From Vision to Reality: Jobs and Bezos on Simplicity, Innovation, and Resilience

Recently, I was wondering what do the ceos of big tech firms think and is there a pattern to it. As I was researching about this, I came across finding a pattern across different ceos and their quotes. So I have learnt a pattern for sure. Now let's start with quotes from Steve Jobs. 

Steve Jobs Quotes: 

Steve jobs first says that don't let the noise of others opinions drown out your own inner voice. This is Steve jobs saying. I believe he intends to leave people pleasing behind and simply work on his ideas and he does not want the noise of the opinions of others drown out his own inner voice. What he also means is that for innovating you need to be different and unique, you got to trust your own gut rather than doubt yourself by hearing other people's opinion. Courage to defy convention, every innovation in the world comes from the courage of defying the current convention. People believed that the earth was flat until proved otherwise. Once you have the courage to defy convention and move towards that, that's where innovation is going to exist. We don't know the path, but we will discover. Moreover, other people opinion can be criticism as well, what jobs wants is to be resilient even if there's criticism. After all, you have to believe in your product and don't let everyone know or they will put some self doubt in you. You have to believe it's possible irrespective of what the world thinks about it. 

Basically, to summarise he says don't care what the world thinks and don't let your inner voice drown. 

It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what do, we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do. Haha, that's true, I love this from Jobs. So if you are working in a company, make sure you are smart enough to tell your boss what to do. We should have the courage to defy convention and tell them right? Haha I mean, at the same time in an appropriate setting, don't tell your boss when you are in a group setting, tell them when you are in a 1:1 conversation. And don't tell, suggest. Anyways, the point is Jobs does emphasise on collective intelligence of a team. 

Steve jobs throughout his time has focused more on quality rather than quantity. He says that one home run is much better than two doubles. What this means is that when you code, make sure the code is of the highest standard and quality. When we do out here is this, think about the product you are building, any product, think about it deeply and think whether it's just a product or it's a quality product. The important thing is that we need a quality product. Produce metrics that define quality, and ease of use. Remember, everyone has an iPhone today because of its quality and not anything else. 

This is beautiful, when we innovate, you make mistakes. The idea is to admit these mistakes quickly and get on with improving your other innovations. Basically what jobs says is that we need to fail and quickly admit to those failures. We can learn from them quickly and easily. However, what's more important is to admit quickly and learning quickly and the redirection comes on the way. 

I love this about jobs. Read it slowly, That's been one of my mantras - focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. Love this, the way Jobs focuses on simplicity is absolutely wonderful. He likes to think that simple is much more complicated and it takes work and effort to make things simple. Keeping things simple is really really important to him. 

He again focuses on not being afraid of the different and not being scared of to have a different opinion then the rest of the world. I love this attitude of Steve Jobs and as multiple of his quotes teach us the same thing, don't listen to the opinions of others that it drowns your own inner voice and then don't be afraid to be different. Anyways, so the point here is that it shouldn't matter if we are different or similar to other people, what should really matter is to be ourselves. 

Another one of my favourite quotes, focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get your thinking clean, to make it simple. Steve jobs previously said that it's quality over quantity for him. So what he means over here is that for apple to really work, he focused a lot on simplicity, whether it was UX design or product development. It was less is more for him, because he wanted to make sure that we as software engineers focus on what the customer wants, an easy user interface without the complexity of the technical details, but also, he said no to a lot of different things. He believed that saying no to a lot of things also means saying yes to the thing that really mattered to him.

So to summarise here are the lessons we learn from Steve Jobs: 

1. Keep it simple. Say no to millions of things and yes to one thing. 

2. Don't let other people's opinions(criticism or praise) get to you, just do what your gut says.

3. Quality is much better than quantity.

4. Don't be afraid to be different. 

5. Fail fast and get redirected faster. 

There might be many more lessons, but here's what all of his quotes give. 

Now, let's think about Mr. Jeff Bezos. He is one of the best entrepreneurs, I am personally aware of and there are so many quotes that can inspire you or me or for that matter anyone in the world to do better. 

I love this quote from Jeff Bezos, I knew that if I failed, I wouldn't regret that, but I knew that one thing I regret is not trying. Look at the long term thinking that he values, he knows that if he failed, he wouldn't regret anything but if anything he would regret is not trying. I love this from Jeff Bezos. He thinks of regret as not living upto his potential and not trying anything new as a much more important metric than failure. Imagine what happens if he does not win a game of cricket or football, he would be fine, but one thing that would be a regret for him is not to try anything new. 

The smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they'd already solved. They're open to new points of view, new information, new ideas, contradictions, and challenges to their own way of thinking. What Bezos means is that the smartest people adopt a growth mindset, even if they think their understanding was a bit wrong in the first place, or if they need to reconsider a problem they thought they had already solved. They're really open to new points of views, they want to learn and grow even if it challenges their previously held beliefs and view points, they are willing to admit their flaws of understanding and learn from it rather. When we challenge our own beliefs, it enables innovation and breakthroughs. So adopt a growth mindset. 

Haha fair enough. The truth in life is that no matter what good you do or how well you do it, there would be critics. There would be people who would say mean things to you, the idea is to tolerate them and ignore them rather than constantly dwelling on them. So whenever you develop something new or interesting, be okay with the critics criticising, in fact learn from them and take it as an opportunity to improve your craft if possible and if the criticism is valid and genuine. But never skip an opportunity to act when you can't tolerate the critics. 

Hahaha lovely, because of today's fancy software tool, people start focusing on the software tool very easily. However, what's more important is that Jeff Bezos prefers a good whiteboard, markers, and someone who knows what they're doing than have a fancy software tool any day. I mean this is so so wonderful, we need to understand the depth of it rather than showing off the tool, so here Jeff Bezos is trying to emphasise on understanding and with someone who knows what they're doing. 

Again a very similar thing to what he said before, he would regret not trying rather than failing. So what's very much more important is that Jeff Bezos also likes to be inventive and says that you should be willing to fail if you want to be inventive. Understand the risk, but take the challenge so that you don't really regret it later on. 

Love this as well, he always focuses on the customer and works backwards from it. For an example, let's say a customer doesn't have his/her Alexa fixed within a particular time frame. Now this is the customer problem, working backwards, he would think about inorder to solve the problem what needs to be done. Contact the customer service, describe the issue, raise a ticket and move it to sev2/sev1 so that the customer needs are satisfied immediately. So that's what customer obsession is. Moreover, not concentrating on the competition is also equally important, you wouldn't be looking at what the other companies are doing, but rather you would care more about what problems your customers are facing and then try solving their problems. The customer first thinking, does help a lot. 

This is Jeff Bezos words again, if you decide only on the things that you know are going to work, you're going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table. Now that's to say that we should not really worry too much about whether it will work or not, but grab an opportunity when the time comes. 

Anyways, the few patterns that I found was this amongst Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos, don't care about the critics. After all every work that you would do, will have critics in place, and at the same time worrying too much about the critics won't really help you progress forward. Second thing is that if you really want to be inventive, you have to be willing to fail. Steve jobs said fail fast and redirect faster. Jeff Bezos also said that you need to work on things that you don't know for sure are going to work, but if you don't work on it, you leave a lot of opportunity at the table.