Transcripts and translations of Steve Jobs’s youth talk show

1995 was the low point of Jobs' career. This documentary was left in the garage by the director for sixteen years and was not found until shortly after Steve Jobs's death. Through it, we fill in the last blank of the "Jobs Code".

Only a team that can make noise can grind out beautiful stones

Every time (new product plan) starts, we have a lot of great ideas, and the team is very enthusiastic about them Believe in the idea. At this moment, I will always think of a scene from my childhood.

There was a widowed man on the street. He was eighty years old. I remember he paid me to mow the grass for him. One day he said, come to my garage, I have something to show you. , he pulled out the old stone grinder, with only a motor, coffee can and a belt connecting the two on the shelf.

We went to the backyard and checked some stones, some ordinary, old, small and inconspicuous stones. We threw the stones into the jar, poured some water, added some coarse sand powder, closed the jar, and he opened it. Ma Da said, "Let's see again tomorrow."

I came back the next day and opened the jar and took out a stunning and beautiful stone!

It was just an ordinary stone. After rubbing against each other and sharpening each other, Making a little noise and turning it into a beautiful, smooth stone is something I've always had in my mind.

In my mind, this metaphor best represents a team that strives for its ideals. Gather a group of talented partners and let them clash, argue, and even quarrel with each other. This will make some noise, but in the process of working, they will make each other better, and their ideas will become better, and in the end they will make each other better. Will produce these beautiful stones.

Later I joined a group at HP. I called Bill Hewlett at Hewlett-Packard when I was twelve, which was another sign of my age. There were no hidden numbers in the phone book at the time, so I opened the phone book and looked up his name. When he answered the phone, I said, "Hi, my name is Steve Jobs, you don't know me, I'm twelve years old, and I'm making a frequency counter and need some parts."

That's what he said He talked to me for twenty minutes, something I will never forget in my lifetime, and not only did he give me parts, but he also gave me a job.

When I was twelve years old that summer, I worked at HP, which had a great impact on me. HP was the only company I had ever seen at that age. It shaped my concept of the company and made me realize How well they treat their employees.

People didn’t know about cholesterol at that time. They would put out a big cart of donuts and coffee at ten o’clock every morning, and everyone would take a break to eat donuts and coffee. It was little things like this. The company clearly realizes that its true value lies in its employees.

The self-esteem of A-level talents does not need your care

I observed something at Apple very early on. I often think about it, but I don’t know how to explain it.

In most things in life, the difference between the mediocre and the top is usually only two to one. If you take a car with an average driver in New York and compare it with the best driver, the best driver may make you faster. Arrive at destination in 30 hours.

How much is the difference between an average car and a top-notch car? Maybe 20. What's the difference between a top-end CD player and an average CD player? I don't know, maybe 20. Therefore, two to one is a huge difference in life. However, as far as software is concerned, the difference between mediocre and top-notch software may be fifty to one, or even one hundred to one. This situation is rare in life. I am very lucky to spend my life doing this. on the field.

So most of my success comes from finding truly talented people. Not B-level or C-level talents, but real A-level talents.

When you gather enough top talent, and you go through so much trouble to find five people who really enjoy working together, who have never had the opportunity to do this before, they don’t want to deal with second-tier talent** *The thing is, it becomes an act of self-discipline and they just want to hire more top talent.

If you find really great talents, they know they are really great, and you don’t need to protect their self-esteem. What really matters is work performance. Everyone knows that the most important thing is work. Performance.

I think the most important thing you can do for them is to tell them what's not good enough, and make it very clear, explain why, and then get them back on track.

You have to say it in a way that doesn't make them think you're questioning their abilities, but you also can't leave them too much room to explain why it's not good enough. It's hard, so I always use the most direct method. If you talk to people who have worked with me, the really outstanding people, they feel that this method is beneficial to them, and some people really hate this method.

I will sometimes call someone's work a piece of shit, but usually just point out that they are nowhere near good enough.

If you ask members of the Macintosh team, many will say that they have never worked so hard. Some will say that it was their happiest time, but everyone will say that this is definitely the most intense time in their lives. It is also the most precious experience.

The real magic is to use 5,000 ideas to create a product

After I left, the most damaging thing to Apple was Scully (former CEO of Apple) ) made a very serious mistake: thinking that as long as you have a great idea, everything will be 90% done. You just tell other people, here's a great idea, and they come back to the office to make it happen.

The problem is that turning a good idea into a good product requires a lot of processing.

As you continue to improve the original "great idea", the concept will continue to grow.

Change, and the result is usually different than what you first thought: because the deeper you go into the details, the more you learn.

You will also find out. You have to make difficult trade-offs to achieve your goals: some functions are just not suitable for electronic products, some functions are just not suitable for plastic or glass materials, or factories just can't do it.

When designing a product, you may have to remember more than 5,000 things in your mind. Put these concepts together and try to make these ideas work together in a new way to achieve the effect you want.

Every day you will discover something new. This represents both new problems and new opportunities. Making the final combination a little different is the real "process" and where the real magic lies.

The key factor in making good products is not being good at managing processes

In 1984, we hired a bunch of people from Hewlett-Packard (to design graphical interface computers). I remember talking to some people about it. Have a fight. They thought the coolest user interface would be a software keyboard at the bottom of the screen. They had no concept of proportionally spaced fonts or a mouse.

They yelled at me that the mouse would take five years to design and cost three hundred dollars. Finally I had enough, so I went out and found David Kelly Design, and within ninety days I had a mouse that cost $15 and worked reliably.

I found that Apple lacks this kind of talent in some aspects and can focus on talents who grasp this idea. It's true that there needs to be a core team, but a team composed of HP people obviously won't work.

This has nothing to do with the dark side of professionalism, this is because people have lost their direction (referring to the HP team's inability to think in multiple directions), and as the company grows larger, they want to replicate the initial success. Many people believed that there must be something magical about the original success process, so they began to try to turn the successful experience into a system.

Soon people were confused, why did the system itself become the answer? This is why IBM failed. IBM has the best system managers, but they forgot that the purpose of designing the process is to find the best answers.

Apple is also in this situation. We have many people who are good at managing processes but don’t know how to find the answers. The best people have the best answers, but they are the hardest people to manage and you have to tolerate them.

Will find the answer - this is the key factor of a good product, not the management process but the answer itself.

We’re not shy about stealing great ideas

Where do my instincts about products come from, you ask?

It ultimately boils down to taste, and it’s about taste question. The point is to expose yourself to the best of humanity and try to incorporate that into what you're doing. I mean, Picasso once said, "Good artists copy, great artists steal," and we're not shy about stealing great ideas.

I think the reason for the success of the Macintosh is that its creators are musicians, poets and artists, zoologists and historians. They also happen to be the best computer scientists in the world. If they had not devoted themselves to computers, Science, they will all have outstanding achievements in other fields, and we all bring a humanistic touch to computers. This humanistic attitude allows us to bring in ideas from other fields, which is impossible to do with a narrow vision.

We can make a small thing that controls something huge.

I first came into contact with computers when I was about ten years old. I saw them at the NASA Ames Research Center. Computers at that time had no graphic display at all. They were actually printers, teletype printers with keyboards. You could type in commands, wait a while, and the machine would start running and tell you the answer. But even so it’s amazing.

You have heard the subsequent story, we read it in "Esquire" magazine. There was a guy named Captain Church who supposedly made free calls. We were fascinated by this again: How could anyone do this? One night, deep in the technical library of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, on the last bookshelf in a corner, we found the technical journal of AT&T , the entire principle is listed above. That was a moment I'll never forget!

It was amazing! We made these little boxes, the contraptions were called "blue boxes," and we added a little note at the bottom. Our slogan is "Control the whole world with one hand."

You can use a public telephone to go to White Plains through the network backbone, then take the satellite to Europe and then to Turkey, and then return to Atlanta via cable. You can travel around the world five or six times. Because we learned how to connect to satellites, you could call the public phone number next door and yell into the phone, and a minute later the voice would appear on the phone next door. It's that amazing!

You might ask, where's the fun in this? The funny thing is that we are young and we learn that we can single-handedly build devices that control billions of dollars of construction. It’s just the two of us, and you know we don’t know much, so it’s an incredibly valuable experience to make a small thing that can control a huge thing.

If it weren’t for this blue box, I don’t think Apple computers would exist.

To test the blue box’s ability to make free international calls, we did make a call to the Pope. We found the Vatican's phone number, and then Wozniak (Apple founder) pretended to be Kissinger and called the Pope, which woke up the entire Vatican.

I have no idea what a cardinal is. We finally couldn't stop laughing when they sent someone to wake up the Pope and they realized we were not Kissinger. We never got to speak to the Pope, but it was really interesting.

I have never started a business for money

The company has already had an exclusive market position and it is impossible to succeed again. Therefore, the people who can make the company more successful are the sales and marketing personnel. So they end up running the company, and the product people are pushed out of the decision-making circle, and the company forgets the importance of making great products. In the beginning, their product acumen and creativity allowed them to dominate the market, but later they disappeared because of their managers. They have no idea about the quality of products, they don’t understand the process of turning good ideas into good products, and they don’t really want to help customers——

After so many years in the industry, I often ask others: The answer to why you do certain things is: that’s just the way it is. No one knows why they do this.

No one really thinks carefully when doing business. This is my experience and understanding.

So if you are willing to ask questions, think carefully, and work hard, you can quickly learn to do business. It is not that difficult.

I was twenty-three when I was worth over a million dollars; I was worth over ten million dollars when I was twenty-four; I was worth over a hundred million dollars when I was twenty-five. But money is not that important, because I never started a business for money. Of course, having money is great because it gives you the ability to do a lot of things.

You can invest in creativity and ideas that cannot be recovered in the short term. The most important thing is the company, the people, the products we make and the benefits the products bring to people, so I don’t often put money in my heart. . You know I haven't sold a single stock, I truly believe the company is going to be great in the long term.

When I was a kid, I read an article in "Scientist" magazine that measured the efficiency of movement of various species on the earth, including bears, chimpanzees, raccoons, birds and fish - how much do they spend per kilometer? Card move? Human beings also accepted the test.

The result is that the vulture wins, it is the most efficient species, while the human performance of the spirit of all things is not very impressive, ranking only in the top third or so. But someone was smart and knew how to measure the efficiency of human cycling, which allowed the vulture to dominate the entire rankings.

I remember this had a profound impact on me: I remember that humans are tool builders, and that the tools we build can greatly enhance our innate abilities. In the early years, Apple actually had such an advertisement, saying that personal computers are bicycles for the soul. I sincerely believe that among all human inventions, the computer ranks high, and it will certainly be so in the future, as the greatest tool we have ever invented. I was lucky enough to be there and watch it take shape in Silicon Valley.

In space travel, nothing can make the difference between a thousand miles. If you can adjust the course slightly when setting off, it will make a huge difference in space. I feel like we're still at the beginning of a course, and if we can adjust in the right direction, it will evolve into something better, and we have the opportunity to make a few adjustments, which brings great satisfaction to everyone involved.

I am obviously a hippie, and everyone I fuck with is also a hippie

If I had to choose, I am obviously a hippie, and anyone I fuck with is a hippie People who do things are also hippies.

What is hippie? This is an ancient word with rich meanings.

There is a side of life that people don’t often talk about: we only experience it when there is a gap in life. At that time, everything seems chaotic, as if there is a gap. Many people throughout history have asked you to find out what that is, whether it's Thoreau or the Indian mystics, and there was a little bit of that in the hippie movement, they wanted to find out what that was, the answer to life.

Life is not about following the same path as your parents. Ideas sprout from this, so people want to be poets instead of bankers. I think this is a wonderful thing. I want to put the same spirit into the products so that when these products come out and get into people's hands, they can feel this spirit.

Everyone who used a Mac fell in love with it, whereas you rarely hear about people falling in love with merchandise. You can feel its presence, and there is some wonderful spirit in it. Most of the top people I've worked with didn't get into it because of computers. They got into it because it's the best medium to convey feelings, because you want to share it with others.