Steve Jobs genius was intuition – the formula for true innovaton
October 31, 2011
by michaelwilliamroach
There was a great article yesterday in the New York Times by the author of the recent bio of Steve Jobs Walter Isaacson. I’ve just finished reading the book, and having been a Mac user since 1984 I’d kind of got the marketing genius of Steve Jobs. What I hadn’t realised was how much an artist Steve was. This is brought out clearly in the book. And in the article yesterday Isaacson speaks to Jobs intuition.
So was Mr. Jobs smart? Not conventionally. Instead, he was a genius. That may seem like a silly word game, but in fact his success dramatizes an interesting distinction between intelligence and genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. They were sparked by intuition, not analytic rigor. Trained in Zen Buddhism, Mr. Jobs came to value experiential wisdom over empirical analysis. He didn’t study data or crunch numbers but like a pathfinder, he could sniff the winds and sense what lay ahead.
He told me he began to appreciate the power of intuition, in contrast to what he called “Western rational thought,” when he wandered around India after dropping out of college. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do,” he said. “They use their intuition instead … Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.”
Mr. Jobs’s genius wasn’t, as even his fanboys admit, in the same quantum orbit as Einstein’s. So it’s probably best to ratchet the rhetoric down a notch and call it ingenuity. Bill Gates is super-smart, but Steve Jobs was super-ingenious. The primary distinction, I think, is the ability to apply creativity and aesthetic sensibilities to a challenge.
China and India are likely to produce many rigorous analytical thinkers and knowledgeable technologists. But smart and educated people don’t always spawn innovation. America’s advantage, if it continues to have one, will be that it can produce people who are also more creative and imaginative, those who know how to stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. That is the formula for true innovation, as Steve Jobs’s career showed.
So how do you develop this kind of intuition, these aesthetic sensibilities? I’ve gotten that from my mentor Dr. Joseph Riggio who happens to be running a training this month in the UK called INFLUENCE.
