Tim Cook: The man who found his purpose
Hi Friends :)
Back with Tim Cook. How many people do you know who can talk about changing the world with conviction? Few.
Yet, it’s the culture at Apple. It’s the only thing they talk about. If I had to sum up all of Apple in 1 word: Focus. You’ll see it in a few minutes.
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Issue 5
We can only do great things a few times
Question: You grew up in a grindingly simple and normal American middle-class household. When you and I as kids would go to a neighbor's house and see their new TV - Sony Trinitron, that would tell us something. And that brand lasted up until Walkman disc but then, fast forward to today, it's less meaningful. How do you not become Sony?
We're very simple people at Apple. We focus on making the world's best products and enriching people's lives. I think some companies, maybe even the one that you mentioned, maybe they decided that they could do everything. We have to make sure at Apple that we stay true to focus. Laser focus. We can only do great things a few times, only on a few products.
The hardest decisions we make are all the things not to work on
The fact that despite this table being so small that you and I are sitting at, you could put every Apple product on it, every single one that we ship today, and yet this year, our revenues will be approximately $190 billion, there's probably no other company on the face of the earth that could say that. Most companies begin to do larger and larger and larger portfolios because it's so easy to add. It's hard to edit, it's hard to stay focused. And yet we know we'll only do our best work if we stay focused. And so the hardest decisions we make are all the things not to work on because there are lots of things we'd like to work on that we have an interest in. But we know that we can't do everything great.
Go West young man, Go west
I go to meet Steve and all of a sudden he's talking about his strategy and his vision. And what he was doing was going 100% into consumer, when everybody else in the industry had decided you could not make any money in consumer. They were headed to servers and storage in the enterprise. And I had always thought that following the herd was not a good thing. You’re either gonna lose big or lose. But those are the two options. He was doing something totally different. And he told me a little about the design, enough to get me really interested. He was describing what later would be called the iMac. And the way that he talked, and the way the chemistry was in the room, it was just he and me and I could tell I can work with him. And I looked at the problems Apple had. And I thought I can make a contribution here. And this is a privilege of a lifetime. I thought I'm doing it. I'm going for it. And you have this voice in your ear that says Go West young man, Go west. I was young at the time. But you come back and you try to do the things that people do with spreadsheets and stuff. And none of it makes sense. It didn't make sense. And yet, my gut said, go for it. They (skeptics) didn't know Steve Jobs. And so in that meeting, I concluded all of those guys are wrong. They don't know him. And they don't know his vision. They see things in the traditional way, which Steve never did.
Curiosity leads to Opportunities
We kick around a lot of things internally. And we might start something and get down the road a little bit and have a different idea. Steve told a story about the iPad. It was not a new idea. And it was shelved and the team was reallocated to work on iPhone, and then the iPhone came out, and after iPhone got up and running, the iPad was out. And so there are always things that we're looking at that are drawing R&D expense, where there's no associated revenue. A lot of what leads to innovation is curiosity. It's the curiosity to begin pulling a strain. And you see where it takes you. And a lot of what we do isn't apparent to the public at the beginning. Like when we did touch ID a year ago, people thought Touch ID was a way to get into your phone. And it's very cool doing that. But then we also said, well, you could buy stuff from Apple with it. Obviously, we the entire time were planning to do a much broader rollout for mobile payments. We invest in a lot of things that have long tentacles.
Building intuitive Products
We try very hard to design the product like the mind works. So you don't have to have an instruction manual. You can pick it and it works as though you thought it would work.
Moving Fast
You could kind of talk to Steve about something very big and if it resonated with him, he would just say, okay, and you could do it. And it was a total revelation for me that a company could run like this. Because I was used to these layers and bureaucracy and studies. And Apple was totally different than that.
Don’t fall in love with your ideas
Be intellectually honest. I see so many people, when they commit themselves to something, their pride will not allow them to say, this just doesn't work. Steve, of everyone I've known in life, could be the most avid proponent of some position. And within minutes or days, if new information came up, you would think that he never ever thought that before. Talking about moving the hat, he was a pro at this. And at first, I thought, wow, he really flip-flops. And then all of a sudden, I saw the beauty in it. Because he wasn't getting stuck like so many other people do. Have the courage to change.
Great teams are pieces of the puzzle
The best groups are more like a band, not a group of chiclets. If you think about a band, you have people that are experts playing their musical instruments. And you have people that are creatively very different person to person. And the band has to trust each other. And Apple runs on trust. With minimal overlap. We don't believe in the check the checker thing. We're more of a puzzle that comes together. For that model to work, we have to put incredible trust in one another.
Make products that you love
I remember going through a course in marketing and it said, step one, set up a focus group. Step two, ask people what they want. Step three, deliver. Well, as it turns out, that doesn't really work. It doesn't work because most people if you set up a focus group will tell you small changes to the existing thing. And so if you want to go from the stagecoach to the car, somebody is not likely to come up with the car. If if you want to go from the Sony Walkman to the iPod, someone's not likely to come up with the iPod. You should make products that you love and you can bet that if you love it there are many other people out there that will love it too.
The 15-year quest of finding my purpose
There will be days where you will ask yourself, where is all this going? What is the purpose? What is my purpose? I'll be honest, I asked myself that same question. And it took me nearly 15 years to answer it. The struggle for me started early on in high school. I thought I'd discover my life's purpose when I could answer that age-old question: what do you want to be when you grow up? Nope. In college, I thought I would discover it when I could answer, what's your major? Not quite. I thought that maybe I’ll discover it when I find a good job. Then I thought I just needed to get a few promotions. That didn't work either. I kept convincing myself that it was just over the horizon, around the next corner. Nothing worked. And it was really tearing me apart. Part of me kept pushing ahead to the next achievement. And the other part kept asking is this all there is? I went to grad school at Duke looking for the answer. I tried meditation. I sought guidance in religion. I read great philosophers and authors. And in a moment of youthful indiscretion, I might even have experimented with a Windows PC. And obviously, that didn't work. After countless twists and turns at last 20 years ago, my search brought me to Apple. At the time the company was struggling to survive. Steve Jobs had just returned to Apple and had launched the Think Different campaign. He wanted to empower the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, The round pegs in the square holes to do their best work. If we could just do that, Steve knew we could really change the world. Before that moment, I had never met a leader with such passion or encountered a company with such a clear and compelling purpose: to serve humanity. It was just that simple, serve humanity. And it was at that moment, after 15 years of searching, something clicked. I was never going to find my purpose, working someplace without a clear sense of purpose of its own. When you work towards something greater than yourself, you find meaning, you find purpose.
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The next issue comes on 29th Nov - We go into the intellectual software of Mike Ovitz. He built CAA into a powerhouse in an era of far few creators. As the creator economy starts eating the world, we might as well dig into his brain to pull out some timeless frameworks and a distinct view into the future. Excited to share it with you in 2 weeks.
- Abhishek