‘Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in His Own Words’

New, from The Steve Jobs Archive:

A curated collection of Steve’s speeches, interviews and correspondence, Make Something Wonderful offers an unparalleled window into how one of the world’s most creative entrepreneurs approached his life and work. In these pages, Steve shares his perspective on his childhood, on launching and being pushed out of Apple, on his time with Pixar and NeXT, and on his ultimate return to the company that started it all.

From Laurene Powell Jobs’s introduction:

Steve once told a group of students, “You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.” He gave an extraordinary amount of thought to how best to use our fleeting time. He was compelled by the notion of being part of the arc of human existence, animated by the thought that he — or that any of us — might elevate or expedite human progress.

It is hard enough to see what is already there, to gain a clear view. Steve’s gift was greater still: he saw clearly what was not there, what could be there, what had to be there. His mind was never a captive of reality. Quite the contrary: he imagined what reality lacked and set out to remedy it. His ideas were not arguments, but intuitions, born of a true inner freedom and an epic sense of possibility.

There’s a (very?) limited print edition that is not for sale, but is being given to Apple employees and others who were close to Jobs (such as Jony Ive’s team at LoveFrom, who clearly produced this work and the lovely apple tree logomark). It’s freely available on Apple Books (nice URL), but I think the best way to read it, if you’re not fortunate enough to have access to the printed book, is the website. It’s just lovely.

Sebastiaan de With, on Twitter:

It’s hard to capture the delight of a real book, but this website does a fantastic job coming close. Lots delightful, thoughtful little details.

I say ‘ebook’ because it isn’t a word used anywhere on the website, likely for good reason: there are no good ebooks. The ePub file lacks all the delight of the beautiful website. Books on Apple Books are objectively worse than their written counterparts. This might be nicer.

Try jumping around using the ‘line of contents’. Super nice stuff. The website even remembers where you left off.

★ Tuesday, 11 April 2023