The editing happens in real time while I’m writing. 99% of the time, I’m writing the final lyrics in the first hour of writing that song. I’m not into going back and editing because I trust my gut, and I put a lot of trust in my subconscious letting itself flow through me. So lyrically, there’s not very many edits that happen.

There were things that I wanted to add. Things that I wanted to take out. Things I wanted to correct. Things had changed for me as a writer, as an author, as a thinker.

Sometimes I like things I’ve written, but usually, when I’m revising it, I’m appalled by incoherence, wordiness, lack of specificity, boredom, like many other stylistic and material sins. It can get very dreary. I have revision techniques that can usually work to combat those errors.

When I’m ready I’ll transfer what I have to the computer and rewrite.

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

No. We have a lot of customers, and we have a lot of research into our installed base. We also watch industry trends pretty carefully. But in the end, for something this complicated, it's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.

The things I'm most proud about at Apple is where the technical and the humanistic came together, as it did in publishing for example. The Macintosh basically revolutionized publishing and printing. The typographic artistry coupled with the technical understanding and excellence to implement that electronically--those two things came together and empowered people to use the computer without having to understand arcane computer commands. It was the combination of those two things that I'm the most proud of.

I've participated in the hiring of maybe 5,000-plus people in my life. So I take it very seriously. You can't know enough in a one-hour interview. So, in the end, it's ultimately based on your gut.

My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.