Jony Ive Once Said Steve Jobs Demanded Everyone At Apple Often Answer This Question: 'It Still Shocks Me How Few People Actually Practice This'

Apple’s AAPL former designer and a key mind behind the first iPhone, Jony Ive says the hardest part of creativity isn’t dreaming up lofty ideas, it’s having the nerve to drop most of them — a lesson he learnt from Steve Jobs.

What Happened: In a 2014 on-stage conversation with Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, Apple’s then–design chief recalled the single lesson Steve Jobs drilled into him: relentless focus. “This sounds really simplistic, but it still shocks me how few people actually practice this,” Ive told the New Establishment Summit crowd.

Jobs, whom Jony Ive called “the most remarkably focused person I’ve ever met,” kept score with a blunt question: “How many things have you said no to?” Ive confessed he sometimes produced “sacrificial” examples — projects he never liked anyway, only to be caught. True focus, he explained, means saying no “to something that, with every bone in your body, you think is a phenomenal idea,” because it distracts from the mission at hand.

The clip has resurfaced online as a pocket-sized master class in priority-setting, racking up millions of impressions on X and LinkedIn posts that repeat Ive’s warning that focus is an “every-minute” discipline, not a Monday-morning resolution.

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The mantra helps explain why Apple routinely axed promising prototypes, an approach former Wall Street Journal editor Walter Isaacson says let Jobs spend “hour after hour” on seemingly the smallest bits of product design that made products iconic.

Why It Matters: Other CEOs have since borrowed the mantra. Salesforce’s CRM Marc Benioff credits a 2010 chat with Jobs for sharpening his own product discipline. Disney’s DIS Bob Iger received a different kind of counsel as Jobs urged him to retire and enjoy life before it’s too late, advice the executive says still frames how he paces his tenure at the entertainment giant.

Apple’s chief Tim Cook recalls that Jobs’ parting words, shared the night before his death, were simply to do what he thought was right when it came to leading Apple.

Snowflake’s SNOW Frank Slootman had his own key takeaway from Jobs’ management philosophies. Slootman believes the late Jobs always either found a product “insanely great” or “sh*t” and that approach ensured there was never any room for mediocrity within the company’s walls.

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