We all know there are two camps in the world, those who like Apple and those who are wrong. Jokes aside, everyone can appreciate the sheer brilliance that Apple, more specifically Steve Jobs, brought to the world, whether you like Apple or not.

I recently finished Steve Jobs’ biography and I would like to share the key lessons I took from the book.

1. Intense Focus

We often think chasing many possible solutions will ultimately bring us success. We have a plan A, B, C and even F just in case. Steve showed that with an intense focus on only a hand full of plans, it can lead to creating insanely great solutions, instead of many average ones.

2. Brutal Honesty

Although Steve could have done it in a “nicer” way, his brutal honesty was key to constantly craft really innovative products. Sometimes we settle for what we’ve got even though we still feel there are things that we know aren’t excellent. Steve refused to accept that reality.

3. Deep Collaboration

“Working in silos” is a term we hear daily in business and we often think of ourselves as belonging to “this” or “that” team. Something Steve got right was to entrench truly deep collaboration by essentially “forcing” his engineers and designers to work together. He simply refused to let one rule the other.

4. Marrying Creative and Logical

On the topic of bringing engineers and designers together, Steve was a master at grasping the importance of an absolutely seamless, excellent, user experience, something that he proved can only be achieved where you think equally as strong about the art you are creating as about the technology you are crafting. It’s so easy to forget the artistic side when we’re focused on complex problems.

5. Extraordinary Simplicity

Finally, building the simplest version of the product was critical to Steve. Do not confuse simple with stupid; Steve proved that extremely complex technology can be made so simple that uneducated children can intuitively use it. To me, this is the best definition of “simplicity”, namely something that you don’t even need to write a user manual for. How many times do we write pages of text to explain what our products or solutions are about…