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Make Something Wonderful

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Steve Jobs in his own words
A curated collection of Steve’s speeches, interviews and correspondence, Make Something Wonderful offers an unparalleled window into how one of the world’s most creative entrepreneurs approached his life and work. In these pages, Steve shares his perspective on his childhood, on launching and being pushed out of Apple, on his time with Pixar and NeXT, and on his ultimate return to the company that started it all.
Featuring an introduction by Laurene Powell Jobs and edited by Leslie Berlin, this beautiful handbook is designed to inspire readers to make their own “wonderful somethings” that move the world forward.

194 pages

Published April 11, 2023

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Steve Jobs

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 105 reviews
Profile Image for Ian.
3 reviews1 follower
April 25, 2023
Can be a bit repetitive and, if you've read a biography on Steve Jobs, the first parts of the book feel like a road already traveled many times over.

The best parts are when you get many personal emails and less well known speeches that are very interesting and thought provoking.

It's a quick read. If you enjoy Steve's thoughts and perspectives, you'll find this is an enjoyable read.
Profile Image for Wyatt Hull.
15 reviews1 follower
April 13, 2023
The hagiographic editing is a bit repetitive around some of the well-worn stories to those like myself that followed his biography (calligraphy at Reed, yes, yes, we get it)… but if given the chance I would read every email he wrote, and this may be the closest we get. Were that each of our best collected words (and a few moments of growth) worthy of being edited together in this way as an act of love by those you surrounded yourself by. It is clear those closest to him loved him dearly and extend his dent in the universe just a bit further.
12 reviews
October 9, 2023
This (mostly) chronological compilation of email correspondences, interview transcriptions, and images showcase Jobs' career ups and downs not only during his time at Apple. I learned a lot about Jobs, but I do wish that these first-hand accounts of current life were supplemented with a basic background and life outside of work on Jobs.
Profile Image for Katie Stephens .
211 reviews1 follower
December 5, 2023
My love for Steve Jobs knows no bounds. He was absolutely brilliant and a true visionary. Was he weird, was he crazy? Absolutely and that’s how he founded and built a company with creatives in mind. It’s not Apple vs. android. Who cares? Not me. It has always been about the core principles. This is a treasure and I am so grateful to have it gifted to me by Apple. To see his journey from his own words was a gift. Meditate. Surround yourself with people smarter than you and from different walks of life. But the most important lesson of all.. Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
Profile Image for Colin Devroe.
15 reviews2 followers
May 16, 2023
Isaacson’s biography is very good, but the way this book is constructed from Job’s own words is terrific.
Profile Image for Titiaan.
87 reviews2 followers
November 12, 2023
This book is absolutely amazing. It's a selection of Steve Jobs' speeches, interviews, and — crucially — emails.

I found the fact that emails were included especially riveting. Some examples:
- At some point, Pixar organized a Waltz for its end of year holiday party. Some 40 employees thought this was unfitting for Pixar's culture. Rather than cave in to the employees' concerns — something that I was inclined to do as a founder — Steve wrote an email to all staff, nudging them to think of the Waltz instead as a fun occasion to see each other in black tie.
- Andy Grove was a mentor of Steve's. At some point, Andy's staff at Intel asked Steve if they could pick Apple's brain about creating software for 3D Graphics. An email exchange ensued between Steve, Andy, and one of Intel's senior engineers. I won't spoil the ending, but it was amazing to see how Steve showed respect to his mentor after being a bit rebellious initially.
- Steve explained how he recruited CEO John Sculley from Pepsi by asking him "do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?" So bold, and so true.

Overall, I finished reading the book feeling very inspired to deepen the connection with my artistic self and to truly make the most of every moment. As Steve said several times, he wanted to leave a blazing path in the sky in the short time while he was alive.
Profile Image for Charlie Harrington.
186 reviews14 followers
April 16, 2023
Meditations on life and work and creativity and technology. I long for a print copy to keep on my desk, perhaps eBay will deliver one. The photos are especially wonderful.
216 reviews
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July 4, 2023
No rating for a memoir but this was a good one. It’s not the typical memoir style, it’s personal collections of Steve’s emails, memos, speeches and interviews. It was great to know more in depth about Steve and how we shaped the way we communicate today. Highly recommend
Profile Image for Molly Wemlinger.
56 reviews1 follower
December 11, 2023
I knew (know) startlingly little about Steve Jobs, Apple, Pixar etc.; surprising especially having lived through the era of their initial impact. This short book was a nice compilation of speeches, emails, thoughts and photos to help whet my interest for more, in a more thorough format.
July 25, 2023
"Once you learn that. You"ll never be the same again "
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Tom.
19 reviews
August 4, 2023
Great addition to other biographies on Steve Jobs. Filled with many great quotes and learnings. Go read this, it’s free and pretty great!
130 reviews66 followers
May 6, 2023
key takeaways:
### Part I, 1976–1985
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.
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.
The early eighties, ’81. Apple II has become the world’s most popular computer. Apple has grown to a $300 million company, becoming the fastest-growing corporation in American business history, with over fifty competitors vying for a share. IBM enters the personal-computer market in November ’81 with the IBM PC.
1983. Apple and IBM emerge as the industry’s strongest competitors, each selling approximately one billion dollars’ worth of personal computers in 1983. Each will invest greater than $50 million for R&D and another $50 million for television advertising in 1984, totaling almost one quarter of a billion dollars combined.
The shakeout is in full swing. The first major firm goes bankrupt, with others teetering on the brink. Total industry losses for ’83 outshadow even the combined profits of Apple and IBM for personal computers.
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.
### Unknown chapter
The years after Steve left Apple were among the toughest of his career—and the most formative.
Determined to build a new great computer company, he started NeXT with several members of the Macintosh team. “We’ll make a whole bunch of mistakes, but at least they’ll be new and creative ones,” he predicted.
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.
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.
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.
But the films were, as Steve put it, “in the background,” not the company’s focus. He described Pixar’s early business strategy as “find a way to pay the bills,” and he later speculated that the only reason the company didn’t fall apart then was that the leadership team “would all get depressed … but not all of us at once.”
If at times in these years he seemed disappointed by the poss­ibilities of technology—“this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t,” he told a reporter in an uncharac­teristic flash of pessimism—his world was also expanding beyond his work. He treasured his privacy, saying of his public persona, “I think of it as my well-known twin brother. It’s not me.”
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.”
As CEO of Apple and Pixar (he held both roles until Disney acquired Pixar in 2006), he saw his job as “number one, re­­­cruit; number two, set an overall direction; and number three, inspire and cajole and persuade.” He said, “You’re not grabbing the pencil out of the twenty-five-year-old’s hand to do it better than they are. If you’re smart, you’re hiring twenty-five-year-olds who are smarter than you.” He gave particular thought to his responsibility for the business aspects of a creative company. A “risk-taking creative environment on the product side,” he said, required a “fiscally conservative environment” on the business side. “Creative people are willing to take a leap in the air, but they need to know that the ground’s going to be there when they get back.”

Key Events
January 1975—Popular Electronics publishes a story about the Altair 8800, sparking the microcomputer revolution. That same year, Bill Gates drops out of Harvard to design programming languages for the Altair. Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, a club launches for people who want to build their own computers: the Homebrew Computer Club, which Steve occasionally attends with Steve Wozniak.
April 1976—Steve and Woz co-found Apple Computer to sell the Apple I, designed by Woz. (A third co-founder, Ron Wayne, drops out ten days after joining.) Apple I buyers must supply their own keyboards and television monitors, as well as know how to write hexadecimal code and use a soldering iron.
January 1977—Apple incorporates, with ownership split evenly among Steve, Woz, and the angel investor Mike Markkula.
April 1977—The Apple II, a more user-friendly computer, debuts at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. At $1,298, the Apple II costs about twice as much as a year of in-state tuition at the University of California.
May 1978—Lisa Brennan Jobs is born.
May 1979—Apple’s publications department manager, Jef Raskin, begins work on an inexpensive computer he calls Macintosh.
December 1979—During a visit to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, Steve sees, for the first time, a networked computer with a mouse, windows, icons, menus, and multiple typefaces. “I was so blown away,” he later recalled. He brings the technology, and several PARC researchers, to Apple.
September 1980—Steve takes over the high-profile Lisa computer project. He is removed nine months later, after the team rebels against his management style.
December 1980—Apple goes public in one of the most successful initial public offerings in American history up to that time.
February 1981—Ten years after dropping out of the University of California, Berkeley, Woz leaves Apple to re-enroll.
Steve takes over the Macintosh project.
August 1981—Apple faces its first real competition when IBM introduces its personal computer. IBM’s market share soon surpasses Apple’s.
January 1983—Time shakes up its “Man of the Year” tradition to choose the computer as “Machine of the Year.”
Apple introduces the Lisa computer, priced at $10,000, targeting business users. It fails in the market.
April 1983—Jobs recruits the Pepsi executive John Sculley to be Apple’s CEO, using the memorable line, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
January 1984—Macintosh debuts.
June 1985—When Macintosh sales fall far short of projections, Apple lays off 20 percent of employees and announces the first quarterly loss in its history.
September 1985—After losing a power struggle with Sculley, Steve leaves Apple with five Mac team members in tow. Within days, Apple sues for breach of fiduciary responsibility and charges Steve with masterminding a “nefarious” scheme to steal trade secrets for his new computer company, NeXT.
January 1986—Steve becomes the majority shareholder in Pixar, after the pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay introduces him to the company’s leaders, Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith.
NeXT and Apple settle their lawsuit over NeXT’s launch and Steve’s recruitment of Mac team members out of court.
August 1986—Steve attends the premiere of Pixar’s first animated short, Luxo Jr., at a graphics industry conference. Luxo Jr. showcases Pixar’s software, but it is the audience’s standing ovation for the storytelling that catches Steve’s attention.
October 1988—Steve unveils the NeXT Computer System at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. A highlight is the machine’s five-minute performance of a Bach violin concerto, accompanied by a violinist from the symphony. The computer did not sell well but had its fans; Tim Berners-Lee wrote the code for the World Wide Web on a NeXT computer.
March 1989—Pixar’s film Tin Toy wins an Oscar for Best Animated Short, a first for a computer-animated movie.
March 1991—Steve marries Laurene Powell in a ceremony at Yosemite.
July 1991—Facing heavy financial pressure, Pixar signs a deal with Disney that is far more favorable to the larger company. In exchange for financing up to three Pixar films, Disney owns the films and their characters, receives most of the films’ profits, and prohibits Pixar from pitching to another studio any ideas that Disney rejects.
September 1991—Reed Jobs is born.
February 1993—Steve ends NeXT’s production of computers to focus entirely on software.
October 1993—With Apple losing tens of millions of dollars every quarter, CEO John Sculley, who pushed Steve out of Apple in 1985, resigns. Apple will cycle through two more CEOs in the next three years but fail to regain its footing.
August 1995—Erin Jobs is born.
November 1995—Toy Story, the world’s first full-length fully animated feature film, earns $29 million in its opening weekend. It goes on to become the top-grossing animated movie of the year.
A week after Toy Story opens, Pixar holds a successful initial public offering. It was a bold bet placed months earlier; if Toy Story had been a bust, the IPO would have been one, too.
December 1996—In need of a new operating system, Apple acquires NeXT for $427 million. As part the agreement, Steve rejoins Apple as a special adviser to the CEO, Gil Amelio.
February 1997—The success of Toy Story and Pixar’s IPO give Steve leverage to negotiate a more favorable agreement with Disney. The companies sign a five-picture deal.
June 1997—In a public show of no confidence in Amelio, Steve sells a huge block of the Apple shares he received in the NeXT acquisition. Three months later, Steve is named interim CEO.
August 1997—Bill Gates appears on a giant video screen at Macworld to announce Microsoft’s commitment to developing Microsoft Office for Mac. When the audience begins heckling, Steve reprimands them: “We have to let go of […] this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.”
September 1997—Apple introduces the “Think Different” advertising campaign. One year later, it wins an Emmy Award for Outstanding Commercial.
March 1998—Steve hires Tim Cook as Apple’s chief of operations.
July 1998—Eve Jobs is born.
August 1998—Apple debuts the Bondi Blue iMac. The “i” stands for “internet,” targeting consumers who want to“surf the web” as easily as catching a wave at Australia’s Bondi Beach.
October 1998—Apple announces its first profitable year since 1995.
January 2000—In the last three minutes of his Macworld presentation, Steve surprises the audience with the announcement that he will drop “interim” from his CEO title.
March 2000—The wave of internet optimism crashes. The NASDAQ loses nearly $1 trillion in a single month, and hundreds of start-up companies fail in a “dotcom bust.”
November 2000—Pixar’s new campus in Emeryville, California, opens. Steve has been so involved in the headquarters design—from the town hall atrium to the bathrooms—that people call it “Steve’s movie.”
May 2001—The first Apple retail stores open in Tysons, Virginia, and Glendale, California.
March 2001—Apple releases OS X, an operating system based on the NeXTStep software developed at NeXT. Updated versions of the operating system remain at the heart of many Apple products today.
October 2001—Apple introduces the iPod. It’s a new kind of product for the company, not a computer but a portable device built to sync with a computer. Apple built a music player, Steve says, because “We love music, and it’s always good to do something you love.”
April 2003—Apple opens the iTunes Music Store, making it easy to buy individual songs online. The store is only available for Apple computers, but users download one million tracks in the first week. Six months later, at the urging of his executive team, Steve agrees to make the store compatible with non-Apple computers.
March 2004—Pixar’s fifth film, Finding Nemo, wins an Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
July 2004—Steve undergoes surgery to remove a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor.
January 2006—Disney acquires Pixar for $7.4 billion in stock. Steve becomes Disney’s largest shareholder and joins the board of directors, while John Lasseter and Ed Catmull assume leadership of Disney Animation.
January 2007—The iPhone debuts. Steve calls it “the most revolutionary and exciting product in Apple’s history.”
March 2009—On leave from Apple, Steve receives a liver transplant in Memphis, Tennessee.
January 2010—Steve introduces the iPad, calling it“a magical and revolutionary device.”
August 2010—Toy Story 3 becomes the highest-grossing animated movie of all time.
### Part II, 1985–1996
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!
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.
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.
People will come at you with reasons why you shouldn’t do these things:
You can’t make a living writing songs. (Right, just ask Bob Dylan.)
Helping children in India is nice, but you need to prepare for real life. ( Just ask Mother Teresa.)
You could be doing so much more with your life. (You can hear Albert Einstein’s parents encouraging him to get a real job, when he was working a low-level job in the Swiss patent office rather than teaching in a university, so that he could stay up late at night working through his new ideas.)
If you don’t have any of these feelings, called dreams, then you’re in trouble. Before you “spend” four or more years of your life going in a direction your heart may or may not want you to go, you need to recapture them.
Be a creative person. Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights that others don’t see.
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.
May 24, 2023
Livro bem interessante para entender o que fez de steve jobs um grande comunicador. E ser mais do que alguém de projeto, alguém que consegue construir times incriveis e mobilizados.
Profile Image for Ben G.
128 reviews1 follower
May 17, 2023
Well, having fairly recently signed up to receive email alerts from the SJ archive , I was both suprised and delighted to find that they were giving me the opportunity to read this book, online and for free.

It is a collection of SJ's writing's, thought's email's - inevitably some of the entries were of less interest to me than others. However, his address (reproduced within the book) at Palo Alto High School (SJ's alma mater) struck a particular chord with myself as I have an adolescent who is about to finish sixth form college (i.e. in US read; High School) and who has also confessed to wanting to make lots of money. Who could possibly be a better mentor than Mr Jobs...;-)

Although maybe not as comprehensive as Walter Issacson's biography (and I guess there was no intention from the SJ archive to make this collection of snippets comprehensive), the book provides interesting insights into SJ's character.
Profile Image for Jean Snow.
73 reviews10 followers
July 16, 2023
This was a terrific read. I really appreciated revisiting aspects of Jobs career via his own voice -- and some of the documents included here are great to take in (like staff emails, messages sent to himself, etc.)
Profile Image for Brian Kramp.
198 reviews26 followers
July 2, 2023
This is an interesting collection of writings and photos by/of Steve Jobs. You definitely want to read the biography first, but if you read that and couldn't get enough, these are some interesting, in-depth, behind the scenes looks at the way he operated.

When talking to designers, he said 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 crap 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.

He predicted that the Internet would be about 15 years out in 1983.

And we hired truly great people and gave them the room to do great work. 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.

Steve returned to Apple after it purchased Next at the end of 1996. Apple had lost $800 million that year after he returned he slashed the company’s product offerings from 17 to 4. He said “you’ve got to choose what you put your love into really carefully.”

What I found is that nobody in their right mind wants to be a manager. It’s a lot of work and you don’t get to do the fun stuff. But the only good reason to be a manager is so some other bozo doesn’t be the manager, and ruin the group you care about. And if you’ve lived through a bad situation, where you’ve had bad management, you’ll do anything to not have your group destroyed by that again. And you will even step up and be the manager yourself, even though you don’t want to do that.

Story of how he met his wife.
I arrive alone and sat down in the front row. It didn’t take me long to notice this really cute girl sitting next to me. I think she was stunned when it was me that got up to speak. And I knew something was up when I was staring at her, forgetting what I was talking about mid-sentence. After my talk, I stayed around to speak with some students and she stayed to, but then she left. I didn’t know who she was, and thought I might never see her again. So I wound things up and left too, and I caught up with her in the parking lot. I asked her if she would have dinner with me on Saturday. She said yes and gave me her phone number. As I was walking to my car, I asked myself if this was the last day of my life would I rather have dinner with the important customers or her? I raced back to her car just as she was about to drive off and asked her. How about dinner tonight? She said sure, and we were married 18 months later.

You can't connect the dots looking forward; You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something. Your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path.

I can loan you my copy if you're a close friend.
Profile Image for Dead John Williams.
591 reviews17 followers
June 3, 2023
I worked in IT for years, like for a long time, and I'm old, so I really do remember how much we "hated our phones" (quote from the book) until the iPhone came along. It was ridiculed by IT people because the battery lasted less than a day, (ha ha) but more tha that, the iphone was a shot across the bows of the status quo and all who believed in it.

Us hard liners all sniggered at the "apple fanboys" from behind our Blackberries. How ridiculous was the onscreen keyboard??? And yet, here we are.

Somewhere along the way I switched over to Apple products, also to endless derision, but I was sold in no time. I was also shocked at how beautiful everything was around Apple products, how unbelievably beautiful and formidable the pieces of hardware were and at the same time, how terrible some of the software was.

But I really got what it was all about.

I was a programmer and I once saw a cartoon that showed 3 square white boxes.
In the first box was a single smooth button and the caption was Apple.
In the second box there were 3 clunky buttons and the caption was Microsoft.
In the third box were hundreds of buttons of different sizes scattered at random all over the place with text of different sizes and fonts. The caption read Your App.

And that was the truth laid out right there. As a programmer I was aware that I was seeing sci-fi like products while still living in the blue screen DOS/Windows world.

So that was the context for me to download this free book from somwhere Apple related.

All us old timers knew that Steve Jobs always had a reputation for being a bit of an asshole, clever, but an asshole nonetheless, before he was beatified by the Tim Cook regime. So I came to this book with a refreshing judgemental, biased, old-asshole outlook.

Buit I read it and I guess I can say nothing bad about the experience of reading it or inded about Steve Jobs himself.

I have never really got over how beautiful the items are and how magically they perform and how we take them all for granted. And it all happened in a single generation.

How I would have loved to have had such a device when my parents were still alive and seperated from their grandchildren literally half a world away. Now I can video my grandkids literally half a world away, they all know me because they see and hear me as if I was there with them.

I'm not saying that we would not have had all this without Steve Jobs, but the reality is that all modern phones that are not made aby Apple are just iPhone copies, it is as simple as that.
Profile Image for Ambarish.
46 reviews
December 14, 2023
Make Something Wonderful
by Steve Jobs

It's a quick read. I read it on the plane while traveling to cancun in 2023. It's super inspiring and gave insights in the mind of Steve. How he thought. There are some personal emails from him to others and how he reacted in certain situations. He accepted his own mistakes when needed.

1. Never be afraid to fail
2. Don’t be scared to change your stance by 180 degrees if you are wrong and you realize it later. Everybody makes mistakes.
3. All the great things in the world are made by people who are not smarter than you
4. You never achieve what you want before falling on your face a couple of times
5. You have some intuitive feeling about what you do with your life, if nurtured it can blossom into something wonderful and magical. Your intuitions are always telling you what you want in life.
6. We are never taught to listen to our emotions, develop and work on it
7. Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights that others don’t see
8. If you see it properly, the power is reversed in private culture. CEO is at the bottom, coz if people leave CEO fails
9. Life can be much broader when you realize the fact that everything around you that you called life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. You can change and influence it
10. If you hire people with same vision it would be helpful in the long run
11. Optimism is needed for creativity
12. Think big and don't be afraid to loose
13. The dots always join looking backwards but the don't looking forward. So believe in yourself.
Profile Image for Kevin.
9 reviews3 followers
April 18, 2023
A collection of speeches, emails, etc. written by Steve Jobs throughout his life.

1. Really puts into perspective his foresight:
In 1983, "Computers and society are out on a first date." - and at the time computers were poorly designed, networking wasn't a thing - he admitted he didn't know how to make the latter work but had the vision to see that in the future, humans were going to interact with computers more than they do with automobiles.

2. His tenacity and ability to persist, even when treading new paths:
"The enemy of most dreams and intuitions, and one of the most dangerous and stifling concepts ever invented by humans, is the “Career.”"
Pixar and NeXT were unlikely successes. Struggled for nearly a decade and pivoted -- NeXT from computer system to OS software focus; Pixar from ad and hardware businesses to computer amination focus

3. Belief that one can shape the world, but also an acknowledgment that only with foresight can one connect these dots (retrospective justification):
"Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact—and that is: everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use."
Profile Image for Heather.
904 reviews18 followers
May 19, 2023
A collection of Jobs' personal writing/memos/email and public speeches. I didn't follow him too much, so this was interesting. I know a couple of factoid about Jobs that were only hinted at in this book. It mentions that Jobs was really involved with the design of the Pixar campus Main Building (now named Steve Jobs Building, posthumously), including the bathrooms. What the book doesn't say is that Jobs wanted all the restrooms to be non-gender-specific. He felt that if you wanted ideas to spread, you needed people to mix and mingle everywhere and thought gender-diving the restrooms would hinder some of that. Unfortunately, they gendered the restrooms for years and years. However recently, they have taken 2 of the stalled, gendered restrooms on the first floor (the two closest the entrance) and lifted the gender suggestions on those. So he was ahead of his time for sure.

This book focuses on business emails and his public face. I would have liked a little more of a window into his family/recreational life.
Profile Image for George Tharp.
28 reviews10 followers
December 29, 2023
This concise book can be easily devoured over the course of two or three engaging days of reading. As echoed by others, it's best experienced through the web version on an iPad. If you count yourself as a fan of Apple and the visionary Steve Jobs, this book is tailored for you. While some content overlaps with other biographies, such as the one by Isaac, the unique aspect of having Steve Jobs articulate much of his and Apple's journey in his own words adds an extra layer to the Apple Saga.

Particularly noteworthy are the emails from Steve to various individuals, providing a captivating glimpse into his thought process. The inclusion of various notes he scrawled on pages feels like a small window into Steve's mind, offering valuable insights into his reflections on pivotal moments and events before they fully materialized, like with his speeches. This book is undeniably a worthwhile read, offering a perspective that enriches the understanding of Steve Jobs and his significant contributions.
22 reviews14 followers
May 16, 2023
I devoured this book, and I'm unashamed to admit it brought me to tears. As a collection of emails, thoughts, and photographs from the life of Steve Jobs, reading "Make Something Wonderful" felt like peeking into the brain of the visionary himself. His words are powerful fuel for the fire to change the world.

Steve Jobs saw what no one else did in technology: elegance and humanity. We are all better for it. Without him and his passion in service of progress and creativity, we wouldn't have beautiful (or accessible) devices, music/fonts/etc. available within them, or TOY STORY. Enough said.

"You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear." What a gift it was to see his life blaze!!! And to continue to see it shine bright. This book is free on any Apple device, and you should read it.
Profile Image for Alison Scott.
91 reviews6 followers
Read
May 26, 2023
A relatively short collection of speeches, emails (to himself and other people), and notes, all by Steve Jobs, and heavily curated by the Steve Jobs foundation to burnish the existing myth of the man. It also includes a lot of photos; some familiar, but others new. Particular delights are drafts of speeches and other notes to himself where you see how his ideas developed, and the occasional email chain where you see the rough parts of his personality along with the smooth.

If you’ve made a study of Jobs and the things he said, you’ll see lots that’s familiar here, but the book is free and a quick read. He says at one point ‘we want to make great products, and we want to make some money so we can make great products. Most companies try to do it the other way around and that never works’. That seems to me to be the distinction between Jobs and Tim Cook, really.
Profile Image for Maya Senen.
443 reviews23 followers
May 16, 2023
Reading just Steve's words over time is a necessarily myopic experience. And of course, we can expect Apple is only publishing a particular narrative (much like how at Disney we don't see many photographs of Walt smoking). Nevertheless, there are still some very valid lessons conveyed here, both in business and in life (particularly the last note, "One More Thing" and his note to himself regarding the nature of humanity leveraging previous generations). If you are here for deep lore and a side of inspiration, you are probably in the right place. If you want to learn about Steve Jobs, Apple, Pixar, etc, you may not find what you are looking for here. This is a collection of speeches, emails, and notes from Steve.
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