Steve Jobs 《The Lost Interview》观影笔记
interview summary as followings:
1, And you might ask what so interesting about what . What so interesting is that we were young.and what we learned was that we could build something,ourselves, that could control billions of dollars worth of infrastructure in the world. That was what we leared, was that , us, two, you know, we didn't know much. we could build the little thing that could control a giant thing.
3, so we use programming in the work, but much more importantly, it does nothing to do with using them for anything practical, have to do with using them to be a mirror of your thought process, to actually learn how to think. I think the greatest value of learning how to think, I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer, should learn a computer language, because it teaches you how to think, it's like going to law school, I don't think anybody should be a lawyer, but I think going to law school may actually be useful coz it teaches you how to think in a certain way. In the same way the computer programing teaches you in a slightly different way how to think. And so, I View computer science as a liberal art. It should be something everybody takes in a year in their life, one of the courses they take is ,you know learning how to program.
4, but it wasn't that important,Because I never did it for the money. I think money is wonderful thing because it enables you to do things, it enables you to invest ideas that don't have a short term payback and things like that. But especially at that point in my life, it was not the most important thing. The most important thing was the company, the peope, the products we were making, what we were going to enable people do with these products.
5, People get confused, companies get confused, when they stared getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success, and a lot of them think well somehow there are some magic in the process, of how success is created. so they started to try to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long, people get very confused that the process is the content.
6, In my career, I found that the best people you know are the ones who really understand the content, and they are pain in the butt to manager, you know but you put up with it because they are so great at the content, and that's what makes a great product, it's not process, it's content.
7, and the problem with taht is that there is just tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve the great idea, it changes and grows, it never comes out like it starts. Because you learn a lot more, you get into the subtleties. you also find There's tremendous trade-offs that you have to make. And everyday you discover something new that is new problem or new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. It's that process tat is the magic.
8, the same common stones that go in through rubbing against each other like this, creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise, had come out these beautiful polished rocks. And that's always been in my mind that, my metaphor for a team working really hard on something they're passionate about. It's that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together they polish each other, and they polish the ideas, and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these really beautiful stones. So it's hard to explain, and it's certainly not the result of one person, I mean people like symbols, so I am the symbol of certain things, but it's really the team effort on the Mac.
9, Most things in life, the dynamic range between average and the best, is at most 2 to 1, In software, and in used to be the case with hardware too, the difference between average and the best is 15 to 1, may a 100 to 1, Okey? very few things in life like this.
10, But what I was lucky enough to spend my life in, is like this, and so I build lots of my success of finding these truly gifted people, and not settling for being C player, really going for A players. And I found something, I found when you get enough A players, when you go through the incredible work to find you know 5 of these A players, they really like working with each other, because they never had a chance to do that before, and they don't want to work with being C players, so they become self-policing, they only want to hire more A players. So you built up these pockets of A players and it propagates.
11, I think if you talk to a lot of people on the Mac team, they would tell you it was the hardest they have ever worked in their lives, some of them would tell you it was their happiest they ever had in their lives, but all of them would tell you that i certainly is one of the most intense and cherished experiences they would ever have in their lives. So, err, you know, it's some of those things are not sustainable for some people.
12, you know, when you get really good people, they know they are really good, and you don't have to baby people's ego so much, and what really matters is the work, that everybody knows that and that all that matters is the work, so people are being counted on to do specific pieces of littele puzzle. and the most important thing I think you can do for somebody who's really good, and who's really being counted on is to point out to them when their work isn't good enough, and to do it very clearly and to articulate why, and to get them back on track. and you need to do it in a way that doesn't call in questions about your confidence and abilities, but leaves not too much room for interpretation that the work they have done for the particular thing is not good enough, to support the goal of the them.
13, I am also one of these people, I don't really care about being right, I just care about success. So you wikk find a lot of people that would tell you that I had a very strong opinion, and they present evidence in contrary and 5 minutes later I can change my mind, because I'm like that, I don't mind being wrong, and I admit that I am wrong a lot, doesn't really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing .
14, The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste, and what means is , I don't mean that in a small way, I meant that in a big way in the sense, that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.
15, I guess, I'm saddened not by Microsoft's success, I have no problem with their success. They're earned their success, for the most part, I have the problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products. Their product s have no spirit to them .Their products have no sort of spirts of enlightenment about them. They are very pedestrian. And the sad part is that most customers don't have a lot of that spirit either.
16, But hte way we are going to ratch it up... Our species, is to take the best, and so spread it around everybody.
17, I really remember this, humans were tool builders, and we build tools that can dramatically amplify our human abilities.
18, Picasso had a saying "good artists copy, great artists steal". we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.
19, So I don't think that most of those really best people that I had worked with, had worked with computers for the sake of working with computers, they work with computers because they are the medium that is best capable of transmitting some fellings that you have, you want to share with other people.