My highlights from the book:

1. In 1980, business at my company, Chuck E . Cheese’s, was thriving and I was feeling flush. So I bought a very large house in Paris. We threw a huge party, inviting everyone I knew at Chuck E . Cheese’s and my other company, Atari, and all my old friends as well. I looked up and noticed that my former Atari employee, Steve Jobs, was at the door.

2. At this time his new company, Apple, was already quite successful, probably doing a little less than one hundred million dollars in sales — but nothing close to what Atari or Chuck E . Cheese was earning. In 1980, Atari was bringing in around two billion dollars in revenue and Chuck E . Cheese’s some five hundred million. 

3. I still didn’t feel too bad that I had turned down a one-third ownership of Apple — although I was beginning to think it might turn out to be a mistake.

4. We then walked around the city for hours. I continued to point out my favorite places to visit, but Steve was most interested in two things: all the creativity he sensed, and the architecture.

5. Around this time, Steve had started to regard the computer as the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds. “If you look at the fastest animals, human beings aren’t among them,” he said, “unless you give them a bicycle, and then they can win the race.”

6. The city’s architecture fascinated him as well: He saw a simplicity and uniformity of design in the buildings — so many of them seven or eight stories tall and made of similar yellow stone, exuding an elegance and consistency that instilled a sense of harmony in the brain. I was having a hard time thinking of Paris as having such simplicity and uniformity. But Steve’s point was that you could parachute anywhere into the city and realize you were nowhere but Paris. “There aren’t many cities where you can do that,” he pointed out. “The architecture here creates a unique signature for the entire city.” That Parisian simplicity was something he wanted Apple to emulate.

7. I asked him how he thought Apple was doing, and he confessed he was worried the company wasn’t being innovative enough. He wasn’t happy with the current products, and he wondered what the next wave of computers was going to look like, and what new innovations would come along. “How in the world do you figure out what the next big thing is?” he asked.

8. Then he sighed. “Everybody expects me to come up with all the ideas. That’s not how you build a strong company.” He went on to explain that he needed to generate more creativity within the company. We both recognized that innovation was the key to the future, and innovation was going to have to come from the brilliance of all the people at Apple — not just the person on top. What I realized then was that the original Steve Jobs believed he had to find his own next Steve Jobs.

9. We spent the rest of the day talking about issues related to creativity. At the time, I came up with dozens of suggestions for Steve, many of which he wrote down. I kept thinking that I should write them down too, and publish them in a book. Now, three decades later, I have.

10. One of the ideas Steve and I addressed was the concept of rules. Neither of us felt that creativity could thrive in the presence of strict ones. 

11. Thus, the book you’re reading contains no rules. Instead, it has pongs. I use pongs because it gives me a chance to reintroduce a word that originated with the video game I created with my friend, in 1972. A pong is a piece of advice (and in the case of this particular book, advice designed to help enhance creativity).

12. It applies only where the advice is helpful or needed, unlike a rule, which thinks of itself as applicable to every situation. That is probably why most rules don’t work. Situations vary. Flexibility is always necessary.

13. The constant application of inflexible rules stifles the imagination. 

14. There are no rules that apply to everyone uniformly — and that rule is the one exception to the rule that there are no rules.

15. As Peter Drucker said, “The only source of sustained competitive advantage is the ability to learn faster than your competitors.”

16. Atari didn’t find Steve Jobs. We made it easy for him to find us. A good company is a 24/7 advertisement for itself.

17. Back in the mid-1970s, Atari wasn’t your average large company. Our quirky environment allowed creative people to thrive, and these people acted as a living, breathing billboard for the company. 

18. If you want ordinary employees, then you promote your company as an ordinary workplace. If you want creative employees, then you demonstrate creativity.

19. When Steve Jobs first came to work at Atari, he wanted to be able to sleep overnight at the office. There were rules: No overnight sleeping at the office. But Steve was insistent. He had to sleep at work. Otherwise, he would quit. His friend Steve Wozniak felt the same way. In the end, we decided to permit overnight sleeping because we wanted to create a comfortable environment for the Steves.

20. If there was a single characteristic that separated Steve Jobs from the mass of employees, it was his passionate enthusiasm. Steve had one speed: full blast.

21. What unites creative people is their passion for diverse knowledge. It is the driver. Serious hobbies are a sign of this passion. 

22. Legendary innovators like Franklin and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities — a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity — but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.

23. Eclecticism is highly undervalued in today’s job market. Don’t let your company dismiss people who dress differently, dye their hair pink, or wear strange jewelry. Minor insanity in the clothing department is a benefit.

24. Some of the best people I ever hired might have been considered somewhat freakish. For instance, the man who created the chip for Pong, Harold Lee, was enormous, drove a great big, tricked-out Harley, and had a huge greying beard and long straggly hair that I don’t think he ever washed. Harold was a brilliant chip designer. I am sure that he would have had one hell of a time getting a job at IBM.

25. Steve Jobs understood that Atari was the kind of place that would allow him to flourish, no matter how arrogant he seemed. Perhaps everyone has creative potential, but only the arrogant are self-confident enough to press their creative ideas on others. Steve believed he was always right and was willing to push harder and longer than other people who might have had equally good ideas but who caved under pressure.

26. Frankly, most of my life people have told me I was crazy. Everyone thought my idea to found Atari was nuts. 

27. My associates took me aside to tell me that the idea of playing games on a video screen was truly ridiculous.

28. The concept of talking animals inhabiting a giant pizza parlor was also thought to be a harebrained idea. Even now, when I use those words to explain Chuck E. Cheese’s, people laugh.

29. One of the best ways to find creative people is to ask a simple question: “What books do you like?” I’ve never met a creative person in my life that didn’t respond with enthusiasm to a question about reading habits.

30. Which books people read is not as important as the simple fact that they read at all.

31. People who are curious and passionate read. People who are apathetic and indifferent don’t.

32. A job with a lot of moving parts benefits from a brain that has a lot of moving parts. It wouldn’t be possible to have read that many books without such a brain.

33. One of the best reasons to keep your company horizontal is that creative leaps do not always originate with your top players. 

34. When your company establishes that anyone can and should contribute, you will end up hearing some very good suggestions coming from unlikely places.

35. Oddly, it’s often hard for many people to understand that the future is also core to the business. Businesses tend to suffer from the tyranny of now. People think now trumps later. But if there is no later, now won’t do you much good.

36. Steve was always a fan of keeping life simple and meditative. 

37. He proceeded to ask me into a home that looked as though he had just moved in — there was almost no furniture, and almost no food , just some tea, and fruit. We then sat under a tree on a bench in the backyard, where he told me that this house represented what he’d always wanted in life: as little clutter as possible. 

38. I strongly believe that everyone who wants to be creative must find a place where his or her mind can be alone and untouched by the insanity of complexity. 

39. I used to employ one of my favorite tricks for enhancing creativity: I would ask everyone to make a list of all the ideas that had been presented at our meetings and then have them rank those ideas from good to bad. I would then take the six items on the bottom of the list and say, “Let’s suppose we were restricted for the next few months to work just on these six terrible projects. How do we make them work?” This process reversed people’s normal mental dynamic. Instead of trying to figure out what’s wrong with something, which triggers people’s critical instincts, here they had to figure out what was right with something, which triggers people’s creative instincts.

40. One of my favorite failure stories is that of the ubiquitous household product WD-40. It’s called that because the first 39 versions of the product failed; WD-40 stands for “Water displacement, 40th formula.”

41. By definition, creatives are always working on something that’s different, innovative, and new. That means most of the people around them aren’t going to understand what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, or where they’re going with it. 

42. I’ve had many great mentors. One of my best was Bob Noyce. Dubbed The Mayor of Silicon Valley, he co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel Corporation and is also co-credited with the invention of the microchip. 

43. I met Bob through an American Electronics Association dinner, and when it became clear that we both liked chess, we started playing regular games. Bob was enormously helpful to me, especially in terms of business advice. Back then being only twenty-nine years old and running a large company was very unusual — perhaps hard to believe considering all of the high-profile young executives in business now. 

44. It was frightening. No one ever really knew how truly scared I was. My way of dealing with my fear was to fake it, which led to a great many blunders. It took me years to find out it was acceptable not to know all the answers, and to ask other people for help. Bob helped teach me this. He gave me the confidence to believe in myself because he believed in me.

45. “If the other guy’s business looks easy, it means you don’t know enough about it.” —Bob Noyce. I have contemplated this idea over and over again when I think I’ve discovered an opportunity that is being overlooked by another business.

46. There are many obstacles to creativity, but one of the most pernicious is other people. There’s an old saying, “The good ideas end up on the cutting - room floor.” How do they generally end up there? Because other people have taken those good ideas and thrown them away.

47. Who are these other people? They are those naysayers who somehow manage to permeate every company like termites infest old buildings. I have seldom seen a company that did not have its fair share of these people, including my own. The trick is not to let them in. But if they’re already infesting your company, you need to find them and neutralize them. These naysayers are easy to spot because they’re the ones who prevent projects from taking off, who quash creativity, who sap imagination. They’ve gained power and prestige by being the company curmudgeon. They pretend that they’re doing this or that for the company’s good ( someone has to play devil’s advocate, they say ). But they’re really saying no all the time because it’s all they know how to do, and because they have no ideas of their own.

48. When people work too hard, they become tired, they make mistakes, they lose their equanimity. They also lose their perspective, the ability to separate the big problems from the little problems. Everything looks overwhelming, creating tension and anxiety — the enemies of creativity. Most of all, what distinguishes creatives from other people is their extraordinary judgment. Judgment is a delicate tool, however, and works best when accompanied by sleep, food, and tranquility. 

49. The idea that humans are supposed to stay up all day and then sleep for eight hours through the night is a modern one, invented with the advent of accurate timekeeping, clock-watching bosses, and the mattress industry. For almost all of humankind’s history, we’ve actually been polyphasic sleepers: sleeping in multiple periods over a twenty-four-hour stretch.

50. Steve Jobs brought a futon to work, and I’d often find him sleeping under his bench. Many of my other creative employees also performed best when allowed to sleep as their bodies desired, rather than as the workday required.

51. There’s one last pong to keep in mind. It’s a simple one: Act! Everyone who has ever taken a shower has had a good idea. The thing that matters is what you do with that idea once you get out of the shower. So if there’s only one thing you take from this book, it’s this: You must act! Do something!

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