A woman's intuition

Women’s intuition is something men have to respect.

While I was, like the rest of the world, let down by the non-arrival of iPhone 5 in the recent event which unveiled only iPhone 4S, my wife “thought different”. “Maybe Apple has decided to put the new product on hold out of respect of Steve Jobs,” she said pensively. “It’s not a time to celebrate the birth of a new product.”

Interesting, I thought, but I was not convinced. Then came the news that Samsung, Apple’s competitor, announced the deferment of release of its new model for exactly the reason that my wife made out.

It is comforting to know that this is not always a dog-eat-dog world.

Le logo qui fait le buzz

“Un étudiant en design de Hong Kong a fait le buzz sur la Toile vendredi après avoir détourné le célèbre logo d’Apple pour render hommage à Steve Jobs.”

It is Hong Kong’s glory that the logo that nineteen-year-old student Jonathan Mak designed to pay homage to the legendary former CEO of Apple who passed away a couple of days ago has, as the above statement from French website Le Parisien said, created a buzz on the Internet. What is pleasing is how firmly the young man has kept his feet on the ground. While he has received attractive job offers because of his wonderful design, he said he would like to concentrate on his studies before working. Such level-headedness is not very typical of the opportunistic Hongkongers.

What "think different" really means

What if all people "think different"?

While having lunch with my wife today, we noticed that all except one of the members of the family at the table next to us were engaged in – no, not a conversation – their electronic gadgets, and those gadgets happened to be Apple products – iPhones and iPads.

We started talking about how it used to be the Apple Daily, Hong Kong’s leading newspaper, rather than the the Apple gadgets, that captured the attention of the Chinese restaurant customers, and we moved on to discuss the factors that have made the computer company such a phenomenal success. It is easy to name a number of surface reasons, such as the high quality and elegant, minimalist designs of the products, the large number of trendy people as followers, which further enhances the company’s image, etc. But at the end of the day, much of the credit would have to go to Steve Jobs and his philosophy.

Perhaps Steve Jobs’s philosophy is best reflected in his much quoted adage, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” The saying is so well liked by my colleague that he puts it under his name in his emails. At a deeper level, though, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” reflects another, more fundamental, idea of the legend who has single-handed changed the company’s fortune. The idea is expressed in the phrase that for a long time accompanied the Apple logo: “Think different.”

Isn’t staying hungry and foolish the exact opposite of what people wish for themselves? However, isn’t this very idea what has brought so much success to Steve Jobs and his company?

I am sure that many people are aware that thinking differently is what would make them successful and that many people wish that they can think differently from the mass. But I am equally sure that it is much, much easier said than done.

It may sound like a twisted piece of logic, but if many, many people were able to think “differently”, would the “different thinking” not then become the common thinking of the mass?