Storytelling lessons I learned from Steve Jobs (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Storytelling lessons I learned from Steve Jobs (2022)

fastcompany.com

226 pointstosh107 comments

The most interesting part to me was this: "He’d been telling a version of that same story every single day for months and months during development—to us, to his friends, his family. He was constantly working on it, refining it. Every time he’d get a puzzled look or a request for clarification from his unwitting early audience, he’d sand it down, tweak it slightly, until it was perfectly polished."

I did the same thing for 12 years as CEO of Postmates and I still do it when I work on new ideas. I thought it was something I just did. But reading this I have to assume it is more common.

Just curious, what was the same story you said every single day for 12-years?

Probably a bad choice of words on my part. I was referring to the stories of the products we worked on, not the same story for 12 years.

Hey Bastian, would love to have a chat about the impact of total automation in the food space (prep, package, deliver). We have 10 years R&D down, about to raise US GTM round, didn't find you on LinkedIn, email in profile. Cheers.

I deleted my LinkedIn. Email or text me. 415 629 9329 or bastianlehmann@gmail.com - I do not like to invest in anything related to food though.

Cheers much appreciated. Will reach out.

It's one of the first lessons I teach the founders in my classes, I learned it building DigitalOcean, I think it was Michael Dell who told me "yeah your job just becomes saying the same thing different ways all the time". Best I've seen at it is Flo the founder of mesosphere.

Don't think you can build a startup into a business if you can't learn how to do this.

And it’s a good lesson. The first hurdle for many (me included) was getting over the fact I’m going to repeat myself - a lot. And that’s ok. There’s a reason Coca-Cola still advertises. Repetition works. When telling someone the story, you never know what’s in their head at that moment. They might be thinking about some other important thing they have to do that day and not hear anything you said.

I do the same thing when I have a new idea. If people don’t seem as excited, I either refine the story or reconsider it entirely. It tests the idea, but also my understanding of why I want to build it. Is my hype justified or will it falter once the caffeine wears off?

I also do this as I refine any pitch. I tell it to everyone over and over, tweaking it slightly, refining, etc… One difference is I don’t think the polishing ever ends until it’s time to move on to something else.

It makes me wonder how many great products were shaped not just in boardrooms or dev sprints, but in casual conversations with friends and family.

How do you avoid annoying everyone around you, or does being CEO mean you don't have to worry about it?

Just as movie stars get paid a lot to compensate for dealing with the unpleasant life-ruining consequences of fame, CEOs get paid a lot to compensate for the monotony.

For me the internal part of this is far more important than any external pitch. Storytelling is a key skill for keeping an organisation aligned. Every company I've worked for that felt disjointed wasn't because of a lack of structure or process, it was the lack of a unifying narrative that people can follow and weave their work into. Once you have that, the sales and marketing part is pretty natural because you're already living the message like you mean it.

The question is how do you find such unique narratives? Who decide it is unique.

Uniqueness is not the end goal, first and foremost it should be competitive. Just highlight where exactly you do things differently (and better) than others.

If that's not possible to formulate even internally, the company is in trouble.

Tail Winds + Vision into-> Mission into-> Purpose. A world class leader understands deeply the coalescing ripples of shift across multiple sectors that result in the change their business is addressing, using this knowledge and extending it out into the future is called vision. If you can paint a good vision, you can then explain some missions people could go on over the period of time that matches your vision that results in positive things for the group, this is how an individual finds their purpose and is a prerequisite for a high functioning team (see tuckman's). The reason this is hard from a leadership perspective is that humans do not hear messages the same way, so you have to do what we call message modulation, where you tell the story many different ways depending on the constituent you're addressing until or such that, they understand what you are saying. You also have to be careful your modulation doesn't introduce confusion, 1 2 | 3 4 - if pipe is your baseline message, to be good at this, you have to think about what happens when 1 and 4 converse.

>A world class leader understands deeply the coalescing ripples of shift across multiple sectors that result in the change their business is addressing, using this knowledge and extending it out into the future is called vision.

So few leaders understand this. Its not common, not even among 'successful' leaders. More than anyone likes to admit, lots of businesses big and small built their backs on exploiting some luck and then achieving a relatively dominate position and holding it by the virtue of traditional business tactics. There's alot of copying, and very little actual innovative thinking.

This is even true of 'visionaries' but I think there is a difference between outright copying w/ refinement vs taking technology (or technologies) and using them in genuinely unforeseen ways, or otherwise marrying them together in ways nobody else really has.

Most success is entirely circumstantial. Right place, right time, things out of the control of anything. Certainly thats not visionary. Its refining someone else's idea (which is different than taking existing technology, refining it, and using it in entirely different ways than it was intended)

Steve Jobs was unique in that he forged success despite circumstances. In multiple aspects of Apple's history there was no good reason for them to succeed the way they did but he actually had genuine vision. Few others have had that kind of vision. Bill Gates demonstrated this earlier in his career (by the late 90s, Microsoft was exploiting monopoly not visionary innovation). Perhaps a few others I can't think of off the top of my head right now.

I can't say the same for 90+% of business people. It should be more humbling than it is. Unfortunately every CEO seems to think they have the 'magic' and they don't.

It's part of what separates "founder" from "executive" in my mind. Most good execs I know understand market fundamentals due to either eduction or solid experience, it's what is taught in HBS, Columbia, etc. Most founders know it from gut, they can just see change and they run at it, but it's part of the shift from founder to executive, you have to operationalize it for a business to be sustainable. Because you are competing against luck (Clay Christensen), you are inevitability foundational relying on solid vision, but because business is extremely complicated and hard to nail most businesses bleed out to find death by a 1000 paper cuts. Friend of mine has a linkedin profile you might find interesting: https://www.linkedin.com/in/agnazem/details/experience/

I'll also add, there are a lot of managers out there fancying themself in leadership, and lots of leaders who fancy themselves managers, this thinking that there is an ability to co-mingle, is generally incorrect.

(I teach business for a living, this stuff is a lot of what I teach new founders how to understand.)

There (used to be?) an old saying about you need a leader to start a business and getting it thriving but an operator to keep it so.

I imagine this is where that came from.

Indeed, and probably why Steve got fired and had to take timeout. I break down some more nuance of it here if you're curious: https://b.h4x.zip/inventors/

I've never come across a leader with a strong corporate vision. Can you think of any relatively unknown companies that have become successful, and would you be willing to share their story?

Most of the founders and business I know you would probably also know, name a big devtool company from the 2011's era and I probably know the story well, the example I often use is my friend: https://www.linkedin.com/in/agnazem/details/experience/ - it's very easy from his linkedin to see how he thought about things. Jeff Lawson is another great example, Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn also fantastic.

I'm sad you've never come across a leader with a strong corporate vision, when you work with them it truly is a joy.

But is that the only way? Can organizations be driven on pure process instead to having to find, and refine 'some narrative' to keep it all together.

Yes, and many are.

From what I hear Disney is very much a “process” company these days.

You can draw your own conclusions about whether Disney is doing very well or not, though.

People need a “why” to what they do. Generally “I do what I’m told because that is what the process says” doesn’t scale as well as “we are here to get airplanes where they need to go”. The narrative doesn’t have to be outlandish, in fact unrealistic stories give narratives a bad reputation.

What you do need is a simple why you are coming to work that is beyond “to get a paycheck”.

It can also serve as a helpful reference point for "what am I (still) doing here?" so that you can judge when you perhaps should not be.

True enough. If I am sitting in the backseat or front and the driver is meandering, I might think of bailing, yeah.

I don't see those things as opposed - you want teams aligned, you want people to be able to plan and collaborate both the short and long term. A good process left shifts as much as possible so teams start out fairly well aligned and don't necessarily drift apart. A bad process requires constant interventions to pull teams back together. I think a clear, compelling narrative of where an organisation is going and why helps here, but it's certainly not the only prescription.

Process without narrative means nobody knows why they are doing what they are doing, which means nobody can question, change, or iteratively improve on it. This works fine for a while.

100% - I used to sell/evangelize/promote/pitch the vision of the educational non-profit I used to work for every. single. day. to. every. single. person. Loved it, still do, and still storytelling at my current gig.

The Narrative, a cohesive one, drives my purpose and gives me direction.

Even just saying the whole thing out loud again and again, makes the talk better. Because, you would understand what you whizzing past, what you are spending time on and reduces the time you would buffer while talking.

I see "mansplaining" as a variant of this.

I don't know how common it is for the different people who do an elevator pitch, but IIUC most successful standup comedians do this incremental testing and refining of bits very heavily.

One difference I'd call out is that the delivery is different in what's understood as a formal rehearsed performance, than when speaking in informal one-on-one contexts.

IMHO, for informal, it's OK if you use pretty much the same canned explanation each time (especially for an elevator pitch, which is understood as a thing), just don't pretend you're speaking off-the-cuff.

For example, don't pause like you're thinking of the right term or analogy to use. (I've seen Steve Jobs videos where he seems to do this. And I had a colleague who would do it for one key metaphor term, even though they said the same bit about their research to different visitors almost every day.)

If you go to a standup performance or TED talk, you're expecting a heavily-rehearsed performance, with artificial flourishes. But if you're having a one-on-one conversation with someone, you want a bespoke, genuine, engaged, adaptive interaction. Canned bits in that are OK, but don't pretend those bits are fresh.

You can still do that, just know it's disingenuous, inauthentic, and disrespectful to your audience. May be worth it to you, for example if you don't care about that particular audience.

It’s exactly what standup comedians do, over months and years, before filming a special.

I always am skeptical about this idea that "great marketers make great products". I mean of course marketing is important to sell stuff, and of course people want to think that they have a major contribution into the success of their company, but...

Take the iPhone. My first iPhone was a 3G. I did not buy it because Steve Jobs convinced me: I bought it because a friend had one, I tried it and it was actually pretty cool. I had tried a PDA before, and did not feel like buying one. No storytelling there, just a product that was a better fit at a better time.

A good product and word of mouth is way more effective than marketing

People often mix marketing and sales. For me marketing is about "understanding your market". You wanted an iPhone because His Steveness knew what many people were looking for in a phone.

(The other parts of marketing, IMO, are getting the right message across at the right time - to those right people. The storytelling is the message part).

The "Product" is part of the "Marketing Mix". But these days, marketing means spamming ads, social media and seo.

Marketing in essence is market making. Producer, Consumer. Product, Customer.

You missed the other horror of modern marketing. Using the thing sold to you, that you paid for, to trap you in endless marketing hell.

I don't mean using it, eg to visit a social media site or whatever. I mean, the device spamming you with ads and "helpful hints' about more products to buy.

Like Google and Android not shutting up about Gemini, nagging you to try it. Or dark patterns to trick you into subscribing to a service.

I should refine my original comment: good marketing is about meeting the right people with the right message at the right time.

That kind of persistent nagging is the wrong time, with the wrong message at the wrong people.

Right. Yeah I often do, possibly because I only have one word (marketing) for both.

I guess the storytelling is the part that I feel is overvalued. "This genius changed the world because of how he phrased it" seems like bullshit to me.

The part where you define what a good product is, this one matters. Even though I feel like there is a whole lot more luck involved than what people want to think. "Steve Jobs was a genius" may rather be "Steve Jobs was really good, and at the same time he was lucky that what he considered a good product at the time was actually perceived as a good product by the masses".

It feels like there is a lot of survivorship bias (let me link xkcd myself before someone does: [1]) that we keep ignoring. "If Musk/Besos/Zuckerberg/<name your crazy billionaire> is where he is, that's most likely because he is the best". Ok, they probably did something right (maybe?), but they got crazy lucky as well.

[1]: https://xkcd.com/1827/

Apple doesn't really do a lot of classic sales. They have people with enterprise accounts and so forth but most of what they do to tell you about products and get people to write about them is fairly classic marketing.

But to your other point, sure. There is a saying about helping to make your luck, but, yes, there is also luck in just about any career or success.

> The part where you define what a good product is, this one matters

From the article "It was the story of the product. And it drove what we built."

The story is what kept the product development on track - and thus made the iPhone sell itself - the story isn't about convincing the public to buy, the story was an encapsulation of the products design - refined as time went on.

Product dev can easily go off the rails - take the recent story about Jeep having Ads popup on their infotainment systems - people wondering how anybody could think that's a good idea.

If you told a story about that product feature to your family and friends - you can be sure you'd get the 'puzzled look', and you'd remove it before the car ever shipped.

> Steve Jobs was really good, and at the same time he was lucky that what he considered a good product at the time was actually perceived as a good product by the masses

Jobs did it multiple times, though. The iPhone no doubt overshadows everything else, but the Macintosh and iPod serve as evidence that he had a recipe for successful products.

Marketing is the process of finding out what people want, how to make it, and then how to communicate to them that the thing you made is that.

Even if Steve never crossed your path, his marketing process is how Apple arrived at the product you wanted.

Right, yeah I should have said "storytellers" instead of "marketers".

So you bought an iPhone because of its "(product) design" (how it fullfill your needs) and not about "marketing" (how to define the markets for a product and why people in these marketing will buy it...).

As I understand it, for example, there's markets for "broken watches": it can be

* broken luxury watches: to have a "rich man look" without paying the full price

* for hobbyist watch-repair

* for professional watch ressellers (after repair)

* for educational / museum...

As far as design is concerned, the watch is broken. But it can be sold if you find who will buy it and why... and that's marketing

Jobs was a great designer too... (and/or knew how to hire great designers and let them get out the best of them)

> So you bought an iPhone because of its "(product) design" (how it fullfill your needs)

Sure. I guess my point is that its "product design" was essentially "it's a PDA with more modern technology". It did not look extra-terrestrial back then, it really looked like a better PDA.

In other examples, I have seen product people saying that they had the "vision" of connecting their app to the cloud. Or more recently, "visionaries" will suggest integrating LLMs in everything they can describe (they would suggest writing an LLM driver in the kernel if they knew the word "kernel"). And then, maybe, one such integration will work, and they will say "I had this vision that we should integrate LLM here" and forget the part where 99% of their ideas were worthless, and the one that work was actually not a revolutionary idea but just something that technically worked.

Again, not to say that Steve Jobs was not good. He certainly brought a lot. But sometimes I feel like we overdo it a bit.

> it's a PDA with more modern technology

Lots of people, including Apple with the Newton, tried to build a really great PDA - some people loved them, most found them too complex and slow.

I'd argue that when the iPhone originally shipped ( remember on shipping it didn't have an App store or even a custom app story - Steve said just write a web app ), it was simply a phone, a web browser, and a music player.

In my view it wasn't trying to be a PDA at all - all that came later.

> it was simply a phone, a web browser, and a music player.

Sure, but again not revolutionary. I had a Nokia that was a phone, a web browser and a music player. The iPhone was just better at that, but not very different in the end.

Sure everything is incremental - but I think you are missing the key feature of the iPhone that really changed how you interacted with it.

A really great multi-touch screen - sure there were touch devices before - and even multitouch ones, but my recollection was they would both miss/confuse inputs and have significant input lag and most were single input - the iPhone just worked as you'd expect - it felt magical. 'You got me at scrolling'

If you take a great touch experience, and a software user interface rather than buttons, then you have a platform with infinitely reconfigurable interaction modes.

Form is function. The user interface ( in the broadest sense of how you interact with the computer ) is key. They delivered touch that worked, in a form factor you could hold.

One of the reasons ChatGPT feels revolutionary is it has changed how people interact with their computers - creating a new conversational mode - ( and sure Eliza goes back a long way as well - but that was a toy ).

Remember during this time he and Apple were riding high on the success of the iPod. So when he drums up excitement about being just as revolutionary with phones, people listened.

It existed at all because Steve Jobs convinced the people working on it to believe in it enough to care. This is really rare, most people don't care (and are rational not to) but it is required to make any great product

Or rather, because Steve took great care not to hire the bozos most companies are staffed with. This is an extremely difficult and underappreciated thing to do, and Steve himself failed spectacularly at it on at least one occasion (which probably made him even more cautious).

I think this revisionist history is accidental, but the five point touchscreen was invented at a university by grad students not apple

Jobs might have convinced apple to have a vision, but it didn’t mean they invented all the pieces out of thin air. Timing in tech was just right

> "An iPod, a phone…are you getting it?"

Honestly, the response from the audience in the hall seemed to suggest we were not getting it. We were expecting multiple devices.

Fortunately Jobs delivered the punchline quickly then and moved on.

I actually thought this worked nicely even though people were NOT getting it. You are right that getting to the punchline quickly turned what could have been a loss into a fun little win.

I don't know -- I remember that time and while I was not in the room, the rumors were flying for months in advance.

I have to assume that most of the people who were in the room knew the rumors also, and were just waiting to see if they were true.

I did watch it live, and that's what I was doing, at least. :)

Agreed. I was in eighth grade and even I knew Apple was making an ApplePhone.

I wonder if, phones could just have a UI area on bottom half and display area on top. I just can't reach the top of the screen anymore with my thumb, and there are lots of controls that visually makes sense to be in the top half.

iPhone was brilliant from cost and mechanical design perspective - there are just so few moving or essential parts in post-iPhone phones. But maybe, just maybe, this solution is not as good as it seemed, maybe it could be better. Just my cynical POV...

iPhone has this as the “Reachability” feature

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-reachability-iph1...

It’s clumsy UI, and the downward swipe is often mistaken as scrolling.

That had existed in even in some Android 4 phones from 2013, but you have to turn it on and off all the time and rather clunky.

> To return to the full screen, tap the upper half of the screen.

Great.

Otherwise looks nice, thanks for the link

You can also do the reverse gesture, a small swipe up from the bottom of the screen, to return to full screen.

Well, today I learned something. I've gotten my phone stuck in this mode (half of the screen hidden below the bottom edge) and just assumed it was an iOS bug.

Pixar in a Box > Unit 2: The art of storytelling: https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar/storytelling

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36265807 ; Pizza Planet

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23945928

> The William Golding, Jung, and Joseph Campbell books on screenwriting, archetypes, and the hero's journey monomyth

Hero's journey > Campbell's seventeen stages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey#Campbell's_se...

Storytelling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storytelling

I found the product story lessons informative. Then opened the comments to all the 'Tony Baloney' comments. Besides his purported character, would you say the info in the article has value?

Now that the guy is no longer actively litigating early stage startups that he Angel invested in, and the true origin stories of the iPhone are more widely known he has become mostly irrelevant.

However I would say there is meta information with value[1] in that he was able to get Fast Company to publish a puff piece on his Steve-Jobs-Like genius of coining the term “Rush Hour Pricing” - when in popular culture (and any editor would point out) we just use the simpler phrase: “Surge Pricing”.

[1] In the same way you can discount information from any outlet that publishes “The suit is back” in their fashion column as a serious article: https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

> the true origin stories of the iPhone are more widely known

Out of the loop on this but very interested: what are the true origin stories of the iPhone, and what is the traditional narrative they contrast?

tldr Jobs put two teams to work on the iPhone development- the iPod team led by Fadell and the iPad team lead by Forstall (Apple began work on the iPad before the iPhone, though Jeff Han’s 2006 TED talk changed everything). Fadell presented an iPhone prototype with click wheel. Jobs went with Forstall’s concept. Much later, Forstall became pretty unpopular and few people had qualms with Fadell taking credit.

A lot of this is covered in various CHM fireside chats - this is a good one: https://youtu.be/5xDRdWFdsoQ

Ohh interesting, thank you I'll have a watch!

I know Han’s demo was a big deal publicly, and maybe it did change things by priming the public to get excited about multitouch gestures.

But Apple’s multitouch implementation was based on research that started long before, in the late 90s, and they had already bought the resulting tech company (Fingerworks) more than a year before Han’s TED talk.

This loser (Tony Fadell) got fired from Google for yelling nonstop at employees, other googlers, management, everyone.

But sure, tell me about his narcissistic story telling skills.

This guys recent startup endorsement is the infamous rabbit r1.

Should tell you enough lol.

I always make sure to scroll down the comments on hackernews to the bottom, because sometimes that's where the best comments are.

Tony Baloney

I seem to recall there being some controversy with Nest at Google. There were high hopes for it in the beginning, but it seemed like it stagnated.

No wonder he idolizes Steve Jobs, another famous yeller.

Was he yelling "don't ruin my product Google, Nest is a great product, don't ruin it!!"

Because... they ruined it.

Sadly that was the only thing he WASN'T yelling about

It wasn’t about his skills. It was about Steve Job’s skills. The writing I thought was quite good and provided a useful framing. Did you think otherwise?

It's only fitting that a """leader""" like Fadell is featured in """journalism""" like Fast Company. Stay away.

Pet peeve: I hate how the term “storytelling” is being used in marketing. No you are not “telling a story”, you are selling fucking shampoo and paper clips. The real art of storytelling in a literary sense has absolutely nada, zilch to do with this stupid framing of promotional language. Pray tell, does good literature “solve problems”? No it fucking doesn’t. In fact, one of the first rules of fiction is to always create more problems to move the tension along. It’s what makes a story interesting. So yeah, you’re just slimy advertisers, stop having Shakespearean allures.

> does good literature “solve problems”?

The last part of a story arc is called the reSolution.

> In fact, one of the first rules of fiction is to always create more problems to move the tension along.

In marketing, story reminds people of their problem. While the product they are selling offers a (re)solution to that problem.

> In marketing, story reminds people of their problem.

You mean creates needs, right?

I'm not sure I understand what are you getting at. Can you explain what you mean?

Not sure either :-). I guess I agree with the parent that I don't like all the noise people can make around "storytelling", when they actually sell a "new revolutionary kind of" paper clips to people who did not need them in the first place.

Ah, you mean convincing people they need something they don't. While that is true for some cases, there are a lot of needs people and companies already have.

A lot of good storytelling is about motivations, adversity and solutions.

Storytelling is about making stuff up, including the meaning of words. If marketers are telling you a story that what they're doing is called storytelling, well, that's pretty clearly metastorytelling.

I can feel your frustration, you must be a true literature lover. Think of it more as a narrative form of talking about your product in a relatable natural way vs listing features in a boring way.

I feel your pain. I recently bought a book on storytelling and it contains no hints whatsoever on how to tell a story. Just like this article, the book it's all "connect with your audience by opening with an emotional story" but not a single paragraph on why (say) a joke told by a comedian has much more punch than when I retell it.

Obviously reading about comedy is probably like dancing about architecture, but nonetheless I'd expect some discussion on the delivery itself. Otherwise it's just "storyplanning".

Stories and jokes are made of, or at least delivered with, words. Architecture (and music, as Elvis was referring to) are not.

Yes. I've been trying to take about what makes good storytelling, or even stand-up comics who can keep an audience interested in a wandering story, and those skills are what I'd think would be valuable in a business setup. Seems like readable analysis of this sort of thing should exist.

I guess. But a story is different than a list of facts. It has a protagonist and narrative elements that imply a sequence of events and causality.

Many people do in fact try to tell people about products or services by just stating a bunch of facts.

But as humans we’re wired to understand stories, not lists of facts. We don’t really process facts without context, and if there’s no main character or narrative our brain instinctively fills that in.

So sure, marketing isn’t literature. It might even be a horrible thing that should not exist. But there is in fact substance to the conversation. There’s marketing that tells and story and marketing that doesn’t.

Furthermore, this "story" is actually a promotion for his book. It's amazing how many articles in legacy media these days are paid advertisements for someone's latest book.

Everything has a story attached to it. And different people have different stories attached to the same things.

Intentionally composing that story and getting it into the heads of other people, for whatever purpose, is storytelling. Marketing, propaganda, self-promotion, employee culture, nationalism, the best version of yourself that you tell to other people. All of that and more.

You can faff all you want about the pretentiousness of it, but the process of composing a narrative is not sacred (we all do it), and it's not the exclusive domain of people who write books.

"story" is used more abstractly then that.

Literary storytelling is one thing, but we also function in daily life by taking in raw information and then distilling it down to a simpler narrative, aka a story. Effective communication accounts for this and creates a narrative for you to latch onto.

Creating a narrative, aka, story telling. It's ready to see the inspiration for the phrase, although yes the result is an overloaded term.

And I think good storytelling isn't just about selling, it shapes the product itself.

exactly. Apple has had its share of failed products that could not be saved by the best storytelling.

And sometimes the whole company? Eg who they feel they should recruit

A strong narrative can influence everything, like from the people a company attracts to the culture it builds

Simplicity is Key: "1,000 songs in your pocket."

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