Deciding What Not to Do Is As Important As Deciding What to Do
Steve Jobs had a lot of things , both positive and negative, but despite all this, he definitely got his way. As the quote above reminds us, at least part of it was knowing when not to do something.
The quote is from Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson. This is in context :
When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it produced a random assortment of computers and peripherals, including a dozen different versions of the Macintosh. After weeks of product reviews, he finally had enough. “Stop!” he shouted. “This is madness.” He took the magic marker, walked barefoot to the board, and drew a two-by-two grid. “This is what we need,” he said. At the top of the two columns, he wrote “Consumer” and “For”. He named the two lines “Desktop” and “Portable”. Their job, he told his team members, was to focus on four great products, one for each quadrant. All other foods should be discarded. There was a stunned silence. But by forcing Apple to focus on making just four computers, he saved the company. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do,” he told me. “That’s true for companies, and that’s true for products.”
Sometimes you need to experiment a little to figure out which paths not to take, but knowing when to stop is an important quality. Jobs, who died in 2011, would be 62 today.