I’ve always been,” he wrote, “full of whims and mischief, and as moody as ever!”36.
One of the basic lessons for innovation is to stay focused.
After you interact with Ginevra de’ Benci long enough, what at first seem like a vacant face and distant stare begin to appear suffused with a haunting tinge of emotion. She seems pensive and ruminating, perhaps about her marriage or the departure of Bembo, or because of some deeper mystery. Her life was sad; she was sickly and remained childless. But she also had an inner intensity. She wrote poetry, one line of which survives: “I ask your forgiveness; I am a mountain tiger.
When our tools don’t work, we tend to blame ourselves, for being too stupid or not reading the manual or having too-fat fingers... When our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole.
I cannot conceive of a personal God who would directly influence the actions of individuals or would sit in judgment on creatures of his own creation.
Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history’s consummate innovator.
I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking,” Jobs later recalled. “People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.
You’ve got to make a new set of friends and interact with a new set of prejudices every time.
I had come to revere the Italian designers, just like the kid in Breaking Away reveres the Italian bikers,” recalled Jobs, “so it was an amazing inspiration.
The spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world.
The reason Apple resonates with people is that there’s a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side.
At the end of the 1940s, when it was becoming clear to him that the effort to control nuclear weaponry would fail, Einstein was asked what the next war would look like. “I do not know how the Third World War will be fought,” he answered, “but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth – rocks.”20 Russia.
Alto: “She’s a pistol and has the strongest will of any kid I’ve ever met. It’s like payback.
The good men may do separately,” he wrote, “is small compared with what they may do collectively.
So starting in 1999 Apple began to produce application software for the Mac, with a focus.
He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.
Finally, I was struck by how the truest creativity of the digital age came from those who were able to connect the arts and sciences.
The Los Altos house with the garage where Apple was born.
The ladies staged tableaux vivants, in which they dressed in costume to re-create famous paintings.
I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important.