even called the store to try to find it physically. The demand to get me to buy that thing was created from Sony’s web page. I think we’re going to see more and more of that. You’re going to be buying information or finding information, and really making a lot of decisions about what you’re going to do with your life, or what you’re going to purchase, from the web.
──“The demand to get me to buy that thing was created from Sony’s web page.”，充满洞见，如今淘宝、小红书的逛的体验、种草的体验，并不稀奇，乔布斯1996年就已经提出来了There’s some software right now that’s still very large. The web on-ramps and off-ramps to corporations are now very fast, but the off-ramps to the consumers’ homes are still not so fast. For buying large software, such as CD-ROM games and stuff, they’ll still be distributed on physical media for a while, but when the off-ramps to the consumer get faster, possibly with cable modems in the near future, then that could possibly go fully electronic as well.
I try not to talk about Apple too much. What I will say is that the day I left Apple, we had a ten-year lead over Microsoft. In the technology business, a ten-year lead is really hard to come by. It happens, maybe a company has that once every few decades, whether it be Xerox or IBM with mainframes. Apple had that with the graphical user interface. The problem at Apple was that they stopped innovating. If you look at the Mac that ships today, it’s 25 percent different than the day I left, and that’s not enough for ten years and billions of dollars in R&D.
──当乔布斯看到如今的iPhone, 15年后仍然和之前差不多，不知道他会如何评价It wasn’t that Microsoft was so brilliant or clever in copying the Mac. It’s that the Mac was a sitting duck for ten years. That’s Apple’s problem, is that their differentiation evaporated. Unlike Compaq, or others who play in the Intel-Microsoft standard space, where they only … Compaq only has to be 5 percent better than its competitors for everyone to want to buy their computers.
──然后乔布斯招聘了Compaq的COOApple has to be 50 percent or 100 percent better, because when you buy something that is out of the mainstream a little bit, you take a risk, and you want a much bigger reward for taking that risk. […] That differentiation has not completely evaporated, but for the most part it has. That’s the predicament Apple’s in now. That’s why cost-cutting and other things at Apple are not going to be the cure. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament. There’s a lot of good people left at Apple that are capable of doing that with the proper leadership, which is what’s been missing.
──深刻I usually believe that if one group of people didn’t do something, within a certain number of years, the times would produce another group of people that would accomplish similar things. We happened to be at the right place, at exactly the right time, with the right group of people. We did some wonderful work. I’m extraordinarily proud of the work that the team at Apple did when I was there. I think that, personally, our major contribution was a little different than some people might think. I think our major contribution was in bringing a liberal arts point of view to the use of computers.
──liberal arts，这个词好难翻译为中文，乔布斯坚持了数十年What I mean by that is that if you really look at the ease of use of the Macintosh, the driving motivation behind that was to bring—not only ease of use to people so that many, many more people could use computers for nontraditional things at that time—but it was to bring beautiful fonts and typography to people. It was to bring graphics to people, not for plotting laminar flow calculations, but so that they could see beautiful photographs, or pictures, or artwork, et cetera, to help them communicate what they were doing, potentially. Our goal was to bring a liberal arts perspective and a liberal arts audience to what had traditionally been a very geeky technology and a very geeky audience.
Because in my perspective, and the way I was raised, was that science and computer science is a liberal art. It’s something that everyone should know how to use, at least, and harness in their life. It’s not something that should be relegated to 5 percent of the population over in the corner. It’s something that everybody should be exposed to, everyone should have a mastery of, to some extent, and that’s how we viewed computation, or these computation devices.
That’s the seed of Apple: computers for the rest of us. I think the liberal arts point of view still lives at Apple. I’m not so sure that it lives that many other places. I mean, one of the reasons I think Microsoft took ten years to copy the Mac was because they didn’t really get it at its core.
TG: Do you think the PC, as we know it, is on the road of changing?
SJ: That’s a really big question. I think the PC as we know it is going to be around for quite some time, but the heart of the question is, are we entering a time window where we might see the first successful post-PC devices? Personal digital assistants, or PDAs, attempted to be that and failed.
The next attempt, I think, is going to be these very low-cost consumer internet appliances. Can somebody make a three-hundred-dollar box that hooks up to your television on one side and maybe hooks up to ISDN or a cable modem on the other side and allows you for, three hundred dollars, to have a web browser on your TV and to access the entire internet? I think that’s entirely possible, and I think that we’re going to see those devices soon, hopefully some innovative marketing and distribution techniques surrounding those devices so that a lot of people can all of a sudden have an internet browser in their living room. I think that’s going to be very exciting, and I think that could be the beginning of the first real post-PC market.
──乔布斯已经开始畅想后PC时代的消费电子设备，在他设想里，Apple TV是带有浏览器的，但最后实现他想法的是iPhone，但Vision Pro会延续他的想法“people can all of a sudden have an internet browser in their living room”Well, I don’t know what a corporate lifestyle is. I mean, Apple was a corporation; we were very conscious of that. We were very driven to make money so that we could continue to invest in the things we loved. I would say Apple was a corporate lifestyle, but it had a few very big differences to other corporate lifestyles that I’d seen. The first one was a real belief that there wasn’t a hierarchy of ideas that mapped onto the hierarchy of the organization. In other words, great ideas could come from anywhere and that we better sort of treat people in a much more egalitarian sense, in terms of where the ideas came from.
And Apple was a very bottoms-up company when it came to a lot of its great ideas. And we hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. A lot of companies—I know it sounds crazy—but a lot of companies don’t do that. They hire people to tell them what to do. We hired people to tell us what to do. We figured we’re paying them all this money, their job is to figure out what to do and tell us. And that led to a very different corporate culture, and one that’s really much more collegial than hierarchical.
──里面有非常多的理念，1）努力赚钱是为了确保能在我们热爱的东西上继续投资；2）优秀的点子非常脆弱，需要平等、呵护---这点和Ivy提到的是一致的；3）雇人是为了让新人来告诉我们做什么、怎么做，而不是来帮助执行Well, we were very young, and most of the folks were not married, and so they could work fifteen-hour days. You didn’t have a typical situation where you worked so that you can support your life. Your work was your life, in many cases.
──然后5年后，初创团队全部离开了NextI feel it is still my life, but it’s not all my life. It’s less of a percentage, but I still don’t really … I’ve never been able to think of my work and my life as different things. They’re the same thing. Where it used to be 99 percent of my life, it’s maybe 50 percent of my life now.
──这种感觉真好，工作就是在生活The two endpoints of everyone’s rainbow are birth and death. We all experience both completely alone. And yet, most people of your age have not thought about these events very much, much less even seen them in others. How many of you have seen the birth of another human? It is a miracle. And how many of you have witnessed the death of a human? It is a mystery beyond our comprehension. No human alive knows what happens to “us” upon or after our death. Some believe this, others that, but no one really knows at all. Again, most people of your age have not thought about these events very much, and it’s as if we shelter you from them, afraid that the thought of mortality will somehow wound you. For me it’s the opposite: to know my arc will fall makes me want to blaze while I am in the sky. Not for others, but for myself, for the trail I know I am leaving.
Now, as you live your arc across the sky, you want to have as few regrets as possible. Remember, regrets are different from mistakes. Mistakes are those things that you did and wish you could do over again. In some you were a fool (usually concerning women). In others you were scared. In others you hurt someone else. Some mistakes are deep, others not. But if your intent was pure, they are almost always enriching in some way. So mistakes are things that you did and wish you could do over again.
Regrets are most often things you didn’t do, and wish you did. I still regret not kissing Nancy Kinniman in high school. Who knows what might have happened? Maybe she regrets it too …
──Mistakes are those things that you did, and wish you could do over again. Regrets are most often things you didn't do, and wish you did. 精辟Be aware of the world’s magical, mystical, and artistic sides. The most important things in life are not the goal-oriented, materialistic things that everyone and everything tries to convince you to strive for. Most of you know that deep inside. Think back on this spring—the last three or four months—when you are winding down high school, know where you are going next year, and begin to really have strong intuitions about the world you will encounter. Maybe you see an image of yourself in Paris, sculpting in an artist’s studio as the setting sun shines in the paned windows. Maybe you’re in India, running a hospital for poor children, and you hear the distant clatter of the outdoor marketplace in the early morning. Maybe you see yourself in a recording studio laying down a track for your album. Maybe you see yourself alone in a rented room at 4:30 in the morning being the only person alive to understand a new law of physics you just figured out.
Whatever it may be, I bet many of you have had some of these intuitive feelings about what you could do with your lives. These feelings are very real, and if nurtured can blossom into something wonderful and magical. A good way to remember these kinds of intuitive feelings is to walk alone near sunset—and spend a lot of time looking at the sky in general. We are never taught to listen to our intuitions, to develop and nurture our intuitions. But if you do pay attention to these subtle insights, you can make them come true.Be a creative person. Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights that others don’t see.
You have to have them to connect them. Creative people feel guilty that they are simply relaying what they “see.” How do you get a more diverse set of experiences? Not by traveling the same path as everyone else …
I’ll give you an example. The college I went to was a small liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, named Reed College. It was, at that time, the center of a calligraphy revival movement in the US. I ended up taking a calligraphy course before I left college, and at the age of eighteen was exposed to a totally new world of typography, graphic layout, font design, and the like. There was no hope of earning any income from this skill or knowledge, and some of my friends derided me for wasting my time and talents on learning how to write with “fancy letters.”
──这些思考，在最后都汇总在了斯坦福大学演讲里了However, years later, when we were designing the Macintosh, it was this very same experience and set of insights which drove me to insist that we find a way to use proportionally spaced type and offer a range of fonts—in essence, to bring a much richer world of typography to the computer world than had ever existed before. And this also led to the LaserWriter printer, so that one could print these letterforms with the quality they deserved. And this set the stage for “desktop publishing.” I tell you truly: none of this would have ever happened at Apple if I had sacrificed that calligraphy class for a more “substantive” class of economics or engineering.
──桌面出版，所见即所得So to be a creative person, you need to “feed” or “invest” in yourself by exploring uncharted paths that are outside the realm of your past experience. Seek out new dimensions of yourself—especially those that carry a romantic scent.
But one has no way of knowing which of these paths will lead anywhere in advance. That’s the wonderful thing about it, in a way. The only thing one can do is to believe that some of what you follow with your heart will indeed come back to make your life much richer. And it will. And you will gain an ever firmer trust in your instincts and intuition.
──去体会、去投资你自己的精神[The] risk factor quotient goes down as you encounter the real world. Many [people] find what they believe to be safe harbors (lawyers and accountants), only to wake up ten or fifteen years later and discover the price they paid.
──在中国，考公务员、国企员工，也是一个数年后会让你付出深深代价的选择Make your avocation your vocation. Make what you love your work.
The journey is the reward. People think that you’ve made it when you’ve gotten to the end of the rainbow and got the pot of gold. But they’re wrong. The reward is in the crossing the rainbow. That’s easy for me to say—I got the pot of gold (literally). But if you get to the pot of gold, you already know that that’s not the reward, and you go looking for another rainbow to cross.
──关键的是旅程、旅途Well, Pixar is a studio. I’m not a filmmaker. I don’t direct our films. […] What I try to do is help create the environment where all these incredible people can make films. We’ve got a really unique thing in the industry, in that the very best creative people will only go to work at a few places: Disney, Pixar, possibly DreamWorks. In the same sense, the very best computer scientists in computer graphics will only go to work at a few places. Pixar is one of those, but most of the studios are not because they don’t have [our] level of technical culture there. I think Pixar is the only place in the world that can hire the best from both of these areas. And we’ve worked for ten years to figure out a way to have them all work together, which is not easy, because the Hollywood culture and the Silicon Valley culture are really different. We think we’ve picked the best from both.
And while there’s a lot of reasons to want to lock down your employees for the duration of a film, because if somebody leaves, you know you’re at risk, those same dangers exist in Silicon Valley. During an engineering project, you don’t want to lose people, and yet [Silicon Valley] managed to evolve another system other than contracts. And we prefer the Silicon Valley model in this case: give people stock in the company so that we all have the same goal, which is to create shareholder value.
──好莱坞用大棒-即合同留住员工，而硅谷用萝卜-即股票留住员工So a strange thing happens: the hierarchy of power sort of inverts, and the CEO is actually at the bottom. I sort of feel like I work for most of these people because they’re the ones that are doing all the brilliant work.
And it’s the same in software. It’s the same thing. The best people are very hard to come by, and so it’s management’s job to support them because they’re on the front lines doing the work.
──非常有洞见的视角What we’re trying to do is to build a great animation studio. We stay very focused on that. The other great animation studio is, of course, Disney. And they’ve done an incredible job. Feature animation is really at the heart of Disney; they’ve created all the character franchises that really breathe life into the theme parks. And if you look at where [Disney’s] profits come from, a tremendous amount of it is dependent on feature animation, as are the theme parks.
──迪斯尼的财报，也需要研究学习What we’re doing is just a pure play to build a feature animation studio. My role is to try to understand the pieces we need to put in place to do that, to work with everybody to attract and retain the people to do that, and to get a clear strategy in place. And [I] help with the relationships with Disney and other people.
──CEO的角色Walt Disney realized many decades ago that animation was so expensive that you couldn’t afford to animate ten times more than what you need. Matter of fact, you don’t want to animate even 10 percent more than what you need. And therefore, the only conclusion you can come to is, you have to edit your film before you make it. Disney pioneered a lot of techniques for doing that, and they’ve refined those over the last sixty years.
Working with Disney gave us access to that wisdom that you can’t buy for love or money: the wisdom and experience of having made tens of feature animated films. And I think we learned a tremendous amount.
──从迪斯尼获得的帮助，其实和乔布斯从Intel格鲁夫那里获得帮助，一样的珍贵Ten years ago, when we made the landmark short film Luxo Jr., it took about three hours on average to render each frame. Fast-forward to today. Computers are a hundred times faster, and yet in Toy Story it took three hours on average to render each frame. And the reason was the frames were a hundred times more complex in many cases.
──原来渲染一帧需要三小时.....On the creative side, though, I think the art of storytelling is very old. And no amount of technology can turn a bad story into a good story. […] Storytelling is a real art, and that’s something that we’re always going to be working on very, very hard. I don’t think it’s changed in a long time, and I’m not sure it will. And I don’t think it’s something that the technology has anything to do with.
You can hardly find an Apple II around too much anymore. You still can in the schools, but that’s about it. It’s not clear whether you’ll be able to boot up a Macintosh five years from now or not. All these technology boxes and all this software: it has a life of a year or two, if you’re very lucky. If it has a life of five years, it’s extraordinary. And every once in a while, something has a life of ten to fifteen years—and I’ve been lucky to be associated with a few of those products as well. But sooner or later, they all become part of the sedimentary layer that is the foundation for new innovation.
──乔布斯看待电子产品消亡的思路，和他看待死亡的思路，其实是一脉相承的[By contrast] Disney released its first animated feature film, Snow White, in 1937. That’s sixty years ago. A few years ago, they rereleased it on video and sold 28 million copies, making probably around a quarter billion dollars of profits—sixty years after its initial release!
And I have a young son. We got Snow White, and he loved it. He watched it thirty, forty times. And it really struck me that I know people on most of the continents of this world, and I think everyone I know knows the story of Snow White. I don’t think I know one person who hasn’t seen it.
Watching my son watch this, it really hit me that these stories renew themselves with each generation of young children. You read Joseph Campbell; these are our myths. Here’s something that’s sixty years old that’s regenerating itself in my son and other young children.
And I think people are going to be watching Toy Story in sixty years. Not because of the computer graphics, but because of the story about friendship. And that’s something really amazing to me, something very different than the industry I worked in in the past.
──故事却不像消费电子，它能让人一遍又一遍地看，总能触达一代又一代人的心灵
──给我们普通人的启发是：那些不能影响你心灵，让你看2遍的影视内容，其实都不大值得你去看
──这才是我认为乔布斯始终愿意坚持皮克斯的原因To have the opportunity to put these stories into the culture like this, if we can work really hard and be lucky again and again, is a rare opportunity. And I think everybody at Pixar feels really, really privileged to have this opportunity.
I am told that around 40 of us are feeling uncomfortable coming to the Pixar Holiday Waltz because we don’t have a guest or because we feel it’s a “hoity toity*” affair that does not reflect “who we are.”
I think very few of us belong to the waltz crowd, nor often attend formal affairs like this (my last waltz was ten years ago). That’s exactly why this promises to be so much fun – it’s a chance to see ourselves and our colleagues in a strange costume (tuxedo) doing a totally foreign activity (waltzing). This may be your last chance during this lifetime to see your favorite TD trying to dance in a tuxedo.
As for being single, all I can say is that cutting in on a lovely lady or elegant gentleman during a waltz is considered proper and flattering. You might also enjoy the food, music, friends and ambience.
I do hope those of you not planning to attend reconsider joining your friends and colleagues at our Pixar Holiday Waltz. We will miss you if you don’t come. What do you have to lose? You just might love it.
Steve
──如何优雅地邀请员工参加华尔兹，哈哈哈Steve Jobs: You’d better have great people, or you won’t get your product to market as fast as possible. Or you might get a product to market really fast, but it will be really clunky and nobody will buy it. There are no shortcuts around quality, and quality starts with people. Maybe shortcuts exist, but I’m not smart enough to have ever found any.
I spend 20 percent of my time recruiting, even now. I spend a day a week helping people recruit. It’s one of the most important things you can do.
──在乔布斯眼中，Design和Marketing至关重要Ultimately the results should lead you to the people. As a matter of fact, that’s how I find great people. I look at great results and I find out who was responsible for them.
However, sometimes young people haven’t had the opportunity yet to be in a position of influence to create such results. So here you must evaluate potential. It’s certainly more difficult, but the primary attributes of potential are intelligence and the ability to learn quickly.
──所以苹果的招人思路，永远都是找到那些做出了伟大产品的人Ultimately it comes down to your gut feeling. Your gut feeling gets refined as you hire more people and see how they do. Some you thought would do well don’t, and you can sense why. If you study it a bit you might say, “I thought this person was going to do well, but I overlooked this aspect,” or, “I didn’t think this person would do well, but they did and here’s why.” As you hire people over time, your gut instinct gets better and more precise.
──招人也是需要持续锻炼与思考的点Over time, my digging in during an interview gets more precise. For example, many times in an interview I will purposely upset someone: I’ll criticize their prior work. I’ll do my homework, find out what they worked on and say, “God, that really turned out to be a bomb. That really turned out to be a bozo product. Why did you work on that?” I shouldn’t say this in your book, but the worst thing that someone can do in an interview is to agree with me and knuckle under.
What I look for is for someone to come right back and say, “You’re dead wrong and here’s why.” I want to see what people are like under pressure. I want to see if they just fold or if they have firm conviction, belief, and pride in what they did. It’s also good every once in a while to really piss somebody off in an interview to see how they react because, if your company is a meritocracy of ideas, with passionate people, you have a company with a lot of arguments. If people can’t stand up and argue well under pressure, they may not do well in such an environment.
──寻找那些真正坚持自己想法的人My strength probably is that I’ve always viewed technology from a liberal arts perspective, from a human culture perspective. As such, I’ve always pushed for things that pulled technology in those directions by bringing insights from other fields. An example of that would be—with the Macintosh—desktop publishing: its proportionately spaced fonts, its ease of use. All of the desktop publishing stuff on the Mac comes from books: the typography, that rich feel that nobody in computers knew anything about. I think that my other strength is that I’m a pretty good judge of people and have the ability to bring people together around common vision.
──太厉害了，乔布斯的两点长处，他自己显然都知道In certain cases, my weaknesses are that I’m too idealistic. [I need to] realize that sometimes best is the enemy of better. Sometimes I go for “best” when I should go for “better,” and end up going nowhere or backwards. I’m not always wise enough to know when to go for the best and when to just go for better. Sometimes I’m blinded by “what could be” versus “what is possible,” doing things incrementally versus doing them in one fell swoop. Balancing the ideal and the practical is something I still must pay attention to.
──sometimes best is the enemy of better.Well, I think that—ultimately, it’s the work that motivates people. I sometimes wish it were me, but it’s not. It’s the work. My job is to make sure the work is as good as it should be and to get people to stretch beyond their best. But it’s ultimately the work that motivates people. That’s what binds them together.
SJ: Well, I’m not sure I’d chalk that up to charisma. Part of the CEO’s job is to cajole and beg and plead and threaten at times—to do whatever is necessary to get people to see things in a bigger and more profound way than they have, and to do better work than they thought they could do.
When they do their best and you don’t think it’s enough, you tell them straight: “This isn’t good enough. I know you can do better. You need to do better. Now go do better.”
You must play those cards carefully. You must be right a lot of the time because you’re messing with people’s lives. But that’s part of the job. In the end, it’s the environment you create, the coworkers, and the work that binds. The Macintosh team, if you talk to most of them—a dozen years since we shipped the product—most will still say that working on the Mac was the most meaningful experience of their lives. If we’d never shipped a product they wouldn’t say that. If the product hadn’t been so good they wouldn’t say that. The Macintosh experience wasn’t just about going to camp with a bunch of fun people. It wasn’t just a motivational speaker. It was the product that everybody put their heart and soul into, and it was the product that expressed their deep appreciation, somehow, for the world to see.
──核心是那些倾注了心灵与灵魂的产品，让人们如此珍惜过往的工作履历So, in the end, it’s the work that binds. That’s why it’s so important to pick very important things to do because it’s very hard to get people motivated to make a breakfast cereal. It takes something that’s worth doing.
──难怪我也一直都不喜欢洗碗、做饭Today Apple announced that it is acquiring NeXT! This is great for Apple -- it gives them a very advanced object-oriented operating system, OpenStep, that can leapfrog Microsoft Windows.