Creativity is just connecting things.

Gary Wolf asks Jobs why more products are not well designed. Jobs first argues that design requires a thorough understanding of how a product works, then describes creativity as connecting experiences. He continues by faulting the narrow experience of many people in the computer industry, which leads to narrow solutions.

Creative work joins experiences and insights into something new. A wider and more carefully considered range of experience makes those connections possible.

The opening sentence can sound as though creativity is effortless copying. Jobs is explaining why diverse experience and sustained understanding matter, not saying that anyone can produce good design without them.

• Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
• The only persons who are really at leisure are those who devote themselves to philosophy: and they alone really live: for they do not merely enjoy their own lifetime, but they annex every century to their own: all the years which have passed before them belong to them. Seneca the Younger
• Simple can be harder than complex.
• Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Naval Ravikant
• The true teacher is a learner. Elbert Hubbard

• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs

Steve Jobs, Gary Wolf, “Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing”, Wired, February 1996 (issue 4.02). Checked at Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/creativity-is-just-connecting-things/ (30 October 2026).

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