The Measure Of Focus
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.” Saying no in order to focus on something else—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
A Double Satisfaction
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. Jobs then 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. 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.” 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. 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.
A Gigantic Aspect of Survival
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? What are we going to say yes to, and what are we going to say no to? “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.”
Make A’s In Fewer Things
In 2008, Matthew McConaughey got a call from his film production office. He reached to pick up the phone, but his hand paused mid-reach when he saw the caller ID. He didn’t want to answer it. He let the call go to voicemail then called his lawyer. “I’m shutting down the production company immediately,” he said. “Shut down j.k. livin Records as well.” It was too much. “I had five things on my proverbial desk to tend to daily: family, foundation, acting, a production company, and a music label,” McConaughey writes in Greenlights. “I felt like I was making B’s in all five. By shutting down the production company and the music label, I eliminated two of my five commitments with plans to make A’s in the other three.” He began to focus entirely on his family, his foundation, and his acting career. “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate,” he writes. “Alright, alright, alright.”
You Have To Say No To Say Yes
When asked, Lin-Manuel Miranda says Wait For It is the best song he’s ever written. “I was on my way to my friend’s birthday party,” Miranda explains, “when that idea showed up in my head.” He was riding the New York City A Train when “the whole chorus showed up in my head, all at once. I write it down, and suddenly, I see the shape of the whole song.” He got off the train, walked to his friend’s apartment, “and I go, ‘hey, happy birthday man, I gotta go.’ I got back on the train, and I wrote the rest of the song on the way back home. You have to do that sometimes. You have to say no to your friends to say yes to your work.”
Concentrate Your Forces
Edwin Land, the scientist and inventor best known for co-founding the Polaroid Corporation and inventing instant photography, said, “My whole life has been spent trying to teach people that intense concentration for hour after hour can bring out in people resources they didn’t know they had.” It’s Robert Greene’s 23rd Law of Power: Concentrate Your Forces. “Conserve your forces and energies by keeping them concentrated at their strongest point,” Robert writes. “You gain more by finding a rich mine and mining it deeper, than by flitting from one shallow mine to another—intensity defeats extensity every time. As Schopenhauer wrote, Intellect is a magnitude of intensity, not a magnitude of extensity.” Concentrate your forces. Do less, better. Make A’s in fewer things. Say no to say yes. Intensity, not extensity.