Steve Jobs Quote of the Day: “My job is not to make things easy for people…” | Today’s news
Many people think that a good leader should make things easy and make everyone feel good. But according to Steve Jobs, one of the co-founders of Apple Corporation, a true leader should make people better at what they do.
He once stated in an interview with Fortune magazine in 2008: “My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to make them better.”
The quote is often shared on its own, making it sound much harsher than Jobs intended. But in this particular interview, Jobs defined leadership as bringing diverse teams together, removing roadblocks, securing funding for major projects, and motivating talented people to do something extraordinary.
Support and demanding expectations were two sides of the same coin
Jobs made it abundantly clear that setting high expectations is not all a true leader should do. Equally important to him was the support of employees in achieving their goals.
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Motivating capable people to develop for Jobs meant helping them overcome difficulties and not just constantly criticizing them. His approach combined high expectations with hands-on support, allowing teams to focus on important projects and achieve better results.
Jobs was also known for his direct and sometimes unpleasant style of giving feedback. He once said, “I’m brutally honest because the price of being in the room with me is that I tell you that you’re full of shit, and you can tell me that I’m full of shit.”
He said such frank conversations often led to strong disagreements, but he believed they helped maintain high standards across the company. Jobs also argued that this approach discourages poor performance and encourages people to improve.
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Looking back, he said many employees who worked in that challenging environment later described it as one of the most rewarding experiences of their careers, despite the challenges they faced at the time.
The Early Life and Career of Steve Jobs
Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 in San Francisco, California and died on October 5, 2011. The former technology executive was known as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer era.
Jobs was raised by adoptive parents in Cupertino, California, which is now Silicon Valley. According to Britannica, he left Reed College in Portland, Oregon in early 1974 to work as a video game designer at Atari Corporation.
Steve Jobs went into business with another Steve, Steve Wozniak, building blue boxes that phone phreaks used to make free calls across the country. The pair founded Apple in 1976. They started their business by selling the Apple I, which was a kit for building a PC.
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Wozniak did most of the building and Jobs handled the sales, so the two made enough money in the hobbyist market to invest in the Apple II. It was the Apple II that created the company that was founded in 1977.
According to Investopedia, Apple was already making more than $5 million in net income by 1979 on the strength of the Apple II alone. Then the company went public in 1980. Over the years, Apple’s legacy has grown steadily.
It was the first company to break the $1 trillion mark in market capitalization, and later $2 trillion and $3 trillion. The company’s success was largely linked to the lessons learned from Steve Jobs.
