May You Find Your Thing
May you love it the way Steve Jobs loves his clicks
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Back when Bob Iger was at the helm of Disney and Steve Jobs was still around, they would do all these fun top-secret CEO stuff. Steve would take the Disney exec through multiple doors — swipe cards, biometrics, exactly what you’d expect— and they’d arrive at the mythic place where all the tech magic happens: the Apple Design Lab.
The room houses tables covered with blankets. Like a magician, Steve would pull off a blanket, revealing to Bob all these devices that he had yet to show the world.
On one occasion, he asked Bob to put his ear down next to a port. Steve was holding a cord with a magnetic DC connector. (If you’re an Apple fan, you might recognize this as the MacBook MagSafe charger where the cord just gets sucked into the port.)
Listen to this, he told Bob.
Then he put the connector in. Click.
Then out. Click.
In. Click. Then out. Click.
“Yes?”, Bob asked, waiting for something to happen.
And Steve goes: “Don’t you just love that sound?”
The sound, as he explained to Bob, tells the user that the connection has been made. “It’s convenient. You know. You don’t even have to think twice. ‘Is this in? Will it charge?’ Of course, it’s charging. I heard the sound!”
It was one of those moments where Bob witnessed Steve’s genius up close:
To watch that, to see that enthusiasm and that energy, that eye, that sense of taste, that awareness of the physical and what it meant to emotions — is just an amazing thing.
Much has been said about the greatness of Steve Jobs. But what made this story particularly refreshing to me is that, here, he wasn’t Steve Jobs the visionary. Not even Steve Jobs the Keynote guy. He was simply, as Oprah mentioned, “the guy who loved the clicks.”
Also, not to say we’re on the same level, but I’m fascinated by a certain clicking sound, too.
And, judging by my and Bob's and Oprah’s reaction to this story, maybe this matters more than I know.
