I like the quote up until the word "people" because it is quite an epiphany to realise that anything that was made can be remade.

I don't buy the "no smarter than you" part though.

To me the point of "no smarter than you" is that you should not baseline assume they were smarter than you because that leads to apathy.

Whether some people really were "smarter" than you (whatever that means) is not relevant to the point of the Jobs quote, I think.

Yes, I am apathetical because it seems self evident to me that the reason Jobs invented the smart phone and I never could is because he's smarter than me. I guess I call that humility.

Perhaps the point of the quote is to encourage people to falsely over-estimate their own smartness in order to maximise the likelihood they'll try to make a difference - because a tiny percentage actually will.

The right question would be: "Would you have been able to invent the smartphone if you had made the same experiences and insights as Jobs did"?

Because, a lot of people like jobs had similar experiences in the early days, e.g. Palo Alto Research Lab around them - though, it was Jobs who came up with the idea, not any other of the SC veterans :)

My personal version of this was realizing that the bar for being a functional, relatively successful adult is FAR lower than I realized as a kid. Many adults can't get things which I find fairly rudimentary right and it explains a lot.