TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

For getting me in here today, it's a great pleasure to be talking to ad tech, because the whole point of ad tech is connecting emotion to technology. And that was the whole point of Steve Jobs life and career. There were people in this world who were probably better technologists. I think even Steve would admit, at least every now and then, that Bill Gates was a better technologist. And certainly there were people who were more emotional as artists. Steve would say, Bob Dylan fits into that category. But nobody of our day and generation was able to connect emotion to technology, to connect art to engineering the way Steve Jobs did. I think that was the secret to success. And that's what he created at Apple Computer, part and parcel of his genius. It was part of his passion and was part of his perfectionism. So this notion of connecting emotion to technology is something I had seen in Jobs for many, many years. By 2009, his wife mentions to me, if you're going to ever do a book on Steve, you better do it now. We could also connect it to practical engineering. As many of you know, he grew up in California, the adopted child of an auto mechanic, actually a repo man. He used to repossess cars for the finance company when people didn't pay it. And then he would fix up the cars and sell them. Paul Jobs was a perfect salt of the earth father for Ste. Paul Jobs had never gone to college. In fact, he dropped out of high school to join the Coast Guard during World War II. But he had a real appreciation of craftsmanship. And as Steve was a young kid, he would sit in the garage with his father and look at the end to end craftsmanship that went into a car. How the car manufacturer had integrated everything. The engine, the drive train, the chassis, but also the design. And Steve always felt that all products should have that end to end integration that he loved watching his father do when he helped fix up cars. I remember Steve walked me around the old neighborhood near Cupertino where he grew up. And his dad was building a fence around the backyard of their house. And his dad told him, you have to make the back of the fence just as beautiful as the front of the fence. And Steve said, why? Nobody will ever know. And his father said, you'll know. And that's a mark of a good craftsman to make the parts unseen just as beautiful as the parts you can see. So that too becomes part of what Steve's job does, Whether it's the first circuit boards or the Macintosh, all the way to the end. The parts unseen have to be beautiful. Meeting at Homestead High School, a guy who had recently graduated from school, Steve Wozniak. And they start pulling a lot of pranks, pranks that involve searching out Bob Dylan albums, but also the bootleg tapes and figuring out how to replicate them, but also doing things like ripping off the phone company with the blue box that Wozniak was able to design that could replicate the tone to the Bell system so you could make long distance phone calls. They even called the Vatican at one point using one of these. And Woz pretended to be Henry Kissinger and says, I want to speak to the Pope. I am at the summit meeting. And after a few hours of back and forth, they were about to get the Pope. And I think they figured it out over at the Vatican that it wasn't really Henry Kissinger. That notion of geeky electronics, that notion of being a misfit and a rebel with it, that really appealed to Steve. And what Steve figured out, starting with the blue box, was that he could take Woz's designs and actually package them so it wouldn't be some little circuit board in which you could make a phone call, be carefully put into a case, and they market it to all of their friends. They sold a couple hundred of them. And that's how Apple Computer was born. Integrated product, end to end, tightly integrated. That helped spark the home computer revolution. I'm not sure that many people here are old enough to remember the Altair and the Apple II and others, but it was the Apple II that finally allowed you to bring a computer home, take it out of a box, and actually use it. One argument that Woz and Jobs had about the Apple ii, Woz wanted to have a lot of slots. He wanted to be able to be opened up. He wanted people to be able to jack in and put their own circuits in, their own peripherals, to put in their own software if they wanted to. Jobs said, no, we don't want that. No slots, no way to open it. They have an argument and Woz actually thinks of quitting, and Woz wins the argument. The Apple II had about eight slots in it, in addition to the ones that were necessary to be used so people could hack into it, people could do whatever they wanted with it. This causes a split between Lars and Steve Jobs, because when Steve starts working on the Apple, on the Macintosh, he wants it to be an end to end. Controlled appliance is the essence of what Steve Jobs greatness. And also to some extent his weakness was he was totally controlling and from his childhood. And he believed that if you had A passion for perfection. If you wanted to make a product insanely great, you had to control the hardware, the software. You couldn't let people jack in, you couldn't open it up. You couldn't put your own operating system on Macintosh hardware or use the Macintosh hardware. I mean, use the Macintosh operating system to be licensed out on another piece of hardware. And that end to end integrated control becomes a signature of really the artist that Steve Jobs felt he was Macintosh. You just pull it out of the box, it smiles at you, it says hello on the screen. And it's a computer everybody can use like an appliance. Steve went to Macy's to look at the Cuisinart machines so that he could have the beautiful appliance like feel to it. And it was that end to end integration that caused it to be such a revolutionary machine, of course, was a graphical user interface, which Steve and his team had been able to see at Xerox PARC as part of a financial deal. People sometimes say, well, you know, he just took the graphical user interface from Xerox parents. But once he saw it, he realized that between the conception and the execution falls the shadow, as Tsoe had said. Xerox didn't know how to execute on something like this and make it so that you can move the folders and the icons and the documents on the screen, move them around with the mouse, which is not something that Xerox did. They created the pull down menus, they created the notion of double click and other things. When people say it was Xerox who did that work of art, I say, yeah, but Xerox actually came out with the Xerox Star and the Xerox Alto. They sold about 300 machines. That is, it totally flopped. When the Macintosh comes out, it sets the world on fire. What we used to call, when we were doing physics and astronomy, a twin in the binary star system of the digital revolution. A binary star system is with two stars. They have their orbits linked a little bit because they each have a gravitational pull on the other. So you have two guys born in 1955 who dropped out of college, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. They start circling each other. Bill Gates, one of the first things he and Microsoft did was create the spreadsheet program, the word processing program for the original app, and then for the Macintosh. But Steve is always afraid that Bill Gates is going to steal the graphical user interface that they're working on for the Macintosh. And indeed it happens. Steve gets furious when he realizes that Bill Gates is creating Windows and using the same Point and click icon system. A very famous exchange between them. When Steve drags Bill down from Seattle and says, how can you do this? You're ripping us off. He uses a lot more colorful language than that. And Bill Gates says, no, I don't think I'm ripping you off. It's like both of us broke in. It's like we both had an uncle and broke into his home, and his uncle was called Xerox, and we both stole the same thing from Xerox. When he came back to Apple, Apple was worth 1/50 of what Microsoft was worth in 2000. By 2010, Apple was worth more than Microsoft. By now, it's worth twice as much as Microsoft. And Apple is, on and off in the past month, the most valuable company on earth. A lot of people came to visit him. But one of the I was there in Palo Alto when Bill Gates decided he wanted to come visit two months ago. Steve is not the most gracious human being. I tried. There's a lot of anecdotes in the book about how nasty he can be, but I try to weave it into how it's part and parcel of his passion. But when he first heard that Bill wanted to come visit, he muttered a few things and the meeting never happened. But eventually, Bill Gates, we're down in college, just comes to the back door, Steve's house, knocks on the door, comes into the kitchen, finds Eve, the youngest daughter, there doing her homework. Bill says, is your dad here? And she points to the downstairs room because Steve was very sick and didn't go upstairs very easily, where Steve is resting. And they speak for three and a half hours about being the different approaches they took in the digital age, including the fact that computers and technology has transformed almost every industry in this room country, from journalism to medicine to law, but hadn't yet transformed education. And the schools have not fully figured out how to be different than they were 400 years ago when somebody invented the notion of putting a teacher in front of a classroom. And they talk about all the future things that could happen with the technology. And finally, Bill Gates, who's a very gracious gentleman, says to Steve, you know, I never thought that the end to end integrated model could work, but you proved it could work. You proved that integrating hardware, software, content into one appliance like system could actually work. Another was very gracious. And Steve, who definitely is not always that gracious, said, well, you know, Bill, you proved your model could work as well. There's room for buzzwords. This is as Steve is Furious at Android for sort of replicating what happened with Microsoft in the 1980s. That is taking the look and feel of an Apple product and licensing it around promiscuously. But Steve says you proved that that open model of open licensing and different competing hardware manufacturers using the software, you proved that could also work. To my book when I heard it from both sides. But the good thing about the digital age is everybody in it's a bit quirky. So when I talked to Bill Gates about that scene, he said, well, there was one thing I didn't tell Steve. I said that the Indian integrated model worked. But I think it only works if you have a Steve Jobs there, somebody with a total passion for absolute into in control and is going to micromanage every bit of it until he gets it. I thought, well, that's sort of a backhanded compliment. So when I saw Steve later the next day, I said, here's what Bill said, you could only work if you were in charge. And Steve looks at me and says, what an asshole. And I said, but Steve, you told him that his model also worked. And he looked at me and said, yeah, it also works, but it only works if you don't care about making crappy products. So anyway, the book ends the way it should with not everything tightly wrapped up with Android still competing with Apple operating systems with these two different types of approaches out there, which I think does allow the passion and perfection of a Steve Jobs to do what he does best. But also a thousand inventors found a thousand ways to use open systems and do what they do best. And so for me, that connection of creativity to technology can happen in many different ways. My book is a pay on to Steve Jobs genius, but I also know he has flaws. And I say this isn't a how to book for how the digital age should rhyme. This is just a biography of one guy and you can learn a lot of lessons from it, good and bad. Thank you all.