I asked Jobs what he meant by that statement. “A lot of times, people don’t do great things, because they aren’t really expected of them, and nobody demands they try,” he said. “Nobody says, ‘Hey, that’s the culture here, to do great things.’ If you set that up, people will do things that are greater than they ever thought they could. Being a pirate means going beyond what people thought possible—a small band of people doing some great work that will go down in history.”

A moving piece by Steven Levy where he looks back upon three decades of reporting on Apple. Jobs made it sound simple, building a great-things culture. Just like he made the iMac, iPod and iPhone look simple and easy to copy.

The more I read about this and experience day-to-day, the more I see what an enormous accomplishment it is to build an environment like that.