Excerpt from a YouTube interview (uploaded Dec 8, 2023) in which an interviewer asks Steve Jobs about the balance between thinking and doing in the semiconductor industry. Jobs argues that the most impactful people are both thinkers and doers in the same person — the "doers are the major thinkers" — and uses examples such as Leonardo da Vinci (artist + chemist/anatomist) and Bob Noyce (risk-taker) to illustrate that combining art/science and thinking/doing produces exceptional results.
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Balance between thinking and doing. I mean, one of the things in semiconductors was you had risk takers. Bob Noyce learns to hang glide at age 40. These people like laying their butts in the line. How important was that in the early days? I mean, we're going back to 75.
Well, again, after seeing. My entire life has been spent only in one industry, which is this one, But I've been in it now for about 15 years. And I've seen a lot of people make a lot of things. I've seen a lot of people fail a lot of things. And my point of view on this or my observation is that the doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker, doer in one person. And if we really go back and we examine, did Leonardo have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years out in the future what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it? Of course not. Leonardo was the artist, but he also mixed all his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist, knew about pigments, knew about human anatomy. And combining all of those skills together, the art and the science, the thinking and the doing, was what resulted in the exceptional result. And there is no difference in our industry. The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers. And when you. A lot of people, of course, it's very easy to take credit for the thinking. The doing is more concrete, but it's very easy for somebody to say, oh, I thought of this three years ago. But usually when you dig a little deeper, you find that the people that really did it were also the people that really worked through the hard intellectual problems as well.