You can go to business school, spend two more years of your life, spending $100K or so in bills, or you can just listen to Steve Jobs.

I’ve read his biography every year for the last 10 years.

Here's what I learned about startup, marketing, creativity, career, life, and more:

Customers don’t know what they want until you show it to them.

When Jobs unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter asked him what type of market research he had done. Jobs replied: “Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?”

Think different.

Turkish Coffee? So Fucking What?

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When someone in Turkey tried to explain to Jobs how Turkish coffee was made very different from anywhere else, Jobs thought, “So fucking what?”

"Who in Turkey even gave a shit about Turkish coffee?"

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"When we’re making products, there is no such thing as a Turkish phone or a music player that people in Turkey would want that’s different from one people elsewhere would want.”

“We’re just one world now."

Build the phone you want to use.

Apple knew the iPod was going to be successful because they could see how badly they each wanted one personally.

With the iPhone, they were excited about building a phone that they would personally want to use.

It's the best motivator.

Make progress by eliminating things.

Jony Ive, who was the Chief Design Officer at Apple explains, "To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential."

The lifeboat.

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If you could take only a few employees on a lifeboat to your next company, whom would you bring?”

Once a year, Jobs took his top 100 employees on a retreat. In the end, he would ask them, "What are the ten things we should be doing next?"

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People would fight to get their suggestions on the list. And Jobs would write them down, and then slowly cross them off until they were left with a list of ten.

Then he would slash the bottom seven and announce, “We can only do three.”

Do a few things well.

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding
what to do. It's as true for companies, as it’s for products.

"We all have a short period of time on this earth. We probably only have the opportunity to do a few things really great and do them well."

Make art.

“I hate it when people call themselves “entrepreneurs” when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on."

Products, not profits, should be the motivation.

If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.

The iPhone was partially created to prevent other smartphones from taking over the iPod market.

Great artists steal.

In 1979, Apple shamelessly borrowed a couple of major features from Xerox, made major improvements, and used them on their next-gen computer.

In the process, they also proved that good execution is almost as important as good ideas.

The greatest salesman.

Jobs' pitch to justify 99 cents for a song on iTunes:

Downloading a pirated song from the internet took about 15 minutes rather than a minute on iTunes. So by spending an hour of your time to save 4 dollars, you’re working for under the minimum wage."

I summarize the best of my 20-hour read-weeks in tweets.

If you like what you read follow me @sumitgrrg for more.

Also, since many of you are into crypto, let's see if I can get some love and support directly in my wallet: grrg.eth