#8 :: Intuition, Zen and looking over the horizon
With the end of year rolling around, the business world accompaniments are pouring in: analyst projections, predictions, and trend reports for 2023. As the world looks ahead to anticipate what next year holds, we’ve been looking back at the great designers, inventors, scientists of the past. How did they see round corners to create a future unknown? This week, we look at mindset and character.
Collected this week:
How Steve Jobs created the future: Seeing over the horizon via Zen + intuition
Why intuition matters: Tools and tips for tuning back in
What’s interested us this week: Predictions, AR, music, failure
01. Steve Jobs, Zen + intuition
Steve Jobs led a life so extraordinary that his biography stretches to 656 pages. He’s been talked about and revered and hailed by admirers and critics the world over. His legacy - on music, film, news, television, publishing… how we consume, study and live our lives - is now legend.
But one of the most significant aspects of Steve’s approach was his mindset - how he thought about things, how he perceived the world around him. As a young man in the early 1970s, Steve became interested in eastern philosophy. He studied Indian and Japanese texts, lived on a commune in Oregon, experimented with hallucinogens, and travelled to India seeking spiritual enlightenment.
That period shaped his life and character. His way of thinking - and in particular his lifelong practice of Zen Buddhism - influenced all the products, companies and inventions he touched. There are four Zen principles that Steve lived by and scaled across his work.
Steve’s minimal home, 1982Steve’s Zen principles
• Focus and intuition
When it came to his vision for the future of computing, Steve’s practice in Zen taught him to trust his intuition and ideas. He was adept at quietening his mind, filtering everything out to focus on inner creativity. As he saw it, his task was to “read things that are not yet on the page”.
Discontinuous products - like the first Macintosh - always arise from thinking about ideas and problems in different ways from the status quo. Where Steve excelled was absorbing information and insights - about markets and people - then tuning in to his intuition, beyond logic and rationale, to make sense of what it all could mean.
• Balance: Art and science
Steve was dissatisfied by the chasm between left and right brain thinking in tech companies. He had never fit discretely into either category. So, he built Apple to combine them equally. In doing so, he upended the business mantra: that numbers matter most.
Of course, not everything Steve touched turned to gold. There was the Cube and the Newton, which were so expensive to manufacture that they never found a market. But what was important was recognising that building tech requires creativity and artistry in equal proportion to science and maths.
• The journey is the reward
The future doesn’t yet exist, so it’s up to us to create it. There are no right or wrong ideas. Steve was often told that his ideas weren’t possible. Yet he had a knack of bringing seemingly outlandish visions to life. In 1982, he showed his team a prototype of a small device with a keyboard hinging together with a screen, that fit snugly on the user’s lap. Steve had a hunch that portability would be the future of computing. It didn’t exist yet, and there was no feasible way of making it possible … yet.
Frame-breaking products can’t be predicted. They’re not based on reason. They’re about taking imaginative leaps on a journey into the unknown.
• Chase the product, not the profit
This principle is evident in both aesthetics and strategy. Quality was a cornerstone of the Jobs philosophy. The early Apple products and interfaces were the first to depart from the typical seriousness of tech. They were designed to be simple, minimal, intuitive, inspired by Zen.
Steve was always motivated by the product being the best it possibly could be, not by profits (something about which he disagreed bitterly with his third CEO). On his return to Apple, he cut 90% of its product lines. The choice was again focus: quality over quantity. Yet this Zen principle melds into business - good design and profit tend to go hand in hand.
First GUI on the Apple Lisa, 19832. Why intuition matters: Tools and tips
Steve said: “Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect”. It’s a potent combination of knowledge plus instinct that creates leaps. The magic is when you join the dots. Some tips for tuning back in to your intuition:
Seek patterns: The greats absorbed information from watching what was happening in the world, in markets and with people.
Practise empathic accuracy: They were adept at using intuition to tune into how other people thought and felt. Their focus was on the human motivations, rather than what the technology might be.
Going beneath the rational: Steve could easily tune out logical and critical thought and be present, allowing him space to intuit clearly.
Sniff the winds: Their next step is to weave that insight with a vision. Two unexpected realms colliding. Joining of dots. This how the next is created.
From quant to qual: Data can be an aid to pinpointing patterns to be attuned to. But the reliance is firmly upon qualitative insight, not quant.
3. What’s interested us this week:
A collection of 83 industry trend reports, gathered by some very helpful people (on Google Drive)
Dyson has announced the launch date of its first foray into wearable tech, with Zone, a pair of noise cancelling headphones-cum-air purifier (via Tech Radar)
Gorillaz released their new album with live, location-specific AR performances at Piccadilly Circus and Times Square (via It’s Nice That)
Stirling claims to have become the world’s first augmented tourist destination this week, with a new AR app allowing exploration of the city via mobile (via Design Week)
The Museum of Failure, a travelling celebration of flops and fiascos
Dyson Zone, 2022“Giving up on your goal because of one setback is like slashing your other three tyres because you got a flat”