272. Ode to the Unfinished

<p>There’s a reason the expression, “unfinished business” has such provocative power. Unfinished projects stack up like skeletons in our cluttered mental closets. We know if we crack open that door, we’ll be reminded of our failed intentions, our foolish optimism, and our broken promises – to others and to ourselves.</p> <p>But unfinished business doesn’t get the credit it deserves. Unfinished projects are a valuable and necessary part of the creative process. They build skills and plant seeds of ideas for future projects. And even when a project <em>seems</em> as if it’s unfinished, sometimes it’s not.</p> <h3>The iPhone came from unfinished business</h3> <p>We wouldn’t have the iPhone if it weren’t for unfinished business. When Steve Jobs set out to make a phone that didn’t suck, he drew upon unfinished projects, and he left unfinished projects in his wake.</p> <p>The iPhone we know and love – and all the imitation ancestor smartphones it spawned – may seem like an obvious invention. But at the start of the project, it was far from obvious.</p> <h4>A trackwheel phone!?</h4> <p>From the beginning, the iPhone was built upon the foundation laid by the iPod. The iPod had transformed Apple’s business. iPod sales were forty-five percent of Apple’s revenue in 2005.</p> <p>But in the early 2000s, when you left the house, you had a dilemma: Do I bring my phone, my digital camera, my iPod – or some combination of the three? Jobs had seen how the digital camera market was getting eaten up by phones that had cameras. That was one less device you had to carry with you. He knew the iPod’s market share would erode, too, as soon as there was a decent phone that could hold music. If Apple could develop that phone, they could stay alive.</p> <p>So the first iPhone prototypes looked like iPods. You’d use the iPod’s then-famous trackwheel not only to navigate through menus, but also to select letters to type with, or numbers to dial the phone.</p> <div class="mceTemp"> <p>Fortunately, this trackwheel phone became unfinished busine