1. Focus. Whether that be in your own life or the things you create, put the few best things in and say no to the many others that are even the slightest bit less than that.

2. Use that focus to also keep it simple. Nothing, whether that be your own decisions or the things you design, benefit from excesses. Simplicity is clean and allows you to breathe and see clearly. As Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

3. Pour your heart in. Chase your vision and put your life into it - and not with the conventional path offered, but in whatever way you can make it work, even if that means breaking with the herd entirely.

4. Roll with the punches. When you get knocked down, find the raw passion that brought you to the top and make it happen again in a totally new way. Anything is possible with that raw passion.

5. Use that raw passion to be ingenious. Solutions exist everywhere and if you force the issue they can be anywhere, anyhow.

6. If you’re going to create something, create something that is not a commodity and likely cannot be turned into a commodity. Finite features - technology, power, etc - they can be readily manufactured and replicated. Innovative design and integrated quality cannot.

7. Quality is king, and quality is in the experience.

8. Build with the future in mind. Just as we trace a straighter line looking to a specific point, we build a more coherent, well thought-out product when we extrapolate its future. Just as a rigorous business plan should have financials over the next 5 years, a thorough design solution should have its perceived evolution over the next 5 years. It makes for steady growth and a steady ship.

9. We cannot use what we know now to think about what we may want in the future. Innovation means breaking the grid and looking to what is ideal, in any form, regardless of what we are familiar now. Innovation should be the target, not evolution. Simple evolution of a product in the marketplace is outpaced upon conception by evolution’s own natural progress; evolution is never truly new.

10. Design is paramount. A customer’s best experience is when they are enchanted – it doesn’t just work well, it feels great. Excellent design is the path to giving that to your customer. As they teach us in engineering (though perhaps not with an eye to the aesthetic as well…): “quality is not manufactured, it is designed.”

For some of the articles that stimulated these insights:

What Steve Jobs Can Still Teach us:

http://www.fastcompany.com/design/2011/what-can-steve-jobs-still-teach-us

The Spiritual Side of Steve Jobs:

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/05/tech/innovation/steve-jobs-philosophy/

Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA

“Three apples changed the world: Adam and Eve’s, Newton’s, and Jobs’”

A visionary thinker; although I never knew him, I feel a genuine sadness because I can feel that the world lost somebody truly special.