Shortly after Steve Jobs returned as the CEO of Apple in 1997, he met with Jony Ive, Apple’s Senior VP of industrial design. Apple had 40 products on the market. “Jony, how many things have you said no to?” Jobs asked. Ive was confused. “You have to understand,” Jobs said, “There are measures of focus, and one of them is how often you say no.” “What focus means,” Jobs taught Ive, “is saying no to something that you—with every bone in your body—think is a phenomenal idea, and you wake up thinking about it, but you say no to it because you're focusing on something else.” Jobs walked up to a whiteboard and drew a 2 x 2 grid. On top, he wrote “Consumer” and “Professional.” Down the side, “Portable” and “Desktop.” Four products—meet Apple’s new radically focused product line, Jobs said. After that meeting, over the next two decades, Jobs and Ive—focused on making a few high-quality products while saying no to everything else—transformed a dying, near-bankrupt company into one of the most valuable companies in the world, worth over $2.9 trillion. Takeaway 1: The philosopher Marcus Aurelius pointed out that the focus of doing less “brings a double satisfaction.” You get the satisfaction of having fewer things to do. And…you get the satisfaction of doing those fewer things at a higher level. You get “to do less, better.” During Steve Jobs’ first visit to Jony Ive’s design studio, he looked around, and then he said, “Fuck, you’ve not been very effective, have you?” It was clear to Jobs that Ive was full of ideas and potential he wasn’t able to execute or fulfill under Apple’s previous leadership. In the Jobs era of “doing less, better,” Ive was very effective. Some products he designed include: iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and AirPods. Takeaway 2: Even though he slashed the product line down to four products, Jobs loved to have and hear ideas. “Steve used to say to me,” Ive said, “and he used to say this a lot, ‘Hey, Jony, here’s a dopey idea.’ And sometimes they were: really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room, and they left us both completely silent.” It made me think of what Jerry Seinfeld identifies as the ultimate skill of the artist: “taste and discernment.” “It’s one thing to create,” Seinfeld says. It’s one thing to have ideas. “The other is you have to choose. ‘What are we going to do, and what are we not going to do?’” What are we going to add to the product line, and what are we not going to add? “This is a gigantic aspect of [artistic] survival,” Seinfeld continues. “It’s kind of unseen—what’s picked and what is discarded—but mastering that is how you stay alive.” - - - “Everything just got simpler. That’s been one of my mantras—focus and simplicity.” — Steve Jobs Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!

On the 27th straight day of filming “Forrest Gump,” Tom Hanks was tired & worried. During a scene on the famous park bench, Hanks stopped & said to director Bob Zemeckis, “Hey, Bob…is anybody going to care about this movie? I don’t think anybody’s going to care.” Bob replied, “It’s a minefield, Tom. You never know what’s good…It’s a minefield! It’s a goddam minefield! We may be sowing the seeds of our own destruction.” Tom Hanks told this story after he was asked, “When I ask for a memory from your career, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?” He said that what Zemeckis said was true of every movie he’s worked on: “There’s never any guarantee...You do not know if it is going to work out.” Takeaway 1: Hanks is the 5th-most highest-grossing actor of all time. And yet, the stickiest memory of his career is the feeling of uncertainty. Rarer than talent or work ethic, the poet John Keats wrote, is the ability to step into and push through doubts and uncertainties. In 1817, Keats wrote a letter to his brothers to share this exciting realization. “At once it struck me,” Keats wrote, “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement … Negative Capability.” Keats explains that “Negative Capability” is “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Takeaway 2: Those who possess Negative Capability, who can sit with uncertainty, who can spend months or years in the minefield that is working on something while knowing that there is a real possibility no one will care about it—they often possess another quality. They do what they do, not as a means to some end (money, fame, awards, etc.), but for the sake of doing it. When asked about one of his movies that commercially failed, Hanks said, "I loved making that movie. I loved writing it, I loved being with it. I love all the people in it." As Ryan Holiday once told me, "The work has to be the win." You control the effort, he says, not the results. "So ultimately, you have to love doing it. You have to get to a place where doing the work is the win and everything else is extra.” - - - “Life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're going to get.” — Forrest Gump Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!