If Apple is different from other companies, it is that it has its own way of understanding technology, and this philosophy is passed on to the way employees work, in a Extreme personal devotion and, above all, intense secrecy.
This trait has been in the company’s DNA since the days of Steve Jobs, who challenged employees to push their abilities beyond what they themselves could have imagined. His personality earned Steve Jobs a reputation as a millionaire and a difficult boss, as his angry outbursts could ultimately lead to employees being fired.
But thanks to this Continuous pursuit of perfection Even the smallest details can teach many other employees in the company important life and improvement lessons.
Justin Santamaria was one of those employees, who, spurred on by Steve Jobs’ requests, ended up learning some of the techniques he’d used during his more than 10 years at Apple. Santamaría is part of the development team for FaceTime, iMessage and CarPlay. Under the watchful eye of Steve Jobs, he learned three important lessons from the Apple founder that stayed with him throughout his career.
Rome was not built in a day.you have to hold on
One of the characteristics of Steve Jobs is His absolute obsession with excellence. It’s not enough to just make something work. It has to be the best version. That meant repeating the process over and over again, with slight variations, until the perfect formula was found and, as he said in a demo of the first iPhone, “until we were five years ahead of everyone else.”
Steve Jobs demonstrated his drive for perfection in the design of the first Macintosh casing, forcing Terry Oyama and Jerry Manock to revise every curve, every angle and every inclination of the prototype over and over again. , until he fully achieves the aesthetic he seeks. . The engineering team itself claimed that it found no differences between the shell that eventually went into production and the 15 previous prototypes.
Just like polishing a diamond, Steve Jobs demanded perfection in even the smallest details. It doesn’t matter how long it takes to get there. Santamaría told CNBC that during his first week at Apple, Steve Jobs was preparing a demo of iChat and, driven by enthusiasm for the new messaging app, exclaimed, “I’m going to make the crowd wet their pants.”
I didn’t fail, I found 999 ways not to make a light bulb
This quote from Edison is a perfect example of one of the maxims that Justin Santamaría learned while working with Steve Jobs.
When the Apple team designed the first smartphone, they were exploring uncharted territory. Jobs accepted mistakes as part of the creative processhe encourages employees to learn from them and turn it into a useful approach to get closer to the results they really want.
The excellence of a product does not start with a perfect idea, but needs to be shaped bit by bit. As Picasso said: “If the muses come, let them find you at work.”
As the former Apple employee noted, “Jobs expected things to go wrong. But he also understood that making mistakes is often worth the reward of learning. In fact, being prepared for failure is critical to not losing perspective.”
Don’t let trees stop you from seeing the forest
When Apple launched the first iPhone in 2007, it changed the mobile phone paradigm forever and became one of the most advanced mobile phones around. the key to success The idea is to eliminate the physical keyboard that all phones have had to use to date, freeing up more space for a multi-touch screen.
This change in the way mobile phones are used opens up a whole range of usage possibilities for mobile screens, allowing the creation of a more organic user experience where you simply touch elements on the screen.
Santamaria said in an interview that overcoming this obstacle has not been easy. The iPhone design team had to confront a widely accepted and integrated element of the phone, such as the physical keyboard, and learn to see the opportunities it offered. “In 2007, the original iPhone changed the world forever, with its multi-touch display and numeric keypad being the highlight. The decision to do away with the mechanical keyboard was a smart industrial design solution. It gave the iPhone more screen real estate for other purposes. Creative Function”.
Jobs had to discuss it with the development team Reasons they shouldn’t choose a physical keyboard. “If it works for BlackBerry, why not us,” they replied.
One of the development team’s biggest concerns is that the phone will make calls involuntarily or start playing files unexpectedly. Faced with this challenge, engineers developed one of the iPhone’s most distinctive gestures: slide to unlock, and achieved the best possible screen performance in just six months.
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Image | Flick (Joey)