This Week in Refinement
A brilliant aspect of Steve Jobs’ character.
A man the world’s top entrepreneurs call the modern Picasso.
And the full Monday collection of what you can learn from the most influential figure in Silicon Valley of his time.
Spotlight Figure
Steve Jobs
Founder of Apple, the enfant terrible of Silicon Valley, a perfectionist with an ego capable of powering a mid-sized power plant. Born in 1955. Adopted, raised in California, he carried from the beginning that mix typical of future visionaries: brilliant intuition, stubbornness bordering on fanaticism, and a total inability to function within normal structures. He built Apple, was thrown out, returned like the protagonist of a third act, and transformed the company into a civilizational phenomenon.
He was not an engineer, although many would like to believe he was. He was a conductor of other people’s talents, a master of narrative, and a man who could look at an ordinary computer and ask why it did not look like something that belonged in a museum rather than on an accountant’s desk. His famous “Think Different” was not a slogan. It was a description of his temperament. Jobs genuinely believed that most people thought too slowly.
Even his eccentricities were tools. He recruited people during fast walks, as if walking speed truly revealed strategic capacity. He listened to a single song on repeat until he entered a project trance. He was afraid of smells, but not of conflict. He rearranged furniture in his friends’ homes because for him aesthetics were a form of ethics. He tested products the way others test relationships: if they did not attract him, he discarded them without regret.
Jobs was difficult, brilliant, and impossible to imitate. A fusion of artist, ascetic, and tyrant who, instead of writing symphonies, created the iPhone. And as it often goes with such people, you love him, you hate him, but you use his world every day, even if it hurts a little.
“I want to put a ding in the universe."
Refined Insights
"Not good enough".
Obsession is strategy.
He was fanatically focused. His rituals, eccentricities, music loops, and product tests were methods of eliminating everything that lacked a soul. In a world that accepts compromises, he lived in a binary, all-or-nothing mode.
Aesthetics are morality.
For him, a poorly placed chair was a systemic error, not a decorative one. Chaos in the environment meant chaos in thinking. This is the lesson entrepreneurs dislike: disorder is not a “work style,” it is evidence of lost control.
Mindset over talent.
Jobs tested people not on skill, but on determination. He watched who could stand back up after an ego blow. This survived in Apple’s DNA: creation does not require comfort, it requires friction.
Greatness is born in silence.
Jobs’s silence was a tool. It forced people to think, not to defend themselves. This runs counter to a culture of loud creation, but it works. The best decisions are made in spaces where nothing interferes with intuition.
The product must attract.
His test was simple: after weeks of ignoring a prototype, did he still want to touch it? If it did not pull him in, the project had no reason to exist. A brutal standard, but precisely why Apple looked the way it did.
Anything without energy is removed immediately.
That is the line between a creator and a producer.
The Blueprint
Put this into practice.
One thing you can implement today, by looking at Jobs, is to introduce a single, merciless quality filter into your work.
Remove one thing that is acceptable but carries no energy.
This is the simplest way to begin working like someone who truly designs, not merely produces.
Join the Movement
Apply the theory.
Download our free guidebook and begin integrating the philosophies of the world’s greatest visionaries into your daily life.
Until Next Time
Michał, Refined Money.
P.S. P.S. If you missed previous editions, you will find everything below.
