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8c1a056
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Steve Jobs] chafed at not being in control, and he sometimes hallucinated or became angry. Even when he was barely conscious, his strong personality came through. At one point the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated. Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask and he would pick ..
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Walter Isaacson |
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4e3141e
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Jobs was a strong-willed, elitist artist who didn't want his creations mutated inauspiciously by unworthy programmers. To him it would be as if someone off the street added some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changed the lyrics to a Dylan song.
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Walter Isaacson |
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712cfb9
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Hertzfeld recalled that Gates just sat there coolly, looking at Steve in the eye, before hurling back, in his squeaky voice, what became a classic zinger. "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it, I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
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insult
perspective
technology
theft
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Walter Isaacson |
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0659cbb
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Lembrar-me de que irei morrer dentro de pouco tempo e a ferramenta mais importante que ja encontrei para me ajudar a fazer as grandes escolhas da vida. Porque quase tudo -- todas as expectativas externas, todo o orgulho, todos os medos e embaracos ou fracassos -- todas essas coisas deixam de ser importantes face a morte, deixando apenas lugar para as coisas que verdadeiramente importam. Lembrar-nos de que vamos morrer e a melhor forma que c..
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Walter Isaacson |
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21a61c0
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Steve's sales pitch on the NeXT operating system was dazzling," according to Amelio. " He praised the virtues and strengths as though he were describing a performance of Oliver as Macbeth."
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sales
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Walter Isaacson |
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2f58398
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Jobs also used the meetings to enforce focus. At Robert Friedland's farm, his job had been to prune the apple trees so that they would stay strong, and that became a metaphor for his pruning at Apple. Instead of encouraging each group to let product lines proliferate based on marketing considerations, or permitting a thousand ideas to bloom, Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time. " There is no one better a..
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concentration
confidence
focus
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Walter Isaacson |
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87b7127
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Innovation requires articulation.
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Walter Isaacson |
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e15bada
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Occasionally Leonardo appended a moral lesson to the entry, such as this: "The oyster, when the moon is full, opens itself wide, and when the crab looks in he throws in a stone or seaweed and the oyster cannot close again, whereby it serves for food to that crab. This is what happens to him who opens his mouth to tell his secret. He becomes the prey of the treacherous hearer." --
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Walter Isaacson |
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b175c05
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There was a key lesson for innovation: Understand which industries are symbiotic so that you can capitalize on how they will spur each other on.
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Walter Isaacson |
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cc49303
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Whoever accustoms himself to pass over in silence the faults of his neighbors shall meet with much better quarter from the world when he happens to fall into a mistake himself."14"
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Walter Isaacson |
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3524b2f
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You always have to keep pushing to innovate.
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Walter Isaacson |
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6ef196c
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On occasion Jobs would use the semi-abandoned Woodside home, especially its swimming pool, for family parties. When Bill Clinton was president, he and Hillary Clinton stayed in the 1950s ranch house on the property on their visits to their daughter, who was at Stanford. Since both the main house and ranch house were unfurnished, Powell would call furniture and art dealers when the Clintons were coming and pay them to furnish the houses temp..
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Walter Isaacson |
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3c7bd25
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progress, the concept that individuals, and humanity in general, move forward and improve based on a steady increase of knowledge and the wisdom that comes from conquering adversity.
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Walter Isaacson |
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b88bd9e
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What do you think of Adolf Hitler?" Einstein replied, "He is living on the empty stomach of Germany. As soon as economic conditions improve, he will no longer be important."
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Walter Isaacson |
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8aab872
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Jobs described Mike Markkula's maxim that a good company must "impute"- it must convey its values and importance in everything it does, from packaging to marketing. Johnson loved it. It definitely applied to a company's stores. " The store will become the most powerful physical expression of the brand," he predicted. He said that when he was young he had gone to the wood-paneled, art-filled mansion-like store that Ralph Lauren had created a..
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business-culture
marketing
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Walter Isaacson |
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e471935
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Despite the pecuniary spirit of Poor Richard's sayings and the penny-saving reputation they later earned Franklin, he did not have the soul of an acquisitive capitalist. "I would rather have it said," he wrote his mother, " 'He lived usefully,' than, 'He died rich.' "
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Walter Isaacson |
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c405a2c
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Leonardo had also been wrestling with the question of why the sky appears blue, and around that time he had correctly concluded that it had to do with the water vapor in the air. In the Saint Anne painting, he portrays the sky's luminous and misty gradations of blue as no other painter had done. The recent cleaning of the painting fully reveals the magical realism, veiled in vapors, of his distant mountains and skyline.
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Walter Isaacson |
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890140d
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As Friedland had done and as Jobs would learn to do, he was able to turn charm into a cunning force, to cajole and intimidate and distort reality with the power of his personality
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Walter Isaacson |
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5705982
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The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is r..
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Walter Isaacson |
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1d3a3d9
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Kenneth Clark referred to Leonardo's "inhumanly sharp eye." It's a nice phrase, but misleading. Leonardo was human. The acuteness of his observational skill was not some superpower he possessed. Instead, it was a product of his own effort. That's important, because it means that we can, if we wish, not just marvel at him but try to learn from him by pushing ourselves to look at things more curiously and intensely. In his notebook, he descri..
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Walter Isaacson |
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5d81067
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The Ottoman Turks were about to capture Constantinople, unleashing on Italy a migration of fleeing scholars with bundles of manuscripts containing the ancient wisdom of Euclid, Ptolemy, Plato, and Aristotle.
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Walter Isaacson |
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fc91afc
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In notes for his treatise on painting, Leonardo recommended to young artists this practice of walking around town, finding people to use as models, and recording the most interesting ones in a portable notebook: "Take a note of them with slight strokes in a little book which you should always carry with you," he wrote. "The positions of the people are so infinite that the memory is incapable of retaining them, which is why you should keep t..
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Walter Isaacson |
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8f1f02d
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Coming back after seven months in Indian villages, I saw the craziness of the Western
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Walter Isaacson |
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d5e066e
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Leonardo at twenty-nine was more easily distracted by the future than he was focused on the present.
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Walter Isaacson |
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4a78109
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Any government is evil if it carries within it the tendency to deteriorate into tyranny," he warned the Russian scientists. "The danger of such deterioration is more acute in a country in which the government has authority not only over the armed forces but also over every channel of education and information as well as over the existence of every single citizen."27"
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Walter Isaacson |
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02acf23
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History is a tale, Franklin came to believe, not of immutable forces but of human endeavors.
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Walter Isaacson |
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e930288
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Look longer at the picture. It vibrates with Leonardo's understanding that no moment is discrete, self-contained, frozen, delineated, just as no boundary in nature is sharply delineated. As with the river that Leonardo described, each moment is part of what just passed and what is about to come. This is one of the essences of Leonardo's art: from the Adoration of the Magi to Lady with an Ermine to The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, each mom..
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Walter Isaacson |
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48795c4
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Be curious, relentlessly curious. "I have no special talents," Einstein once wrote to a friend. "I am just passionately curious."4 Leonardo actually did have special talents, as did Einstein, but his distinguishing and most inspiring trait was his intense curiosity. He wanted to know what causes people to yawn, how they walk on ice in Flanders, methods for squaring a circle, what makes the aortic valve close, how light is processed in the e..
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Walter Isaacson |
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8cbb7f1
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Despite his new fame and fortune, he still fancied himself a child of the counterculture. On a visit to a Stanford class, he took off his Wilkes Bashford blazer and his shoes, perched on top of a table, and crossed his legs into a lotus position. The students asked questions, such as when Apple's stock price would rise, which Jobs brushed off. Instead he spoke of his passion for future products, such as someday making a computer as small as..
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Walter Isaacson |
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bd8cccd
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Use for yourself little," he said, "but give to others much."26"
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Walter Isaacson |
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bd765cc
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One must apply the greatest artistry in three things," Alberti wrote, "walking in the city, riding a horse, and speaking, for in each of these one must try to please everyone."12 Leonardo mastered all three."
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Walter Isaacson |
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de67ec1
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When Leonardo was painting The Last Supper (fig. 74), spectators would visit and sit quietly just so they could watch him work. The creation of art, like the discussion of science, had become at times a public event. According to the account of a priest, Leonardo would "come here in the early hours of the morning and mount the scaffolding," and then "remain there brush in hand from sunrise to sunset, forgetting to eat or drink, painting con..
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Walter Isaacson |
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e06fdbf
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Most notably, he was known for his willingness to share his blessings. "He was so generous that he sheltered and fed all his friends, rich or poor," according to Vasari. He was not motivated by wealth or material possessions. In his notebooks, he decried "men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of the desire for wisdom, which is the sustenance and truly dependable wealth of the mind."2 As a result, he spent more..
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Walter Isaacson |
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9c202a8
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Leonardo at twenty-nine was more easily distracted by the future than he was focused on the present. He was a genius undisciplined by diligence.
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Walter Isaacson |
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3a32e13
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Leonardo da Vinci liked to boast that, because he was not formally educated, he had to learn from his own experiences instead
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Walter Isaacson |
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3270738
|
That goes a step too far, I think. Leonardo did not invent the scientific method, nor did Aristotle or Alhazen or Galileo or any Bacon. But his uncanny abilities to engage in the dialogue between experience and theory made him a prime example of how acute observations, fanatic curiosity, experimental testing, a willingness to question dogma, and the ability to discern patterns across disciplines can lead to great leaps in human understandin..
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Walter Isaacson |
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9e59d2b
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First and foremost is that creativty is a collaborative process. Innovation comes from teams more often than the lightbulb moments of lone geniuses.
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Walter Isaacson |
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c8f9a8a
|
We saw an example of this pattern-based analysis on the "theme sheet," where he made the analogy between a branching tree and the arteries in a human, one that he applied also to rivers and their tributaries. "All the branches of a tree at every stage of its height when put together are equal in thickness to the trunk below them," he wrote elsewhere. "All the branches of a river at every stage of its course, if they are of equal rapidity, a..
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Walter Isaacson |
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9560d4e
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While at Windsor Castle looking at the swirling power of the "Deluge drawings" that he made near the end of his life, I asked the curator, Martin Clayton, whether he thought Leonardo had done them as works of art or of science. Even as I spoke, I realized it was a dumb question. "I do not think that Leonardo would have made that distinction," he replied."
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Walter Isaacson |
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b3439db
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On what may be the last page he wrote in his notebooks, Leonardo drew four right triangles with bases of differing lengths (fig. 143). Inside of each he fit a rectangle, and then he shaded the remaining areas of the triangle. In the center of the page he made a chart with boxes labeled with the letter of each rectangle, and below it he described what he was trying to accomplish. As he had done obsessively over the years, he was using the vi..
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Walter Isaacson |
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d998e91
|
Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground.
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Walter Isaacson |
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a402c9d
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One purpose of these notebooks was to record interesting scenes, especially those involving people and emotions. "As you go about town," he wrote in one of them, "constantly observe, note, and consider the circumstances and behavior of men as they talk and quarrel, or laugh, or come to blows."1 For that purpose, he kept a small notebook hanging from his belt."
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Walter Isaacson |
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505476a
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He also noted that the veins of humans narrow with age, but the springs and rivers of the earth continually enlarge their channels.30
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Walter Isaacson |
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40512cc
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While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."3"
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Walter Isaacson |