“Steve [Jobs] was the most remarkably focused person I ever met in my life,” Apple’s senior vice president of design Jonathan Ive told Vanity Faireditor Graydon Carter during the closing event of Vanity Fair’sNew Establishment Summit in San Francisco.

“The thing with focus is that it’s not this thing you aspire to, like: ‘Oh, on Monday I’m going to be focused,’” said Ive, who rarely gives interviews. “It’s every single minute: ‘Why are we talking about this when we’re supposed to be talking about this?’”

Asked to name three lessons he learned from Steve Jobs, his former boss at Apple, Ive said Jobs taught him that focus means “not doing something that, with every bone in your body, you think is a phenomenal idea,” if it would prevent you from staying on task.

Jobs was often perceived as a harsh manager, but Ive said that he was simply “beautifully focused,” with little time for “behavioral niceties.”

This trait was in full force during one design critique Ive recounted, in which the late Apple C.E.O. wasn’t exactly complimentary toward Ive and his team. After the meeting, Ive asked Jobs why he had been so brutal.

“We had been putting our heart and soul into this,” Ive said he told Jobs, telling his boss that he cared about “the team.” Jobs responded candidly: “No, Jony, you’re just really vain. You just want people to like you.”

Ive admitted the comment made him “really cross,” but only because Jobs had hit a nerve. Ive, who joined Apple full-time in 1992 and was deeply involved in establishing the look of its signature products, from the iMac to the iPhone 6+, said he ultimately agrees that it’s more important to do great work than make people happy.

In addition to learning from Jobs about the importance of focus and of prioritizing the product over emotions, Ive said he “learned the whereabouts of a lot of rubbish hotels when we traveled.”

The wide-ranging conversation also touched on the size of Apple’s core design team (just 16 people, and they still begin their process with drawings), the new iPhone (Ive said its rounded edges make the bigger screen feel “less wide”) and the new Apple watch, which Ive described as the culmination of hundreds of years of function-first thinking.

“Why a watch and why not a pendant?” asked Carter.