Anyone can knock ideas down.
You don’t have to be clever to do that.
What you do have to be clever to do, is suggest ways to make them better.
Being negative isn’t difficult.
Being positive is difficult.
That’s why it’s the creative director’s job.
You can’t say “No, that’s crap.” and sit there looking smug.
You have to say “That’s not right for these reasons. Try doing it this way.”
You have to point them in another direction.
Steve Jobs wasn’t simply negative.
But he couldn’t let anything just be the way it was.
He had to tell everyone what was wrong with everything and how it could be better.
With everything.
That’s the difference between a man who revolutionised six industries and just another armchair critic.
When the ad agency presented Steve Jobs with the campaign featuring Einstein, Lennon, Picasso, and Orson Welles, the line they had on the end was “Think differently”.
Steve Jobs said “That sucks”
Then he said “It should say “Think different”.
The ad agency said that wasn’t correct grammar.
Jobs said he didn’t care.
Apple didn’t just think a little differently to everyone else.
So he didn’t just want it to be comparative, as in “Think bigger”.
He wanted it to be absolute, as in “Think big”.
And so, that’s how the truly memorable “Think different” commercial ran.
When he’d been fired from Apple, Steve Jobs bought a tiny computer animation company with his own money.
It was called Pixar.
John Lasseter, who ran it, said they needed to make a short film to demonstrate what computer animation could really do.
But it would cost $300,000.
A third of a million is a lot of money to anyone.
But Steve Jobs wrote out a personal cheque, to cover the entire cost of the film.
As he was handing it over he paused.
He said “All I ask of you John, is that you make it great.”
That short film went on to win an Oscar.
Telling people how to make things better was so ingrained in Jobs, he couldn’t switch off.
He was about to have a major operation, he was sedated and about to go under.
As they were placing the oxygen mask over his mouth, he feebly pushed it away.
He said “That design sucks. Bring me five different masks to choose from.”
Jobs would tell anyone, from a nurse to the most powerful media mogul in the world how to do it better.
Over dinner, he told Rupert Murdoch “You’re blowing it with Fox News. You’ve got the axis wrong. The axis isn’t left wing – right wing, anymore. Now the axis is constructive – destructive. The problem isn’t that Fox News is right wing, the problem is it’s destructive.”
But the truth of what separates Jobs off from mere critics is in his reply to a blogger.
The blogger had made a lot of negative criticisms about Apple.
And they were surprised to get a response from Steve Jobs in the middle of the night.
But during the exchange Jobs began to get frustrated.
Every time he answered a point, the blogger criticised something else.
It became clear, this person didn’t want an answer.
They just wanted to look clever by constantly finding fault.
So Jobs ended the correspondence like this.
“By the way, what have you done that’s so great?
Do you actually create anything yourself?
Or do you just criticise others’ work and belittle their motivations?”

And that question, separates the negative people from the positive people.