It is hidden but always present
As [Steve Jobs] told Fortune magazine in 2008, he’s as proud of the things Apple hasn’t done as the things it has done. “The great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products,” he said. “We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas.”
Jobs sometimes says this even more bluntly: Nike CEO Mark Parker likes to recount the advice Jobs gave him shortly after Parker’s promotion to the top spot: “You make some of the best products in the world — but you also make a lot of crap. Get rid of the crappy stuff.” (…)
Jobs’s immersion in Zen and passion for design almost certainly exposed him to the concept of ma, a central pillar of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Like many idioms relating to the intimate aspects of how a culture sees the world, it’s nearly impossible to accurately explain — it’s variously translated as “void,” “space” or “interval” — but it essentially describes how emptiness interacts with form, and how absence shapes substance.
photo { Leilani Wertens }
