Recently, I was reading an interview with former Apple CEO John Sculley on Steve Jobs. By far, my favorite snippet was this, as Sculley describes Jobs’ admiration for Dr. Edward Land, co-founder of Polaroid:
Both of them had this ability to not invent products, but discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed – it’s just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them. The Polaroid camera always existed and the Macintosh always existed — it’s a matter of discovery.
It goes hand-in-hand with John Gruber’s description of Stanley Kubrick discovering the perfect camera angle in his wonderful talk, The Auteur Theory of Design.
Things already exist—perfect camera angles, ingenious product ideas, beautiful songs, new strategies. But we have to have patience and dedication, then put ourselves in positions to discover them.
