I have never written about this topic, but Steve Jobs was the reason I originally got into startups as a teenager. However unlike most people, I didn't even know he existed until he died and saw everybody mourning his death.
I was in highschool and owned zero apple products, but I was enamored with why everybody thought he was such a big deal and after a few google searches about him, I was for some reason compelled to buy an eBook on the founding of Apple called Apple Confidential 2.0. Steve Jobs was young when he started Apple, but he was no boy-genius. No National Science awards, or valedictorian, no rhode scholar. He was a rather ordinary child with an interest in electronics His biographies felt almost like a playbook on how you could choose to channel an interest in technology into becoming a visionary. And tell me a teenager with zero social life, friends, or meaningful prospects, who does not yearn to be thought of as a visionary.
Biographies try to whisper you life advice if you listen closely. The takeaway I got from reading his biographies was to be more demanding from life. Steve Jobs was a divinely discontent individual, and he channeled that energy into dreaming up better experiences that could replace the status quo. He was not only frustrated with computers, he experimented with weird diets and sleeping patterns, doubted the popular career advice he was given, everything was drawn into question with him - including things as sacred as going to college. And sometimes, often, he was wrong. But when he was right, he was rewarded disproportionately for it.
That was a second lesson I got from him. Life does not penalize you for being wrong, it rewards you for being right where others are wrong. In fact, you only need to be right once in your career about something big to never have to work again. Life offers a natural incentive to be skeptical, the deal is that skeptics with a bias for action generally become leaders.
Read what Steve Jobs said about TV in 2011:
He [Steve] very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant. “I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,” he told me. “It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.” No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. “It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.”
- Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs Biography
Thirteen years later, the Apple Vision Pro is released in the world. First patented in 2007, you can criticize it’s too big, too expensive, battery drains too fast, not enough apps. But it solves exactly the problem he outlined thirteen years ago:
The Apple Vision Pro was seventeen years in the making. You cannot be visionary without first being frustrated. But of course, it's not enough to be frustrated and get caught up in fantasies - you need to strategize and be willing to do anything that is necessary to bring your vision to life. The biggest sacrifice I have seen that most people are unwilling to make is the willingness to compromise on two things. First, few are willing to be uncomfortable and endure pain without knowing that there will be clear and defined pay-offs. Second, those who are willling to make the trade are unwilling to compromise on the details of their vision for the sake of getting *something* out the door that is within their control today.
Apple Vision Pro may have been 17 years in the works, but their first computer, the Apple I, went from prototype to sales in only 10 days (1976). The prototype itself was built in only four months. You don't get to work on the multi-decade projects before you have proven yourself first with shipping small projects. Shipping a product that people do not like is not failure. Failure is not shipping any products at all.
That is why when you are working on something and midway through building it you get feelings of doubt and insecurity about what you are doing, the best solution is to speed-run it’s completion, take the shortest path possible to showing someone, so you can ship it as soon as possible and get that rejection out of the way asap.