5 Secrets Behind Steve Jobs' "Exquisite Taste"
It’s fascinating.
Steve Jobs built the most successful company in history.
His refined taste for people and products is widely known as a key to Apple’s success.
Yet, surprisingly little is known about how he actually cultivated such a singular taste.
Instead Jobs was constantly misunderstood.
On the light side, many thought his extreme taste was quirky and detail-oriented. On the dark side, others thought it was perfectionist, controlling, and needlessly cruel.
Even his lifetime competitor, Bill Gates, the person with the most incentive to learn from Jobs’ taste, could never quite understand it.
One story stands out.
You may remember that when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he introduced a line of colorful iMacs:
When asked what he thought about the lines’ success, Gates’ laughed:
The one thing Apple’s providing now is leadership in colors. It won’t take long for us to catch up with that, I don’t think.
—Bill Gates
Soon after, Jobs expressed his frustration to a reporter:
The thing that our competitors are missing is that they think it’s about fashion, and they think it’s about surface appearance. They say, ‘We’ll slap a little color on this piece of junk computer, and we’ll have one, too.’
—Steve Jobs
The back-and-forth continues 10 years later at the 2007 All Things Digital conference. When sharing the #1 thing he learned from Jobs, Gates still sees Jobs’ taste as a mystery. At least, now he looks upon it with reverence:
Credit: All Things Digital, WSJ YouTube channel
Well, I’d give a lot to have Steve’s taste… in terms of intuitive taste both for people and products… I’d see Steve make the decision based on a sense of people and product that, you know, is hard for me to explain. The way he does things is just different, and I think it’s magical.
—Bill Gates
The whole exchange over the years begs several questions:
Why does a genius like Bill Gates have so much trouble copying Jobs’ taste?
Is Jobs’ taste a skill that we can all learn from or is it an innate talent?
Why is such an important skill like taste so undervalued?
For most of my adult life, Jobs’ taste has been a mystery to me.
But, over the last 8 years of studying great artists, thinkers, entrepreneurs, creators, and innovators (in addition to the researchers who study them), I’ve started to see Jobs in a new light.
Rather than seeming quirky, his process seems more and more replicable.
So I decided to revisit many of Jobs’ interviews and Walter Isaacson’s definitive biography on him.
What I found completely changed how I view the process of mastering taste…
Taste Is Fundamental To The Creation Process
I’m fascinated by taste as a thought leader because it pervades every part of the creation process.
Taste isn’t a cherry on top of our work at the end of production. It’s inherent in every decision. Famous music producer and author of The Creative Act, Rick Rubin, explains:
The objective is not to learn to mimic greatness, but to calibrate our internal meter for greatness. So we can better make the thousands of choices that might ultimately lead to our own great work.
—Rick Rubin
As thought leaders, better taste helps us make better decisions about:
What to write about
How to research it
How to package it
What medium to use
What format to use
How to produce it
What style, tone, and voice to use
What level of quality to create to
Where to publish it
Ultimately, taste is like a lever for success and impact. Every improvement we make in it improves our work. With that said, let’s dive into Steve Jobs’ 5 lessons for cultivating taste…
5 Lessons On How To Cultivate An Exquisite Taste Like Steve Jobs
Below is a summary of the lesson’s we’ll cover in this post…
Surround yourself with the work of the greats (free preview)
Taste is about the transcendent (paid subscribers only)
Make decisions by looking inward at your taste (paid subscribers only)
Focus on quality, because it improves your taste (paid subscribers only)
Stay stubborn in face of external pressure (paid subscribers only)
#1. Surround yourself with the work of the greats
From the documentary Triumph of the Nerds, PBS
Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then try to bring those things in to what you're doing. I mean, Picasso had a saying, he said, "Good artists copy, great artists steal." And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.
—Steve Jobs
Great art stretches the taste, it doesn’t follow tastes.
— Steve Jobs
So the question becomes, how do we surround ourself with the best things humanity has created?
Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs provides the answer.
When I first read it, I was confused. I wondered why Isaacson spent so much time talking about Jobs’ preferences of furniture, architecture, cars, smoothies, and so on.
“Ok. He’s quirky. I get it,” I thought to myself.
I missed the deeper message.
Taste wasn’t a surface level aesthetic for Jobs. It was deeply ingrained in to his lifestyle and being:
Jobs’ taste influenced seemingly every personal purchase decision.
Great design in any industry served as a model for Jobs to make better product decisions at Apple whether it be related to shape, materials, colors, price, functionality, purpose, etc.
Appreciating and dissecting craftsmanship was baked into how Jobs’ processed reality. In other words, what others overlooked, Jobs noticed, processed his love or hate for it, and then dissected it.
Below are a few of my favorite examples of the ubiquity of Jobs’ taste:
Even when Jobs was barely conscious at the hospital, he demanded higher quality masks…
At one point the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was deeply sedated. Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he ordered them to bring five different options for the mask and he would pick a design he liked.
—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs
To me, this story really highlights how deeply ingrained Jobs’ taste was on a few levels.
He’s in a hospital, not at Apple
He still demands quality even for something as mundane as a mask
He’s not thinking logically because he’s sedated, so the stubborn adherence to taste is coming from a deeper level
Below are more examples of how Jobs got his taste from multiple places:
Architecture influenced Jobs’ view on how to balance quality and price
Jobs said that his appreciation for [real estate developer] Eichler homes instilled in him a passion for making nicely designed products for the mass market. “I love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesn’t cost much,” he said as he pointed out the clean elegance of the houses. “It was the original vision for Apple. That’s what we tried to do with the first Mac. That’s what we did with the iPod.”
—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs
Jobs went to conferences in other industries
Interestingly, in 1981 Steve Jobs (age 26) was so passionate about design, he started attending an international design conference. He took a lot of inspiration from Italian designers:
He began attending the annual International Design Conference in Aspen. The meeting that year focused on Italian style, and it featured the architect-designer Mario Bellini, the filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, the car maker Sergio Pininfarina, and the Fiat heiress and politician Susanna Agnelli. “I had come to revere the Italian designers, just like the kid in Breaking Away reveres the Italian bikers,” recalled Jobs, “so it was an amazing inspiration.”
—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs
Two years later, he gave a talk at the same conference that shared how the Bauhaus style had influenced Apple’s design aesthetic
Jobs publicly discussed his embrace of the Bauhaus style in a talk he gave at the 1983 design conference… He predicted the passing of the Sony style in favor of Bauhaus simplicity. “The current wave of industrial design is Sony’s high-tech look, which is gunmetal gray, maybe paint it black, do weird stuff to it,” he said. “It’s easy to do that. But it’s not great.” He proposed an alternative, born of the Bauhaus, that was more true to the function and nature of the products. “What we’re going to do is make the products high-tech, and we’re going to package them cleanly so that you know they’re high-tech. We will fit them in a small package, and then we can make them beautiful and white, just like Braun does with its electronics.”
—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs
Jobs was even inspired by building materials
Jobs became fascinated by the way Carr Jones relied on old material, including used bricks and wood from telephone poles, to provide a simple and sturdy structure. The beams in the kitchen had been used to make the molds for the concrete foundations of the Golden Gate Bridge, which was under construction when the house was built. “He was a careful craftsman who was self-taught,” Jobs said as he pointed out each of the details. “He cared more about being inventive than about making money, and he never got rich. He never left California. His ideas came from reading books in the library and Architectural Digest.”
—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs
Cars influenced the shape of the early 80s Mac
One day in March 1981, Andy Hertzfeld came back to the office from dinner to find Jobs hovering over their one Mac prototype in intense discussion with the creative services director, James Ferris. “We need it to have a classic look that won’t go out of style, like the Volkswagen Beetle,” Jobs said…
“No, that’s not right,” Ferris replied. “The lines should be voluptuous, like a Ferrari.”
“Not a Ferrari, that’s not right either,” Jobs countered. “It should be more like a Porsche!” Jobs owned a Porsche 928 at the time.
He also admired the design of the Mercedes. “Over the years, they’ve made the lines softer but the details starker,” he said one day as he walked around the parking lot. “That’s what we have to do with the Macintosh.”
—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs
Jobs was even picky on household appliances
For example, he mused over what sofa to get for years. Speaking on the experience of buying furniture with Jobs, his wife said:
We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years. We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’
Explaining his process for buying a washing machine to Wired, Jobs said:
It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans make them much better—but they take twice as long to do clothes! It turns out that they wash them with about a quarter as much water and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don’t trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot less water, but they come out much cleaner, much softer, and they last a lot longer. We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.
When Jobs couldn’t find something that met his standards, he’d get nothing:
Jobs had never furnished his Woodside house beyond a few bare essentials: a chest of drawers and a mattress in his bedroom, a card table and some folding chairs in what would have been a dining room. He wanted around him only things that he could admire, and that made it hard simply to go out and buy a lot of furniture.
—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs
Jobs was also an incredibly picky eater
He would eat only fruit smoothies, and he would demand that seven or eight of them be lined up so he could find an option that might satisfy him. He would touch the spoon to his mouth for a tiny taste and pronounce, “That’s no good. That one’s no good either.”
He came to the Four Seasons hotel to join me, his wife, and Reed, plus Reed’s two Stanford pals, for lunch. For a change he was eating, though still with some pickiness. He ordered fresh-squeezed juice, which he sent back three times, declaring that each new offering was from a bottle, and a pasta primavera, which he shoved away as inedible after one taste.
—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs
And, of course, a typography course he sat in while at Reed College famously influenced the fonts on the Mac
“His knowledge of fonts was remarkable, and he kept insisting on having great ones,” Markkula recalled. “I kept saying, ‘Fonts?!? Don’t we have more important things to do?’ ” In fact the delightful assortment of Macintosh fonts, when combined with laser-writer printing and great graphics capabilities, would help launch the desktop publishing industry and be a boon for Apple’s bottom line.
—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs
Now let’s jump into lessons 2-5…