Rick Rubin on the power of creating something truly for yourself

Last month, Elon Musk tweeted that Rick Rubin’s philosophy of creating something truly for yourself is how Tesla creates products.

Rick elaborates on this philosophy in the clip below:

“My only goal is to make something that I like… I know what I like. If I don’t like it, I keep working, and eventually we get to a place where we like it.”

And somewhat counterintuitively, he doesn’t consider the audience at all:

“The audience comes last… I’m not making it for them. I’m making it for me. And it turns out that when you make something truly for yourself, you’re doing the best thing you possibly can for the audience.”

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt a similar point:

"If you think about the greatest products, they've almost always been designed for the benefit of the people who are actually building them.”

Uber started out as a private timeshare limousine service for Garrett Camp and his friends. Microsoft started when Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a Basic interpreter for the Altair so they didn’t have to write machine language to program it. Drew Houston built Dropbox to make his files live online after forgetting his USB stick. Larry Page and Sergey Brin built Google for Stanford—and particularly for themselves—with the first server in Larry’s dorm room.

There’s of course a delicate balance here between building for yourself and talking to users—you don’t want to be “fake Steve Jobs”.

Perhaps legendary coach Bill Campbell said it best in response to Steve Jobs’s approach of relying solely on the taste of Apple’s team members:

“I don’t think a marketing person would have created the Macintosh, but [talking to users] would have made it better.”

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[kevalan]

This may be true if you don't depend on your audience for a living