carefree_wanderer

It's very difficult to create a great product (including buildings). Steve Jobs, who has long been an inspiration for me, articulated it so well in a 1995 interview where he is describing what happened to Apple after he was ousted (by the CEO he brought in). It helped me to accept and internalize that the difficulty, and the tremendous amount of work, is a normal part of creating something great: “One of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. And that disease, I've seen other people get it too. It's the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work. And that if you just tell all these other people, you know, here's this great idea, then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there's just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there's tremendous trade-offs that you have to make. I mean, you know, there are just certain things you can't make electrons do. There are certain things you can't make plastic do or glass do or factories do or robots do. And as you get into all these things, designing a product is keeping 5,000 things in your brain, these concepts, and fitting them all together and kind of continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. And it's that process that is the magic.”