Steve Jobs has the reputation for being something of a design savant, a leader who took Apple from mediocrity into a leading tech giant.
Since he died in 2012, that reputation hasn't really diminished at all, and Jobs' proclamations on business and design continue to be regularly quoted in meetings and team-building exercises.
Proving that his ideas about building great products remain persuasive to this day, an old interview of Jobs was reposted by none other than Elon Musk this month, underlining how high the esteem for Jobs is in the tech world.
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Musk posted the video on X (the social media platform he owns, formerly known as Twitter), with a one word caption: "Precisely".
It's a big endorsement from the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, so the video can give us a bit of a hint at how his brain works.
It shows Jobs talking about the challenges of turning good ideas into great products, and railing against what he sees as the "disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and that if you just tell all these other people, 'Here is this great idea,' then, of course, they can go off and make it happen".
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As Jobs argues, once you have an idea, even a truly great one, there's still a vast amount of work to go through before you can start to feel confident that you're building a really great product around it.
Jobs goes on to say that you also have to be open to change, and ready to adapt as you work, since "as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows".
So, effectively, you can't just rest on your laurels once you come up with an idea, since there will still be huge amounts of work to be done, and that work might well show new ways to improve on an idea.
It's perhaps unsurprising that Musk posted this video, since some might think it plays into the idea that he's a similarly great thought leader, or at least tech CEO.
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Still, even if you limit yourself to just X and Tesla, his two main companies, it's an interesting time to talk about sticking to ideas. After all, Musk was reportedly the main driver arguing to concentrate Tesla's resources on the Cybertruck project, which has now had to issue a total recall on every truck sold so far.
On X, meanwhile, he's had to rewind several of his ideas after they've been implemented, too, not least the deletion of headlines on links in posts. So, perhaps Musk still has more to learn from Jobs than he realizes.
Featured Image Credit: Magnolia Pictures / Steve Granitz / Contributor / Getty