Steve Jobs was quite the successful tech entrepreneur, but was also known to be a person of weird quirks. He tried to keep his private life in as much secrecy as a person of his stature could, which meant he wasn’t usually open to interviews. However, the ones he did appear in were always enriched by his unique philosophy towards business and life.

Let’s start with the reason this particular interview was called ‘Lost’. It was the year 1995 when Steve Jobs gave a 70 minutes interview to a technology journalist by the name of Mark Stevens aka Cringley. The interview was conducted for a documentary to be published on PBS under the title (funnily enough) “Triumph of the Nerds”. The documentary ended up using only 10 minutes of the total interview and the remaining bits were considered lost. It was only after Jobs’ death that the original tape was recovered from director’s garage.

In this article we cover the famous words of Steve Jobs and quote them as they came directly out of his mouth, but also put our analysis to them to make them more useful for the readers.

Learning from a rare Steve Jobs interview

In business, a lot of things are folklore

One of the first questions Jobs was asked was, how was he able to achieve so much at such a young age (40 at the time of the interview) even though he didn’t have any formal education in business or management.

To this Jobs response was that “…in business a lot of things are folklore. They are done because they were done yesterday, and the day before. What it means is, if you are willing to ask a lot of questions and think about things and work really hard, you can learn business pretty fast. It’s not the hardest thing in the world. It’s not rocket science.”

What his answer shows us is that he was more of a reverse-engineer than a businessman. But it was his dedication towards getting to the root of a belief that made him understand the often simple, but also at certain times complex, realities that lie beneath so-called folklore.

Humans are tool builders

Cringley asked Steve Jobs a question that almost all successful and famous people get asked frequently. What’s your passion? What drove you?

Jobs: “As a kid, I read an article in the Scientific American. It measured the efficiency of locomotion of various species on the planet. Humankind came in with an unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. But somebody there had the brilliance to test a human riding a bicycle. We blew away the condor. Off the charts.

This really had an impact on me. Humans are tool builders. We build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human abilities.”

This is the reason Steve Jobs was not only an innovator but a trend setter for generations of technologists who arrived after him. His vision for technology as an exoskeleton is visible in a lot of Apple products and also enlightens us regarding the workings of businesses in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs around the world.