No matter how compelling your crafted narrative is, or how rousing your delivery of it, you will always face pushback. This holds true even for people you fully expect to embrace your vision right away. That’s exactly why unshakable resolve is non-negotiable for any creator.
Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief design officer and co-founder of LoveFrom — a small collective of independent creators — has long been a dedicated student of design and the creative process. When he accepted the Stephen Hawking Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, he used his lecture to emphasize that resolve is an indispensable partner to creativity.
“There is a fundamental tension between two very different modes of thinking,” Ive observed. “It is the tension between curiosity, and the unwavering resolve and focus that you need to actually solve hard problems.”
Yet, he went on to stress, curiosity and resolve are not truly opposing forces that cannot coexist. Instead, creators must learn to strike a balance, dancing between the two mindsets. While you must be “utterly driven and completely focused to solve apparently insurmountable problems,” he continued, “solving those problems requires new ideas.”
The creative process relies on a constant back-and-forth: you lean into curiosity to keep uncovering better approaches to the problem, then dig in to build a tangible solution. As Ive put it, “The difference between an idea and a product is that you’ve solved all the problems between them.”
One of my favorite examples of how this dance between curiosity and resolve unlocks brilliant problem-solving and game-changing breakthroughs is the origin story of the first iPhone. Contrary to popular myth, the iPhone was never just Steve Jobs’ brainchild. In fact, Jobs almost blocked it from ever being created. Hard to believe, right? This serves as a perfect reminder: even the people who build their careers disrupting industries can become resistant to new change, and they need other creators to step in to stop them from being disrupted themselves.
In his book The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, author Brian Merchant tells the full untold behind-the-scenes story of how the iPhone came to exist. At the very start, Jobs knew nothing about the project. “The iPhone began as an experimental project undertaken without his knowledge,” Merchant explained in an interview.
It was 2004, and smartphones were just starting their rise into mainstream use. Beyond support for checking email, what caught the attention of a small group of Apple designers was the growing functionality of mobile phones as standalone cameras and MP3 players. Devices like the Nokia 5310 were growing rapidly in popularity specifically for their music-playing capabilities.
