I, Steve: Steve Jobs in His Own Words via 200 Quotes

A first-hand tour of the heart and mind of one of our era’s greatest visionaries, culled from 30 years of wisdom.

While writing my personal remembrance of Steve Jobs last week, I sifted through the dozens of quotes I had clipped to Evernote from his many interviews, speeches, and keynotes over the years — for all his visionary entrepreneurship, Jobs was also a rare outlier in being incredibly eloquent and articulate about his vision, a master of speaking his mind, even in the face of resistance and controversy, and using his specific expertise to extract general insight about design, psychology, behavior, and just about all of the human condition. So I’m thrilled for the release of I, Steve: Steve Jobs in His Own Words — a wonderful anthology of more than 200 quotes and excerpts from his many appearances in the media over the years.

(And if you’re quick to write this off as a heartless exploitation of Jobs’ recent death, it turns out the publisher had the book in the works since last spring, set to publish in March 2012, but they moved it up after Jobs resigned as CEO in January.)

Edited by George Beahm, the volume is a wonderfully curated curtain-peeler that offers a singular look at Jobs’ mind as an entrepreneur, his heart as a passionate visionary, and Apple’s fundamental DNA. Here are a few of my favorite quotes:

On broad-based education:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country… I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.” ~ Commencement address, Stanford University, June 12, 2005

(Be sure to watch his entire Stanford commencement address, it’s a piece of existential poetry.)

On the importance of broad life experiences:

A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. They don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions, without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better designs we will have.” ~ Wired, February, 1996

On being the best:

We’re not going to be the first to this party, but we’re going to be the best.” ~ Apple event for iPhone OS 4.0, April 8, 2010

On media monopoly and lowest-common-denominator content:

When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.” ~ Wired, February 1996

On Bill Gates:

I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.” ~ The New York Times, January 12, 1997

On the importance of saying “no”:

And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.” ~ Business Week, October 12, 1994

On selling out:

The problem with the Internet startup craze isn’t that too many people are starting companies; it’s that too many people aren’t sticking with it. That’s somewhat understandable, because there are many moments that are filled with despair and agony, when you have to fire people and cancel things and deal with very difficult situations. That’s when you find out who you are and what your values are. So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they’re gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives. Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their newfound wealth in perspective.” ~ Fortune, January 24, 2000

On Apple’s existence:

What if Apple didn’t exist? Think about it. Time wouldn’t get published next week. Some 70% of the newspapers in the U.S. wouldn’t publish tomorrow morning. Some 60% of the kids wouldn’t have computers; 64% of the teachers wouldn’t have computers. More than half the Websites created on Macs wouldn’t exist. So there’s something worth saving here. See?” ~ Time, August 18, 1997

On computers:

What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.” ~ Memory & Imagination, 1990

On creativity and cross-pollination:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” ~ Wired, February, 1996

On legacy:

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.” ~ The Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1993

An invaluable treasure trove of inspiration and insight, I, Steve captures the essence of one of our era’s greatest hearts, minds, and souls with the candor and precision only self-revelation can unlatch.

via Boing Boing

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7 Essential Collections of Conversations with Cultural Icons

Inside our era’s greatest minds, or what Nelson Mandela has to do with the fringes of the art world.

Whatever we might say of the future of the written word, a book remains a remarkable curated package of ideas that matter, one that lives on as a precious time-capsule of the era defined by those ideas. Nowhere is this property of the book more concentrated than in anthologies that gather the first-hand insights and cultural observations of an era’s greatest thinkers. Today, we turn to seven such treasure troves of ideas by some of our time’s most influential writers, artists, scientists, creators, and philosophers.

WISDOM

If you aren’t yet familiar with the work of photographer Andrew Zuckerman, you’re missing some of the most compelling visual philosophy of our day. In Wisdom: The Greatest Gift One Generation Can Give to Another, Zuckerman went wisdom-hunting among 50 of our time’s greatest thinkers and doers — writers, artists, philosophers, politicians, designers, activists, musicians, religious and business leaders — all over 65 years of age. (Though Zuckerman himself is just over 30.) He posed 7 questions, recording his subjects’ candid responses in a way that unearths a landslide of intelligence, inspiration, and invaluable insight. From Nelson Mandela to Jane Goodall to Desmond Tutu, the list of modern-day shamans reads like an all-star pickup game between TED and the Nobel Prize.

You don’t stop doing things because you get old. You get old because you stop doing things.” ~ Rosamunde Pilcher, writer

Against the plain white backdrop and in the signature crispness of Zuckerman’s shot, the subjects are stripped down to their core essence, decontextualized and thus democratized in a way that truly captures a cross-cultural cross-section of our era, with all its burdens and triumphs.

Zuckerman subsequently divided the great tome into four smaller, more digestible sub-volumes, each with its own thematic DVD: Wisdom: Life, Wisdom: Love, Wisdom: Peace, and Wisdom: Ideas.

See more, including a behind-the-scenes peek, here.

SCIENCE IS CULTURE

In 2001, Adam Bly founded Seed Magazine with the vision of exploring the social, creative, intellectual, economic, and political transformations underpinned by science. One of the magazine’s most beloved features has been the Seed Salon, pairing a scientist and artist, humanist, or other non-scientist in a conversation about issues of common interest and shared significance. In 2010, Bly collected 12 of these conversations in Science Is Culture: Conversations at the New Intersection of Science + Society — a who’s who of contemporary art, science, literature, and philosophy, methodically and thoughtfully bridging the age-old yet, as these conversations prove, artificial divide between science and culture. These tête-à-têtes include momentous pairings like David Byrne + Daniel Levitin, Benoit Mandelbrot + Paola Antonelli, E.O Wilson + Daniel Dennett, and Jonathan Lethem + Janna Levin. (It’s also worth nothing that of the seven books in this omnibus, this one is by far the most gender-balanced in perspectives and representation — something that would be commendable were it not for the tragic admission of male-centricity still being the norm implicit to such commendation.)

Here’s a taste from the salon conversation between author Alan Lightman and choreographer Richard Colton, who discuss the relationship between art and time:

Alan Lightman: If I had a few hours or longer, I could work on a writing project. If I had half an hour, I could do errands or pay bills. If I only had two or three minutes, I could answer telephone messages. I realized that I had carved up the entire day into five-minute units of efficiency, andd I was appalled. I was very upset to think that i was becoming a robot — and I’m wondering, how do you use time in your life?

Richard Colton: One of the things that came to mind when you told this story is something I remember reading during the Gertrude Stein phase, which is that Stein believed the first ingredient for creativity was boredom. You must trust that the mundane will lead to something interesting.

John Cage also taught that if you let the duration of a movement or musical phrase just keep going, it will almost always become more interesting, which is the exact opposite of carving something up into small increments. You will go through a period where the music seems boring, but if you let it keep going it can become quite interesting.”

HANS ULRICH OBRIST INTERVIEWS

Since 1993, curator, critic and art historian Hans-Ultirch Obrist, whom you might remember from the 2010 documentary The Future of Art, has been interviewing hundreds of noteworthy characters who have piqued his curiosity, from renowned luminaries to emerging artists, including writers, scientists, designers, composers, architects, and other thinkers and doers. The project was inspired by two long conversations HUO, as Obrist is often referred to, read when he was a student — one was between Pierre Cabanne and Marcel Duchamp, and the other between David Sylvester and Francis Bacon.

Throughout The Interview Project, HUO has amassed thousands of hours of tapes and more than 300 interviews to date. The first batch of 75 were released in 2003 in Hans-Ulrich Obrist: Interviews, currently out-of-print and a collector’s item. In 2010, HUO released the highly anticipated sequel, Hans Ulrich Obrist: Interviews, Volume 2 — an epic 950-page tome featuring 70 fascinating interviews with great minds from inside and outside the art world born between 1900 and 1989, organized by date of birth. Though you might recognize some of the bigger names, like Ai Weiwei and Miranda July, the beauty of the project is that many of its “endless conversations” live in the fringes of culture, where the most provocative art and thought take place.

A meditation on the art of the interview by the exceptional Douglas Coupland captures HUO’s unique gift:

Hans is one of the few people who know what a true interview out to accomplish, and he has an amazing knack for getting to the essence of a person. He’s the press equivalent of laser eye surgery. With HUO you never get to the twenty-first minute, and with HUO you feel like you’ve had a conversation. He does it the old fashioned way, in person, with a microphone, transcribing the results. This second volume of HUO’s interviews is more diverse than his first, and reflects a broader span of voices and points of view. Each person is a person, and each person is unique. This is a difficult feat to accomplish.”

Amen.

Thanks, Bettina

THE INNOVATOR’S COOKBOOK

Speaking of Steven Johnson, the freshest of these anthologies comes precisely from him. On the heels of his excellent Where Good Ideas Come From comes The Innovator’s Cookbook: Essentials for Inventing What Is Next — a formidable compendium of essays, interviews, and insights on innovation featuring big thinkers like Richard Florida, John Seely Brown, Peter Drucker and many more, alongside Johnson’s own narrative mesmerism. The book does away with everything that makes the innovation space a minefield of fluff-lined buzz and offers instead a lucid, thoughtful, cross-disciplinary lens refracting across education, art, science, economics, urban design, and more.

Underpinning the anthology is a message about the essential role serendipity plays in innovation — or, as Johnson puts it, “the importance of getting lost.” And for the ultimate treat, the trailer for it is a stop-motion gem 3D-printed by MakerBot, one of the 7 open-source platforms changing the future of manufacturing:

It may not be possible to ‘win the future,’ in President Obama’s words, but if we’re going to encourage more innovation, it’s not enough for us to just dig in and work harder. We also need to encourage surprise and serendipity. We need to play each other’s instruments.” ~ Steven Johnson

CULTURE

For the past 15 years, literary-agent-turned-crusader-of-human-progress John Brockman has been a remarkable curator of curiosity, long before either “curator” or “curiosity” was a frivolously tossed around buzzword. His Edge.org has become an epicenter of bleeding-edge insight across science, technology and beyond, hosting conversations with some of our era’s greatest thinkers (and, once a year, asking them some big questions.) In Culture: Leading Scientists Explore Societies, Art, Power, and Technology, Brockman gathers invaluable essays and interviews by and with icons like Brian Eno, George Dyson and Douglas Rushkoff, as well as Brain Pickings favorites like Denis Dutton, Stewart Brand, Clay Shirky and Dan Dennett. From the origin and social purpose of art to how technology shapes civilization to the Internet as a force of democracy and despotism, the 17 pieces exude the kind of intellectual inquiry and cultural curiosity that give progress its wings.

Nearly all of art history is about trying to identify the source of value in cultural objects. Color theories and dimension theories, golden means, all those sort of ideas, assume that some objects are intrinsically more beautify and meaningful than others. New cultural thinking isn’t like that. It says that we confer value on things. We create the value in things. It’s the act of conferring that makes things valuable. Now this is very important, because so many, in fact all fundamentalist ideas, rest on the assumption that some things have intrinsic value and resonance and meaning. All pragmatists work from another assumption: No, it’s us. It’s us who make those meanings.” ~ Brian Eno, “A Big Theory of Culture” (1997)

See the full review, with more excerpts, here.

AN OPTIMIST’S TOUR OF THE FUTURE

By now, you’re no doubt familiar with An Optimist’s Tour of the Future: One Curious Man Sets Out to Answer “What’s Next?”, one of our 7 favorite books on optimism and required reading from our summer reading list for cognitive sunshine. To recap: After a stark confrontation with his own mortality, comedian Mark Stevenson spent a year traveling 60,000 miles across four continents and talked to scientists, philosophers, inventors, politicians and other thought leaders around the world, hoping to find an optimistic antidote to all the dystopian futurism that constantly bombards us. He synthesized these fascinating insights in an illuminating and refreshingly hopeful guide to our shared tomorrow.

From longevity science to robotics to synthetic biology, these cutting-edge ideas, gathered from all over the world and featuring (alas, mostly male) minds like Chris Anderson, John Seely Brown, and Tim Berners Lee, span a wide spectrum of science and technology, revealing above all the incredible potential for innovation through the cross-pollination of disciplines and modes of thinking — a centerpiece of the Brain Pickings ethos.

This is a book that won’t tell you how to think about [the future], but will give you the tools to make up your mind about it. Whether you’re feeling optimistic or pessimistic about the future is up to you, but I do believe you should be fully informed about all the options we face. And one thing I became very concerned about is when we talk about the future, we often talk about it as damage and limitation exercise. That needn’t be the case — it could be a Renaissance.” ~ Mark Stevenson

PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS

Last year, the excellent Paris Review opened up its archive, containing a half-century worth of fascinating interviews with some of the greatest literary figures in modern history. The Paris Review Interviews, Vols. 1-4 is a priceless box-set of these extraordinary interviews and revelatory self-portraits captured between the 1950s and today. From Ernest Hemingway to Maya Angelou to Stephen King, the archive isn’t merely a reflection of literary history, it’s also a goldmine of meditations on culture and creativity by some of our greatest literary icons.

It’s a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to. Writing is very pleasurable, very seductive, and very therapeutic. Time passes very fast when I’m writing—really fast. I’m puzzling over something, and time just flies by. It’s an exhilarating feeling. How bad can it be? It’s sitting alone with fictional characters. You’re escaping from the world in your own way and that’s fine. Why not?” ~ Woody Allen

Here are 10 favorite quotes from the interviews, to give you a taste.

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Apple and the Bananas: A Steve Jobs Personal Remembrance

From Jules Verne to the Iron Curtain, or why ‘bondi blue’ is the defining color of my curiosity.

I grew up in Bulgaria in the 1980s. Before the fall of the communist regime in 1989, scarcity underpinned the status quo — of commodities, of information, of opportunity. So limited were Western imports that once a year, around New Year’s, a handful of grocery stores would make available “exotic” produce like tropical fruit. The supply-demand ratio was so skewed that the store had to ration these exorbitantly priced annual luxuries — one banana and two oranges per person — and people would line up around the block to get them. (Meanwhile, the unworthy apple, Bulgaria’s most ample fruit crop, would sit neglected in the produce aisle at 50 stotinki a kilogram, roughly $0.15 per pound.) The most ambitious parents would camp out in front of the store overnight to make sure they got the bananas and oranges first thing in the morning as they went on sale.

In my lifetime, I’ve only seen such lines twice since — first in front of the Apple Store on June 29, 2007, when the iPhone was released, and then again in April of last year, when the iPad became semi-available. Under Steve Jobs, Apple became the bananas of the West.

In the 1990s, my mother joined Bulgarian Business Systems — Bulgaria’s first and, for over a decade, only official Apple dealer. I had grown up reading Jules Verne, so when we got our first Macintosh, I remember thinking that the man behind it — because, let’s face it, such was the cultural conditioning that I wouldn’t have expected a woman — must be some modern-day Jules Verne, having just handed me a portal for curiosity and exploration that helped me lean into knowledge in a way that has since become the fundamental driving force of my intellectual life.

That iconic 1984 Apple commercial, with its undertones of Big Brother rebellion and escapism, always had special resonance with me.

In the early 90s, about a year after I had started learning English, my mother reminds me of this jingle I wrote for a Macintosh Performa ad in one of the big newspapers:

An Apple a day keeps the doctor away

A Performa a day lets you thrive and play

(Oh come on, cut me some slack. I was nine.)

By the mid-90s, I was spending my school holidays folding Apple brochures and helping my mother set up the big annual Apple Expo, held every December at the Zemyata i Horata (‘Earth and People’) museum.

In 1998, my high school was the only school in the country to have Macs in its library. I vividly remember the day the first candy-colored iMac G3 arrived. It was the bondi blue flavor, the kind of translucent greenish-blue I’d always imagined as the backdrop to Captain Nemo’s world. When I was exploring the budding Internet on it, I felt like it had opened to me to the doors to the library on Nautilus.

When I came to the states for college, I went through a 13-month period I’ve since referred to as “the dark days” — being broke and beguiled by a sweet-talking UPenn senior, I bought his lightly used Dell laptop for the bargain price of $400, rationalizing it as a handy investment in class assignments. It was a foreign land to me, with its confusing navigation menus and counterintuitive interface. The blue screen became a frustrating frequent.

Finally, one fine day in 2004, I bit the bullet and walked into the campus bookstore, which had an official Apple section. I was working three jobs at the time, to pay my way through college, so I ended up eating canned tuna and store-brand oatmeal for a couple of months to offset the expense, but I did walk out with a brand new iBook G4. It was promptly named Francis by my friends, since I was going through my Frank Sinatra period and that’s all that streamed from my iTunes, the same iTunes through which I discovered Sinatra in the first place.

It was like I had undergone a personal Renaissance. I started taking Francis to all my classes and, often, classes I wasn’t actually enrolled in — curious lectures across various departments, from criminology to nutrition to design history, that I would drop in on. I never thought much of my secret hobby, until I heard Steve Jobs’s now-iconic 2005 Stanford graduation address. In it, he recounts the power of a serendipitous visit to a calligraphy class he wasn’t enrolled in, which went on to shape his landmark contributions to design and graphic interfaces:

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” ~ Steve Jobs

Long before I was able to articulate it, he was a living testament to the power of networked knowledge and combinatorial creativity.

The semester I got Francis, I was one of three students to have a Mac in the large Annenberg Center lecture hall, where I had many of my classes. Over the next three years, I watched with wonder as the white lids proliferated, taking over the rows until, by my senior year, you could count on the fingers of one hand the students who hid in the back with their PCs. And it wasn’t because — or, okay, only because — to have a Mac was a status symbol of early hipsterdom. It was because it changed how we did everything, from taking class notes to designing presentations to listening to music. Most importantly, it changed our expectations about taking notes and designing presentations and listening to music.

This is the true legacy of Steve Jobs. He didn’t just transform technology, design, and entertainment — he transformed our expectations about technology, design, and entertainment. He not only made us eager to line up for the bananas of our time, but also made us willing to step into the Nautilus library of fascination and never want to leave.

Thank you, Steve, for shaping my childhood, my curiosity, and my creative and intellectual destiny. May you rest in peace 20,000 leagues under the sea.

* * *

Brilliant top image by Jonathan Mak

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