Folklore.org has this great story about how the Macintosh team was super-charged by the prospect of achieving something great.
“The original Macintosh was designed by a small team that worked long hours with a passionate, almost messianic fervor, inculcated by our leader, Steve Jobs, and the excitement that we felt during its creation shines through in the finished product…
We were excited because we thought we had a chance to do something extraordinary. Most technology development is incremental, but every once in a while there’s an opportunity to make a quantum leap to a whole new level…
the ambiance of the Mac team was spontaneous, enthusiastic and irreverent…
the Mac team was surprisingly egalitarian. Unlike other parts of Apple, which were becoming more conservative and bureaucratic as the company grew, the early Mac team was organized more like a start-up company. We eschewed formal structure and hierarchy, in favor of a flat meritocracy with minimal managerial oversight, like the band of revolutionaries we aspired to be…
At our third retreat in January 1983, Steve reinforced our rebel spirit, which was waning as the team grew larger, by telling us “it’s better to be a pirate than join the navy” (see Pirate Flag).
Enthusiasm is contagious, and a product that is fun to create is much more likely to be fun to use. The urgency, ambition, passion for excellence, artistic pride and irreverent humor of the original Macintosh team infused the product and energized a generation of developers and customers with the Macintosh spirit, which continues to inspire more than twenty years later.”