How he got engineers to wear ninety-hour weeks like a badge of honor

Picture being told by your boss, in front of fifty colleagues at a company retreat, that customer research is a waste of time, because 'customers don't know what they want until we've shown them,' and then having that same boss pull a device the size of a desk diary out of his bag and announce it is his dream of what your company will be building in a few years' time. That was the world Steve Jobs built around the Macintosh team.

At a retreat in Pajaro Dunes in September 1982, Jobs stood on a table in front of the Macintosh division and wrote, on an easel, a short list of principles that would define how the team worked. 'Don't compromise.' 'It would be better to miss than to turn out the wrong thing.' 'It's not done until it ships.' And his own personal favorite, one he would repeat for the rest of his career: 'The journey is the reward.' The idea was that the team was not simply building a computer. They were on an exalted mission that they would someday look back on, laughing off the painful parts, as one of the high points of their lives.

It worked, remarkably well, on its own terms. Team members had T-shirts made that read '90 hours a week and loving it!' They flew a pirate flag over their building. They held retreats with pool parties and bonfires. Susan Kare, one of the designers, explained the spirit behind it: 'Let's have a renegade feeling to our group. We can move fast. We can get things done.'

But the same mission that produced this loyalty also produced real damage. Jobs's outbursts were, by Debi Coleman's account, an almost hourly occurrence: 'He would shout at a meeting, "You asshole, you never do anything right." Yet I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with him.' Steve Wozniak, who watched from a slight distance, thought a gentler version of the same project would have gone more smoothly, though perhaps not as far. 'I think a company can be a good family,' he said. 'But I think if it had been a mix of both our styles, it would have been better than just the way Steve did it.'

Try writing down the two or three things your own team or project genuinely will not compromise on, and put them somewhere visible, the way Jobs stood at an easel and wrote 'Don't compromise' in front of his engineers. Give the effort a phrase that reframes the grind as meaningful, something like his own favorite line, 'the journey is the reward,' so people remember why the hours mattered rather than just how many there were. When you are tempted to run one more survey before deciding what to build, ask honestly whether you already know the answer and are only stalling, since sometimes the people you're building for genuinely cannot picture what they want until you show them. And pay close attention to the moment when the same intensity that once produced loyalty starts producing only exhaustion, because that line is real, even if it is hard to see while you are standing on the wrong side of it.