When you do a screenshot, it plays my camera. It was my Canon AE-1 that I had since I was in high school and then. Now it’s been moved over and it’s on the iPhone. So, anytime you take a photo it’s my camera, which also kind of freaks me out because even to this day when I hear people take photos with their iPhone I look to see like who stole my camera.

Decades after I stopped working for Roone [Arledge], I watched a documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, about a master sushi chef from Tokyo named Jiro Ono, whose restaurant has three Michelin stars and is one of the most sought-after reservations in the world. In the film, he’s in his late eighties and still trying to perfect his art. He is described by some as being the living embodiment of the Japanese word shokunin, which is “the endless pursuit of perfection for some greater good.” I fell in love with Jiro when I watched it and became fascinated by the concept of shokunin.

It’s a delicate thing, finding the balance between demanding that your people perform and not instilling a fear of failure in them. Most of us who worked for Roone [Arledge] wanted to live up to his standards, but we also knew that he had no patience for excuses and that he could easily turn on anyone, in his singularly cutting, somewhat cruel, way, if he felt we weren’t performing to his satisfaction.

I wake nearly every morning at four-fifteen, though now I do it for selfish reasons: to have time to think and read and exercise before the demands of the day take over.

It was only later, looking back, that I realized that so much of what we accomplished didn’t have to come at such a cost. I was motivated by Roone’s drive for perfection and have carried it with me ever since. But I learned something else along the way, too: Excellence and fairness don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

[Speaking about the famous Mac startup sound:] [People at Apple] thought you couldn’t change the sound, but I happen to know the people that own the roms, I built the sound and I gave it to them, and I said put this in there, and I did it really late in the project so that it wouldn’t go through many review cycles, and I snuck it in late, and that’s how it got there.

As these sounds are heard quite frequently, it’s important that they be able to stand up to use over time. And one method of doing this is to provide subtle variation and perform an algorithmic selection over a set of variable sounds. And this could be based on some input variable or even random selection. But what we’re trying to do is mimic a more real world or natural behavior of sound events.

What I meant when I talked about “the relentless pursuit of perfection.” […] is what it looks like to take immense personal pride in the work you create, and to have both the instinct toward perfection and the work ethic to follow through on that instinct.

I actually said I’m going to call it “Let It Beep.” Of course you can’t do anything like that, but I thought yeah, it was still sumi, and then I thought that’s actually the right name, I’ll just have to spell it funny. So I spelt it s-o-s-u-m-i, and then I said it’s a japanese word, it doesn’t mean anything musical, and that’s how that sosumi beat came around. It was really me making fun of lawyers.

There’s been a lot of research done in the aviation and medical industries around the role of sound. And in aviation, for example, studies have shown that flight crew were more concerned with turning off a warning sound rather than understanding the underlying cause of that sound, or in the medical field where a majority of anesthetists admitted to deactivating sound warnings because the sound itself was displeasing.

[When I confessed that it was my fault in that meeting,] Roone never said anything to me about it, but he treated me differently, with higher regard, it seemed, from that moment on. In my early days, I thought there was only one lesson in this story, the obvious one about the importance of taking responsibility when you screw up. That’s true, and it’s significant. In your work, in your life, you’ll be more respected and trusted by the people around you if you honestly own up to your mistakes. It’s impossible not to make them; but it is possible to acknowledge them, learn from them, and set an example that it’s okay to get things wrong sometimes. What’s not okay is to undermine others by lying about something or covering your own ass first.