Jony Ive - The Biggest Lesson I Learned from Steve Jobs

Nugget from Steve Jobs

Hey Friend!

In today’s letter, I bring you one of my favorite lessons from Steve Jobs. I think it not only applies to business, but also to life in general—more specifically, to live more purposefully (and thus, with more meaning and ultimately more happiness).

But this nugget does not come straight from Steve Job’s words. It comes from an experience that Jony Ive (Former Chief Design Officer at Apple Inc.) had when working with Steve. But since this lesson is so powerful… I wanted to share it!

👤 Authors

💡Nugget

Graydon Carter (interviewer at Vanity Fair) asked Jony:

“Can you name 3 life lessons you took away from working with Steve Jobs?"

The lesson that personally impacted me, was the last lesson that Jony mentioned… (the other lessons are also useful, but these are pretty well-known already).

🟠 Jony Ive (on Steve Jobs):

This sounds really simplistic, but it still shocks me how few people actually practice this—and it's a struggle to practice—but is this issue of focus.

Steve was the most remarkably focused person I've ever met in my life.

You can achieve so much when you are truly focused.

And one of the things that Steve would say [is]: “How many things have you said no to?” And I would have these sacrificial things—because I wanted to be very honest about it, and so I say: “Oh, I said no to this, and no to that…” But he knew that I wasn't vaguely interested in doing those things anyway. So there was no real sacrifice.

What Focus means… is saying NO to something that—with every bone in your body—you think is a phenomenal idea. And you wake up thinking about it… but you say NO to it because you're focusing on something else.

And then the 3rd one is an interesting one:

This is the lesson that truly impacted me...

Which actually reflects a little bit poorly on myself.

But I remember having a conversation with him and [I] was asking… it could have been perceived that in his critique of a piece of work he was a little harsh.

And we'd been working on this, we put our heart and soul into this… and I was saying: “Could we not moderate the things we said? A little bit.”

And he [Steve] said: “But why?”

And I said: “Well, you know, because I care about the team.”

And he said this brutally brilliantly insightful thing: “No, Jony. You're just really vain. You just want people to like you. And I'm surprised at you because I thought you really held the work up as the most important, not how you believed that you were perceived by other people.”

And I was terribly crossed because I knew he was right…

"I think when you multi-task so much, you don’t have time to think about anything deeply. You’re giving the world an advantage you shouldn’t do. Practically everybody is drifting into that mistake.

Concentrating hard on something that is important is … I can’t succeed at all without doing it. I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span."

- Charlie Munger (source)


Jeff Bezos is another great example of someone with intense focus...

"I don't like to multitask. It bothers me. If I'm reading my email I want to be really reading my email. My mom tells a story about me being in Montessori School and then they couldn't get me to switch tasks, so the Montessori School teacher would have to literally pick up my chair and just move me to the next task station. So I don't need discipline in order to not be checking my email, for me it's very natural. I love being present in whatever I'm working, and I'm happy multitasking but I do it serially.

Honestly, if something really important is happening somebody will find me… you know it's not like I have to check my text messages every five minutes or something like that. It’s not a big deal."

- Jeff Bezos (Mark and Jeff Bezos in conversation)

💥 Stuff I Loved

This newsletter is brought to you by Shortform - The platform that I love using to get nuggets from Books!

Shortform is THE platform to go if you wanna find highly valuable nuggets (big ideas) from important non-fiction books. This is how I mainly learn from books. Beyond offering book summaries, they provide you with a full guide and synthesis of all the worthy ideas in a book.

Personally, I love it because I can absorb book ideas at a faster pace compared to reading the entire books, and there is a deep analysis on each idea! (it is not shallowly explained, as it is the case in other platforms). But of course, for books that I’m deeply interested in reading I still read the entire book! And then use Shortform to quickly re-visit the main ideas.

I also made a short video exploring the platform and showing you how I’m personally using it. Here’s the Link!

The cost is equivalent to the price of one book a month and you can use my affiliate link to get a 5-Day FREE trial and a 20% Discount on the annual subscription (besides, you will be supporting my work 😉) - shortform.com/pickingnuggets

Happy Friday ;)

Julio xx

P.S. If you liked this article, you'll definitely enjoy my free 80-page ebook. It’s packed with 23 big ideas (from top influential doers and entrepreneurs) to become better, richer and wiser. Download your copy here!