What created the legendary Steve Jobs?

Although Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has left us for more than 6 years, as soon as IPhone X was launched, there was an instant rush to buy it.

His continuous innovation and fanatical pursuit of the integration of art and technology have been guiding the development direction of the information industry until now.

What he does is not ordinary products, but provides brand-new equipment and services to consumers before they are aware of their needs.

But he is not a role model that everyone can imitate. He is both a genius and a devil, and his moodiness can lead people to despair.

On January 24, 1984, the Mac launch event was held concurrently with Apple’s annual shareholder meeting, and the Flint, Michigan, USA auditorium, which could accommodate 2,600 people, was packed to the brim.

Apple Chairman Steve Jobs wore a blue double-breasted suit, a crisp white shirt underneath, and a light green bow tie.

"I want to start with a song by Dylan - Bob Dylan 20 years ago." Jobs smiled, then lowered his head and began to read "The Times are Changing" 》The second paragraph.
Come writers and critics
who prophecise with your pen.
Come writers and critics who prophecise with your pen.
And keep your eyes wide,
Please keep your eyes wide,
the chance won't come again.
The chance won't come again.
And don't speak too soon,
There is no need to draw conclusions too quickly,
for the wheel's still in spin.
Because the wheel is speeding.
And there's no tellin'
who that it's namin'.
It's still unclear who is nominated.
His voice was high and he spoke very fast until the end:
For the loser now
will be later to win.
The loser at this moment will eventually win.
For the times they are a-changin'.
Because times are changing.

Jobs listed the mistakes of his competitor IBM, pushing the atmosphere to a climax.

Suddenly, the entire auditorium fell into darkness, and the "1984" TV commercial appeared on the screen.

The heroine in the ad is a rebel intent on thwarting the Big Brother world. She wears a pure white tank top with a Mac computer printed on it. The commercial is dominated by metallic gray tones, rendering a cold industrial environment and inducing people to think of the dystopian atmosphere of "Blade Runner".

As Big Brother declares on the screen, "We shall win," the heroine's hammer shatters the screen and everything disappears in flashes and smoke.

The whole audience stood up with thunderous cheers.

Then the screen displayed different fonts, documents, charts, drawings, chess games, spreadsheets, and a rendering of Jobs showing a Mac computer in his mind. Mac even spoke and introduced himself.

This was the first time for people to see all this before them. They jumped up and down excitedly and waved their fists crazily.

Jobs nodded slowly, his lips tightly closed but smiling happily, then he lowered his head and began to choke. The applause lasted for nearly 5 minutes.

He knew that he would create a miracle in the information industry.

## Zen Buddhism and hippie culture

Jobs always regarded Bob Dylan as his own Idol, who is considered the face of the American counterculture in the 1960s. In 1972, when 17-year-old Jobs came to Reed College, a school known for its free spirit and hippie culture, he brought with him a two-reel recording equipment and a large number of Dylan tapes.

Hippie is derived from the English "hippie", which refers to a person who understands and understands. He has a sense of superiority that everyone is drunk and I am alone, and dares to challenge the truth and authority of orthodox culture.

At that time, the political fervor on campus over the Vietnam War and military conscription was gradually fading, and students were all talking about how to realize their self-worth. Jobs was fascinated by Zen Buddhism.

He began to search for the meaning of his existence and seek enlightenment. He shared Zen books with his college classmate Daniel Kottke and his girlfriend, and they also opened a meditation room together, which was decorated with Indian floral cloth and incense, and several people meditated on cushions.

In early 1974, he and Kottke embarked on a trip to India. For seven months, he wandered around India, looking for teachers who imparted wisdom, and sought enlightenment through ascetic experience, restraint of material desires, and return to nature.

Back in the United States, he met Cao Zongdong Zen master Otokawa Hirofumi, and they often practiced Zen together. For a long time, he had long hair and beard, wore an Indian robe, and walked around barefoot.

Apple founders Steve Jobs (21 years old on the right) and Steve Wozniak (26 years old on the left)

Some of Jobs’s personality traits were absorbed from Robert Friedland, a graduate of Reed College. He taught Steve the reality distortion field.

Kottke recalled: "The first time I met Steve, he was shy, humble, and very reserved. Friedland was extremely charming, deceitful, and could bend the situation to his will. His super will. He is witty, full of confidence, and a little arbitrary. Steve admires this very much. After spending time with Friedland for a long time, he has become like this."

One day, Jobs walked into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, the engineer responsible for the Mac operating system. Jobs complained that it took too long to boot up.

Kenyon began to explain, but Jobs interrupted him and asked: "If it could save someone's life, would you like to find a way to shorten the startup time by 10 seconds?" Kenyon said maybe Can.

Jobs walked up to a whiteboard and started to demonstrate. If 5 million people use Macs, and it takes 10 more seconds to start up every day, it will add up to wasting about 300 million minutes per year, which is equivalent to the lifetime of at least 100 people. life. Kenyon was shocked by these words.

A few weeks later, when Jobs came back to see it, the startup time had been shortened by 28 seconds.

Jobs’ reality distortion field inspired his team to change the course of the computer industry even though the resources at their disposal were far less than those of Xerox and IBM. "It's a self-fulfilling twist, where you accomplish the impossible because you didn't realize it was impossible," said Mac member Debbie Coleman.

In addition to Friedland's influence, the root of the reality distortion field lies in Jobs's unshakable belief deep in his heart that none of the rules in the world apply to him.

As a child, he was rebellious and stubborn, and could often make reality succumb to his desires. He felt that he was special: he was chosen by God, he was the enlightened one.

“He thought there were some people who were special — like Einstein, Gandhi, the mentors he met in India — and he was one of them,” said Mac engineer Herzfeld. "Once he even hinted to me that he had been inspired by God."

#The reason Apple resonates with people is because there is a humanistic spirit embedded in our innovations.

When he was young, Jobs always thought that he was a person suitable for the humanities, but at the same time he liked electronic devices. He saw something said by one of his idols, Edwin Rand, the founder of Polaroid, about the importance of people who excelled in both the humanities and the sciences. He decided to become such a person. Buddhism’s emphasis on intuition also deeply influenced Steve Jobs. "I began to realize that intuitive understanding and awareness are more important than abstract thinking and logical analysis." As soon as he dropped out of Reed College, Jobs did not leave campus, but went to some "interesting courses class".

One of the calligraphy classes attracted him very much. He learned serif fonts and sans-serif fonts, how to adjust the spacing between letters, and create a perfect layout design. “I was intoxicated by the beauty, historical significance, and artistic subtlety that science cannot capture.” There are so many types of fonts and well-spaced fonts that are not available on other personal computers." (Windows copied the Mac's fonts)

Every product he creates, technology must be perfect It combines unique appearance design, exquisite feel, humanized experience and even romance.

He was a pioneer in the pursuit of a friendly graphical user interface, designing the Mac in a way that Xerox could not; he felt the joy of putting 1,000 songs in his pocket, so he created the iPod in a way that Sony could not achieve .

The original design of the iPhone was to embed the glass screen into the aluminum alloy casing. One Monday morning, Jobs walked up to chief designer Ive and said: "I didn't sleep last night because I realized that I just don't like this design."

The focus of the iPhone is the screen display, and The design at that time focused on both the metal casing and the screen. The entire design feels too masculine, too focused on performance, and is a task-driven product.

"Guys, for the past nine months, you've worked so hard on this design that you wanted to kill yourself, but we're going to change it." Jobs told Ive's team, "We're going to work on it day and night." If you want to work on weekends, I will send you some guns right now and kill us all." However, the team members did not hesitate and agreed to the modification.

"This is one of my proudest moments at Apple." Jobs recalled.

The design of the new mobile phone is out. The front of the phone is completely

made of diamond glass, extending all the way to the edge and connected with a thin stainless steel bevel. Every part of the phone seems to serve the screen. The new design has a simple and friendly look that makes people want to touch it.

This also means that the circuit board, antenna and processor inside the mobile phone must be redesigned, and Jobs approved such changes.

“He always regards thinness as beauty,” said current Apple CEO Tim Cook. “It can be seen from all our products. We have the thinnest laptops and smartphones, The iPad is also very thin, and will become even thinner in the future.”

Since his teenage years, Jobs has become a strict vegetarian. Coupled with uncontrollable rage and impatience, his body gradually collapsed and he suffered from pancreatic cancer.

One day, his daughter Lisa witnessed Jobs spitting out a large mouthful of soup after knowing that there was butter in the soup.

Lisa realized at an early age that his eating habits reflected a philosophy of life: asceticism and minimalism would sharpen people. "He believes that scarcity equals abundance, and self-discipline produces joy." She said, "He knows a truth that most people don't know: when things go to extremes, they will inevitably reverse." He will never be a good father or husband. Lisa was his child with his ex-girlfriend. Before she was 10 years old, Jobs had almost no control over her. Later, when Jobs married Laurene Powell, he often neglected their three children when he was at work, and his moody temper would make the atmosphere at home very tense.

Jobs wife Laurene Powell

When traveling and eating delicious food, the children I feel very relaxed being with my father. In July 2010, Jobs and his wife took their daughter Erin to travel to Kyoto, Japan. They found a tiny sushi restaurant, which Jobs labeled on his iPhone: “The best sushi I’ve ever had.” Erin thought so too.

They also visited the famous Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto. Erin likes Saihoji Temple the most, "because it has more than 100 kinds of moss growing around the golden pond." The trip helped improve the always strained relationship between father and daughter.

"Like many people with extraordinary talents, he is not equally good in all aspects." Powell said, "He has no social graces and does not put himself in other people's shoes, but he is highly concerned about how to perform. The role of human nature, empowering people, how to make human progress, and create the right tools for humans to pursue progress."

##                            Extreme, create great products

“Zen had a profound influence on Steve. You can see this from his minimalist aesthetic and persistent personality,” Kottke said.

Jobs’ persistence also comes from the influence of his adoptive father, Paul Jobs. When I was a kid, my family lived in Mountain View. When building a fence for the family yard, his father told him that it was also important to make the cabinets and the back of the fence well. “He loved pursuing perfection, and he cared about things even when others couldn’t see them,” Jobs recalled.

This passion for perfection and extreme is applied to every product.

When producing Mac computers, Jobs would carefully inspect the printed circuit boards that were placed inside where no one would see them.

He would criticize from an aesthetic point of view: "Look at these memory chips, they are really ugly. The lines are too close together."

A novice engineer interrupted him: "As long as the machine can Just run it and no one will look at the circuit board."

Jobs replied as usual: "A good carpenter would not use inferior wood to make the back of a cabinet. Even if no one would see it, you You know it's there. If you want to sleep well at night, make sure the appearance and quality are good enough."

Is software and hardware integrated or fragmented? Culturalization is the core difference in the information industry. From Mac to iPad, Jobs has always insisted on end-to-end software and hardware integration, competing fiercely with Microsoft and Google's software openness strategies for decades.

“It’s not that we are control freaks,” he explains, “we want to create great products because we care about our users and are willing to take responsibility for the entire experience rather than do the same crap that everyone else does. "

When talking about what kind of legacy he hopes to leave behind, Jobs said, "My passion is to build a company that can be passed down from generation to generation. The people in this company are motivated to create great products. Others Everything comes second.

What he is best at is discovering a group of geniuses and creating things with them. "Some people say, give consumers what they want. But that's not my way. Our responsibility is to figure out what they want in the future one step ahead."

When he was in high school, Jobs wrote about a famous book The magazine called "The Whole Earth Catalog" fascinated me. On the back cover of the discontinued issue in 1971, there was a picture of an early morning country road, the kind of scene you might encounter while hitchhiking if you were adventurous.

There is a line below the photo: Be hungry for knowledge, be humble and foolish. (Stay hungry, Stay foolish.)

With his fanatical pursuit of perfection, he subverted six major industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, mobile phones, tablets and digital publishing.

At Jobs's funeral, the "Extraordinary" advertising slogan he helped design when he returned to Apple in 1997 was played, which was an unpublished version of his own. Dubbed version.

His voice hovered above the sunny courtyard, like a ghost announcing his epitaph to the world: To crazy people. They are unique. They are unruly. They cause trouble. They were out of place.

They see things differently. They don't like to stick to rules. They are also unwilling to settle for the status quo.

You can agree with them, oppose them, praise or denigrate them, but you cannot ignore them.

They push mankind forward. Maybe they are madmen in the eyes of others, but they are geniuses in our eyes. Because only those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world can actually change the world.

How did Steve Jobs find financing to create the Mac computer when he was still relatively inexperienced because he didn't know how to program? Abandoned by Apple, how did he create the Pixar animation kingdom in the trough? After returning to Apple, how did he turn the tide and reinvigorate the company's creativity and vitality?

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