people and passion

by jenson wong - october 13, 2025

i just finished reading the steve jobs biography and the thing that that sticks out to me most is the sheer intensity and passion for building something insanely great. money, status, fame, control, and ego all played their parts no doubt but it's obvious that the key driver was passion.

for me, i share that same passion for making something insanely great and also believe the path towards that is through great design. i love product and i love design, but seeing such intensity in steve prompted me to ask why i love the things that i do, and i think i figured it out (sort of).

i think what i'm truly passionate about is enabling other people to make things that are insanely great.

"i didn't invent the language or mathematics i used. i make little of my one food, none of my own clothes. everything i do depends on other members of our species and the shoulders that we stand on. and a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. it's about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how because we can't write bob dylan songs or tom stoppard plays. we try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. that's what has driven me."

like steve, i believe almost everyone has a deep desire to create or contribute to an expression of themselves. and yet, most move through life so passively and so void of passion. for so many people, life passes by them, not through them.

internally, i've always seen work as a beautiful thing. to have a vision and a purpose and something to build towards and to create value for the world, to me, is something undeniably beautiful. that perspective of work as more of an artistic form instead of just a means to an end isn't something that is applicable to everything or everyone, but it's a view i think more people ought to share.

the difficulty comes when people pick a career they are excited about and love, only to find out that 90% of their job is bullshit. if a consultant joins a firm to innovate but spends half their time doing data entry in a spreadsheet, that's bullshit. if a product manager joins a tech company to build a product that makes the world a better place but spends all day organizing jira tickets, that's bullshit.

sometimes, bullshit is part of the job. but often times, it shouldn't be.

"i read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. the condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. it was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. so, that didn't look so good. but, then somebody at scientific american had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. and, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts. and that's what a computer is to me. what a computer is to me is it's the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with, and it's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds."

as a product designer, what i care about most isn't making something pretty for people to look at, but to give people tools that make their work less bullshit and more beauty: tools that are bicycles for the mind.

what's beautiful about this analogy is that a bicycle doesn't do any of the work for you. it leaves the work to you, but gives you the means to do and explore what you couldn't before. it's why art is so beautiful. an empty canvas with nothing but a fine point pen or paint brush doesn't do anything for you, but gives you the chance to express something you could have never captured with just words.

and if someone is robbed of their chance to turn their work into something beautiful because i didn't take the time or effort to make the right tool for them, that's bullshit.