Steve Jobs Didn’t Invent the iPhone
Steve Jobs didn’t invent the iPhone. Thomas Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb. Alexander Graham Bell didn’t invent the telephone.
These are all facts propagated by the ubiquitously romanticized notion that groundbreaking inventions had but a single author behind them. The Myth of The Lone Inventor is predicated on the idea that a single inventor came along, an inventor so talented and ingenious that he single-handedly solved problems that stumped all other experts. Think about it for a moment, what are the chances that the Wright Brothers woke up one day and somehow decided that they wanted man to fly.
The Myth of The Lone Inventor is a great story to tell. It’s an epic of a single man who, with the grace of God, either created brand new instruments or rapidly advanced existing ones.
While these inventors certainly contributed to technological advancement, it is, sadly, entirely inaccurate.
Now, the Myth of The Lone Inventor can be broken down into two constituents: the impression that a single man created an earth-shattering invention and the notion that the idea came solely from him.
No Man Does It Alone
Like we said earlier, Steve Jobs didn’t invent the iPhone. In fact, he neither came up with the idea nor did he support it at first.
It was actually headed by the likes of Scott Forestall, Andry Grignon, Hrni Lamiraux, Richard Williamson, and a star-studded assortment of developers, designers, and engineers.
What does this mean? That even someone as revered as Steve Jobs has to share the credit. Admittedly, he played a huge role in the development of the iPhone and its rapid worldwide adaptation could be easily credited to the amazing marketing campaign that he implemented. That doesn’t mean that he built the damn thing.
Behind every successful man is a strong woman… and about 10 other team members helping to build his idea.
For us everyday folk, it’s easy to get caught up in the fantasy world of mad geniuses and world-changing inventors.
The truth is that we need a team or, at the very least, a partner to help speed up the process. Think about it: Warren Buffett had Benjamin Graham, Steve Jobs had the Woz, and Michael Jordan had Scottie Pippen. Not a single one of these geniuses had any success until their partner came along — and were often thought of as failures before them.
This speaks volumes about the value of cooperation and recognition. Even rivalry and competition go a long way in aiding an individual to grow and pushing his product to ways previously never before seen. If you ask me, this goes to show that there’s no shame in asking for help especially when you need it.
Working alone is no different than working with a team; in fact, having a team might even be better as it provides you different avenues and people to bounce ideas off and spread the workload. On top of that, having a team building a project with you allows you to specialize. In my experience, having a single person focus on a single task creates a better output than having a dozen people produce subpar work.
It’s the same reason as to why you shouldn’t aim to be a jack of all trades when it comes to business but rather a master of a single action. It’s just like what Bruce Lee said, “ I fear not the man who practiced a thousand kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced the same kick a thousand times.”
All the great inventors of our generation and the generation before couldn’t have accomplished anything without having their friends, teammates, mentors, and rivals provide motivation, insights, and even aid in their projects.
The Adjacency Principle
The second part of this myth is that the lone inventor mysteriously woke up one day with an idea that would eventually reshape the world. The fact of the matter is: there’s almost zero truth behind this.
What’s really occurring is that decades of inventions culminated into a single one, an invention that just so happened to change the world.
In his book “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation”, Steven Johnson explains the adjacent possible in terms of business management to explain just how ideas are generated. Prior to that, Stuart Kauffman had introduced this theory of adjacency to help explain evolutionary biology.
In line with Kauffman’s thesis, we could also alternatively see innovation as evolutionary, much like how Newton had envisioned himself as standing on the shoulders of giants to see a little further. In the same way, rather than attempting to create something out of thin air, we could instead look towards what we currently have today and improve on it further.
The iPad, once again, is an example of the phenomenon. When Samsung was sued for copying Apple’s designs of a rectangular object with a gesture-based screen, they cited multiple sources as the first generation “tablets” even going so far as to citing “2001: A Space Odyssey” which has scenes depicting devices that could very well be interpreted as tablets or iPads.
Nothing about your smartphone could be considered entirely “new”. Its gorilla glass case was invented by Corningware in the late ’60s, the Simon Personal Computer, thought to be the first handheld computer, was invented in the early ’90s, and the apps that make the smartphone so versatile was first introduced by Blackberry. Apple wasn’t the first organization to build and release a smartphone, they just combined and collated already developed technology better than anyone else.
Concluding Thoughts
History is written by the victors, it is quite often linear and entertaining. History books will tell you about the geniuses, the Nikola Teslas and Tim Berners-Lees of this world, yet fail to recognize the Galileo Ferraris, Vint Cerfs, and Bob Kahns, all of whom made tremendous contributions that made technological advancement possible.
Without other people working with you, you’ll never get anywhere in life. No one, not even athletes who play “individual” sports like Tiger Woods, says that they did it alone. There’s no shame in asking for help.
Lastly, if you’re looking to innovate and create the next big thing, I think the best way to do so would be through looking at what we have now and finding ways to improve it.
If you want to change the world, you can start by looking a little bit further ahead.
