I’ve finally finished reading ‘Steve Jobs’ by Walter Isaacson, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ll leave the discussions around Steve’s personality for others; I wanted to focus on what I can learn from the mind of someone who profoundly changed the technology landscape throughout their life. For his contributions to product design and consumer technology, Jobs is one of my personal heroes and it was fascinating spending my afternoons going through his life, exploring his mind and reflecting on his legacy.

The biggest learning for me was getting a deeper understanding about what it really means to innovate as fully integrated ecosystem on the intersection of engineering and humanities. I self-identify as a hacker, I love open systems and tinkering with technology. So much so, that I’ve previously looked down upon Apple products and the philosophy behind them. Now, I understand the motivations a little better. The average consumer doesn’t care about hacking, and the average hacker will never be happy with a consumer product. If your vision involves perfectly curating the user experience, offering a closely integrated solution is probably the right, and maybe the only, option. In this context, the aim is to simplify and focus – radically deliver just the minimally required set of features needed to satisfy market consumers, in the most intuitively designed package possible. Never compromise when delivering this baseline though.

In all of his successes, having a team of A-players has been essential for performing great feats. You have to be ruthless about retaining A-players and eliminating others. The most important job as a leader is to set a compelling vision to keep your team motivated and trick them to do the impossible (even after you’re no longer around). This involves being good at oration and presentation – you should constantly work on being an exceptional storyteller.

Quick, honest feedback is essential attribute for a highly performant team that can iterate towards a good solution. Maybe Jobs went too far with his behaviour sometimes, but I also feel that current industry standard HR practices have overcorrected too much. Ideally, you’d want a team that is bonded well enough that you can yell brutal feedback at each other without taking it personally, even if you don’t do it everyday for civility.

In life, being able to negotiate well is a crucial skill. You need to be a ruthless negotiator and have a radical bias towards action. Pick up the phone or fire off that email right now. Being involved in details (popularly called “Founder Mode” these days) means you have to be obsessed with your job. There is no work life balance for such folks. You have to be fine with this, and your family needs to be fine with this too.

A reality distortion field is great for fooling yourself into performing impossible tasks, but a liability when it’s for processing critical feedback. Your brain can warp up some of your biggest flaws as just simple, harmless character traits. Ideally, you want the right balance of being able to take feedback from a trusted group and being able to ignore feedback as ignorant noise to stick with your convictions.

Being a rebel means not accepting the status quo. Experiment in your life, in big and small ways. Life is short, you need to get to work doing what you want to do. If you want to be great, money cannot be your primary motivation. You have to remember to give back to the next generation.

Thanks for everything, Steve!