Finding value in introspection and introversion in a world that won’t stop shouting

I finally got time to sit down and listen to Jony Ive at Stripe Sessions. I have thoughts.

There’s something deeply reassuring about watching someone take their time. In our era of instant reactions and hot takes, witnessing Jony Ive sit with a question for twenty seconds—complete silence hanging in the air while thousands wait—feels almost revolutionary. Not because it’s something he just started doing, far from it, but because in 2025, nobody does it. His recent conversation was a masterclass in the power of introspection.

I’ve always found myself drawn to this quality, perhaps because I recognise it in myself. Like Ive, clearly fidgeting and not entirely at ease with being the centre of attention, I’ve also had a complicated relationship with introversion. As a child, I was surprisingly gregarious, but university experiences kicked the stuffing out of me. My confidence collapsed, and I’ve spent years rebuilding it.

Yet in certain contexts, with people I know well or when presenting to a crowd, something shifts. I become animated, engaged, even the centre of attention. I love social settings: a party, a stage, a dancefloor. I find presenting fun. Yesterday, demonstrating an app I’ve spent three years developing, I could have presented for hours, completely in my element. The contradiction feels familiar when I watch Ive speak: the visible discomfort of doing the thing, endured solely to ensure the thing you’re doing is the best thing you ever did.

The counterculture of calm

What strikes me most about Ive is how his approach stands in stark opposition to Silicon Valley’s dominant ethos. While tech (bro) culture celebrates disruption and speed—“move fast and break things”—Ive represents something altogether different: deliberate consideration, careful craftsmanship, and a deep sense of responsibility.

Innovation and breaking stuff for the sake of it are not the same thing, he reminds us. “If what you create isn’t better than what came before, that’s not progress, it’s carnage.”

Perhaps no example illustrates this more dramatically than Theranos, the once-celebrated healthcare startup that promised to revolutionise blood testing with a finger prick. Elizabeth Holmes embraced Silicon Valley’s move fast mantra, attempting to apply software development principles to medical technology that led to catastrophic results. While software companies can release buggy products and iterate, Theranos delivered wholly inaccurate health test results to actual patients making life-altering medical decisions, even informing cancer patients that they didn’t have cancer at all.

By 2015, investigations revealed the company’s technology simply didn’t work as advertised, leading to billions in investor losses, criminal fraud charges, and worst of all, potentially endangering lives. Theranos serves as the ultimate cautionary tale of what happens when the break things ethos collides with reality.

“If what you create isn’t better than what came before, that’s not progress, it’s carnage.”

And so, Ive’s philosophy resonates deeply with me. In my own work developing software, I’ve often found myself swimming against the current, advocating for taking the time to get things right rather than rushing to ship. There’s immense pressure to accelerate, to prioritise features over finish, to sacrifice quality for speed. But watching Ive speak reaffirms my conviction that this approach misses something essential.

The value of contemplation isn’t just personal preference: it produces better outcomes. The most elegant solutions rarely emerge from the first frantic brainstorming session. Your first idea is never your best. They come from turning a problem over in your mind, examining it from different angles, letting it simmer until something crystallises.

The spiritual weight of caring about details

“I like to believe that when somebody unwrapped that box and took out that cable, they thought: ’Somebody gave a shit about me.’” That is a spiritual thing. When Ive declared that, I was clapping at the screen for a good five seconds before I realised the entire audience was doing the same thing.

That statement captures everything I believe about design and development. The details that most people never consciously notice are precisely the ones that matter most. They communicate care in a way that’s felt rather than observed.

In my own work, I’ve spent hours refining animations that last milliseconds, adjusting the timing of interactions until they feel natural rather than mechanical, and obsessing over typography that most users will never consciously appreciate. To many, this might seem excessive. But like Ive, I believe these absurd details aren’t absurd at all—they’re where the magic lives.

“I like to believe that when you open the box and take out the cable, you think: Somebody gave a shit about me.”

I just released an update to my latest app, Scratch. It’s still in beta, but after a glut of new features, I’ve taken the time to go back and refine: finish beats features. It’s a music app and so, after I’ve spent days and weeks straining over the order of songs in each playlist and how that affects the listener, I then at the end of each playlist, added a little sign-off: “Curated with love by Scratch”. When I introduced the ability to create your own playlists in Scratch, I displayed a slightly altered message at the bottom of that playlist: “Curated with love by you.”

Most people will never consciously consider this detail. But it’s there, and it’s important, and it fills me with utter joy that for those who do clock it, there may just be a hint of a smile on their face, and even in their heart.

And to that end, no detail is absurd.

What’s striking is how Ive frames this attention to detail not as perfectionism, but as an act of service: “a way of expressing our gratitude to the species.” This perspective transforms design from mere aesthetics into something approaching the sacred. It’s not about showing off technical prowess; it’s about honouring the humanity of the person who will use what you create.

Trust and vulnerability: the foundation of innovation

One of the most powerful insights from Ive’s talk was his emphasis on trust within creative teams. “A small group of people who trust each other is fundamentally important to the evolution of a precarious thought becoming a breathtaking idea.” ¹

As an introvert who thinks deeply before speaking, this resonates profoundly. Innovation requires vulnerability: the willingness to share half-formed ideas, to expose your thinking before it’s bulletproof. Without trust, this becomes impossible. We retreat to safe positions, offering only polished thoughts that won’t expose us to criticism.

“A small group of people who trust each other is fundamentally important to the evolution of a precarious thought becoming a breathtaking idea.”

I’ve experienced both environments: teams where ideas were immediately picked apart, leading everyone to self-censor, and teams where tentative suggestions were met with curiosity rather than judgment. The difference in outcomes was stark. The latter produced work that was not just technically sound but always more genuinely innovative.

This is where introversion can become a strength rather than a limitation. The tendency to process internally before speaking means that when introverts do share, their ideas often have a depth and nuance that more reactive thinking lacks. But this only happens in environments where that processing time is respected rather than penalised.

Finding joy in craft

There’s a palpable joy in Ive’s philosophy that’s too regularly missing from technical discussions. He laments how modernism, when stripped of joy, becomes soulless, desiccated. To him, joy and humour aren’t frivolous additions, they’re essential components of meaningful work.

I recall the “lickable UI” of yesterday’s Apple and the glorious OS X intro videos when you switched on a Mac for the very first time. It’s those things that I remember, not the Retina displays or the extended battery life, or anything else quantifiably good, yet seemingly less important to me.

This perspective challenges the false dichotomy between seriousness and playfulness. Being thoughtful doesn’t mean being humourless. Taking your craft seriously does not preclude finding delight in it.

I’ve found this balance in my own work. The same attention to detail that can make me agonise over a particular interaction also allows me to appreciate its elegance when it finally works. The deep thinking that sometimes slows my initial progress often leads to solutions that bring genuine satisfaction, both to me and to others.

The unquantifiable value of care

Perhaps most radical in today’s metrics-obsessed world is Ive’s insistence on the importance of things that can’t be measured. The power of design isn’t something you can chart on a spreadsheet. The joy and delight of using something well-made is real, even if it can’t be quantified.

This is the ultimate rebellion against a culture that increasingly values only what can be counted. Not everything that matters can be reduced to analytics. Some qualities, like the feeling of using something that’s been crafted with care, resist quantification while remaining undeniably real.

As someone who has frequently had to justify spending time on aspects of projects that don’t show up in performance metrics, this validation feels important. This validation feels crucial. The value of thoughtful design isn’t always immediately apparent, but it accumulates over time in user loyalty, emotional connection, and longevity.

A call for thoughtful creation

What I take from Ive’s example isn’t just design philosophy but a broader approach to creating in a world that seems increasingly impatient with reflection. There’s room, indeed, there’s necessity, for those of us who process internally, who need time to consider before speaking, who value depth over immediacy.

The qualities often associated with introversion: careful observation, deep thinking, and attention to nuance, aren’t weaknesses to overcome but strengths to embrace. They’re precisely what’s needed to create work that endures beyond the next news cycle or product release.

So here’s my call to those who, like me, sometimes feel out of step with a culture that prizes quick reactions over considered responses: Your approach has value. The world requires your thoughtfulness, your attention to detail, your willingness to sit with complexity rather than rushing to simplify it.

Make things with care. Take the time they deserve. Trust that the depth of your consideration will be felt, even if it’s not always explicitly acknowledged. And remember that in a world that won’t stop shouting, sometimes the quietest voices have the most important things to say.

My God, Jony, I’ve missed you.

Footnotes