Success Quote by Steve Jobs

Jobs is doing a neat bit of reputational judo: flipping “copying” from an insult into a philosophy of mastery. The line starts by name-checking a common Western caricature of Japan as an efficient mimic, then pivots to a more flattering frame that also happens to justify how Apple liked to work. “Reinvent” is the keyword. It doesn’t mean conjuring from nothing; it means taking a prior idea, stripping it down, and reassembling it with obsessive attention until the result feels inevitable.

The subtext is as much about taste and discipline as about technology. Jobs isn’t praising novelty for its own sake; he’s praising comprehension so complete it produces better decisions about what to keep, what to discard, and what to refine. That’s also a backhanded critique of the “original inventor” myth: invention is romanticized as a lightning strike, while iteration is dismissed as derivative. Jobs argues the opposite. Understanding can outrank authorship.

The cultural context matters. Postwar Japan built its global reputation on manufacturing excellence, miniaturization, and continuous improvement, often after importing American and European ideas. By the late 20th century, the “Japan copies” trope had become a lazy Western shorthand for anxieties about economic competition. Jobs, a longtime admirer of Japanese design and Zen-inflected minimalism, reframes that anxiety as respect: the threat isn’t imitation, it’s relentless learning.

There’s a self-portrait embedded here, too. Apple’s greatest hits rarely began as pure firsts; they were reinventions that made existing categories feel suddenly outdated. Jobs is praising Japan, but he’s also defending a method: borrow, study, internalize, then out-execute.