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At Apple, People Are Putting In 18-hour Days. We Attract A Different Type Of Person—a Person Who Doesn’t Want To Wait Five Or Ten Years To Have Someone Take A Giant Risk On Him Or Her. Someone Who Really Wants To Get In A Little Over His Head And Make A Little Dent In The Universe. We Are Aware That We Are Doing Something Significant. We’re Here At The Beginning Of It And We’re Able To Shape How It Goes. Everyone Here Has The Sense That Right Now Is One Of Those Moments When We Are Influencing The Future.

-Steve Jobs

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At Apple, People Are

Steve Jobs

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At Apple, People Are Putting In 18-hour Days. We Attract A Different Type Of Person—a Person Who Doesn’t Want To Wait Five Or Ten Years To Have Someone Take A Giant Risk On Him Or Her. Someone Who Really Wants To Get In A Little Over His Head And Make A Little Dent In The Universe. We Are Aware That We Are Doing Something Significant. We’re Here At The Beginning Of It And We’re Able To Shape How It Goes. Everyone Here Has The Sense That Right Now Is One Of Those Moments When We Are Influencing The Future.

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But Apple Really Beats To A Different Drummer. I Used To Say That Apple Should Be The Sony Of This Business, But In Reality, I Think Apple Should Be The Apple Of This Business.

The People Who Built Silicon Valley Were Engineers. They Learned Business, They Learned A Lot Of Different Things, But They Had A Real Belief That Humans, If They Worked Hard With Other Creative, Smart People, Could Solve Most Of Humankind's Problems. I Believe That Very Much.

If I Were Running Apple, I Would Milk The Macintosh For All It's Worth - And Get Busy On The Next Great Thing. The Pc Wars Are Over. Done. Microsoft Won A Long Time Ago.

Why Would I Ever Want To Run Disney? Wouldn't It Make More Sense Just To Sell Them Pixar And Retire?

That's Why I Think Death Is The Most Wonderful Invention Of Life. It Purges The System Of These Old Models That Are Obsolete. I Think That's One Of Apple's Challenges, Really. When Two Young People Walk In With The Next Thing, Are We Going To Embrace It And Say This Is Fantastic? Are You Going To Be Willing To Drop Our Models, Or Are We Going To Explain It Away? I Think We'll Do Better, Because We're Completely Aware Of It And We Make It A Priority.

There’s A Phrase In Buddhism, ‘beginner’s Mind.’ It’s Wonderful To Have A Beginner’s Mind.

Your Time On This Earth Is Limited, Don’t Live Someone Else's Life, Live By Your Vision.

For The Past 33 Years, I Have Looked In The Mirror Every Morning And Asked Myself: 'if Today Were The Last Day Of My Life, Would I Want To Do What I Am About To Do Today?' And Whenever The Answer Has Been 'no' For Too Many Days In A Row, I Know I Need To Change Something.

If A User Is Having A Problem, It's Our Problem.

Entrepreneurship

The People Who Are Crazy Enough To Think They Can Change The World Are The Ones Who Do.

Why Join The Navy If You Can Be A Pirate?

Combine Science And Humanities.

Reed College At That Time Offered Perhaps The Best Calligraphy Instruction In The Country.... I Decided To Take A Calligraphy Class To Learn How To Do This.... It Was Beautiful, Historical, Artistically Subtle In A Way That Science Can't Capture, And I Found It Fascinating. None Of This Had Even A Hope Of Any Practical Application In My Life. But Ten Years Later, When We Were Designing The First Macintosh Computer, It All Came Back To Me.

Much Of What I Stumbled Into By Following My Curiosity And Intuition Turned Out To Be Priceless Later On.

The Thing That Drives Me And My Colleagues At Both Apple And Pixar Is That You See Something Very Compelling To You, And You Don't Quite Know How To Get To It, But You Know, Sometimes Intuitively, It's Within Your Grasp. And It's Worth Putting In Years Of Your Life To Make It Come Into Existence.

I Try To Get People To See What I Have. . . . When You Run A Computer Company, You Have To Get People To Buy Into Your Dreams.

John Sculley Ruined Apple And He Ruined It By Bringing A Set Of Values To The Top Of Apple Which Were Corrupt And Corrupted Some Of The Top People Who Were There, Drove Out Some Of The Ones Who Were Not Corruptible, And Brought In More Corrupt Ones And Paid Themselves Collectively Tens Of Millions Of Dollars And Cared More About Their Own Glory And Wealth Than They Did About What Built Apple In The First Place Which Was Making Great Computers For People To Use.

The Most Important Decisions You Make Are Not The Things You Do, But The Things You Decide Not To Do.

Decisions You Make

Good Pr Educates People; That's All It Is. You Can't Con People In This Business. The Products Speak For Themselves.

Things Don't Have To Change The World To Be Important.

That's Been One Of My Mantras - Focus And Simplicity. Simple Can Be Harder Than Complex: You Have To Work Hard To Get Your Thinking Clean To Make It Simple. But It's Worth It In The End Because Once You Get There, You Can Move Mountains.

After All The Statistics And Calculations Are Formulated, The One Element That Breathes Life Into Marketing Is Good Design.

Innovation Is The Ability To See Change As An Opportunity - Not A Threat

Simplicity Is The Ultimate Sophistication-- Steve Jobs Turned This Into The Slogan Behind An Early Mac Advertising Campaign. Which Doesn't Make It Less True.

Most People Have No Concept Of How An Automatic Transmission Works, Yet They Know How To Drive A Car. You Don't Have To Study Physics To Understand The Laws Of Motion To Drive A Car. You Don't Have To Understand Any Of This Stuff To Use Macintosh.

I Know That Living With Me Was Not A Bowl Of Cherries.

Team, It Turned Out That Michael Dell Wasn't Perfect At Predicting The Future. Based On Today's Stock Market Close, Apple Is Worth More Than Dell. Stocks Go Up And Down And Things May Be Different Tomorrow But I Thought It Was Worth A Moment Of Reflection Today.

Creativity Is Just Connecting Things. When You Ask Creative People How They Did Something, They Feel A Little Guilty Because They Didn't Really Do It, They Just Saw Something. It Seemed Obvious To Them After A While. That's Because They Were Able To Connect Experiences They've Had And Synthesize New Things.

We Think That Computers Are The Most Remarkable Tools That Humankind Has Ever Come Up With, And We Think That People Are Basically Tool Users. So If We Can Just Get Lots Of Computers To Lots Of People, It Will Make Some Qualitative Difference To The World.

The Things I've Done In My Life Have Required A Lot Of Years Of Work Before They Took Off.

Great Art Stretches The Taste, It Doesn't Follow Tastes.

There Are Times When You Run A Marathon And You Wonder, Why Am I Doing This? But You Take A Drink Of Water, And Around The Next Bend, You Get Your Wind Back, Remember The Finish Line, And Keep Going.

That's What Makes Great Products. It's Not Process-it's Content.

These Technologies Can Make Life Easier, Can Let Us Touch People We Might Not Otherwise. You May Have A Child With A Birth Defect And Be Able To Get In Touch With Other Parents And Support Groups, Get Medical Information, The Latest Experimental Drugs. These Things Can Profoundly Influence Life. I'm Not Downplaying That.

Apple Is The Only Company In The World That Has All Of That Under One Roof. We Can Invent A Complete A Solution That Works - And Take Responsibility For It.

To Me, Ideas Are Worth Nothing Unless Executed. They Are Just A Multiplier. Execution Is Worth Millions.

One: Demonstrations Always Crash. And Two: The Probability Of Them Crashing Goes Up Exponentially With The Number Of People Watching.

So We Went To Atari And Said, 'hey, We've Got This Amazing Thing, Even Built With Some Of Your Parts, And What Do You Think About Funding Us? Or We'll Give It To You. We Just Want To Do It. Pay Our Salary, We'll Come Work For You.' And They Said, 'no.' So Then We Went To Hewlett-packard, And They Said, 'hey, We Don't Need You. You Haven't Got Through College Yet.'

We Wanted To More Richly Experience Why We Were Alive, Not Just Make A Better Life, And So People Went In Search Of Things. The Great Thing That Came From Those That Time Was To Realize That There Was Definitely More To Life Than The Materialism Of The Late Sixties And Early Sixties. We Were Going In Search Of Something Deeper.

Companies, As They Grow To Become Multi-billion-dollar Entities, Somehow Lose Their Vision. They Insert Lots Of Layers Of Middle Management Between The People Running The Company And The People Doing The Work. They No Longer Have An Inherent Feel Or A Passion About The Products. The Creative People, Who Are The Ones Who Care Passionately, Have To Persuade Five Layers Of Management To Do What They Know Is The Right Thing To Do.

The Problem With The Internet Startup Craze Isn't That Too Many People Are Starting Companies; It's That Too Many People Aren't Sticking With It. That's Somewhat Understandable, Because There Are Many Moments That Are Filled With Despair And Agony, When You Have To Fire People And Cancel Things And Deal With Very Difficult Situations. That's When You Find Out Who You Are And What Your Values Are.

Difficult Situations

Microsoft Has Had Two Goals In The Last 10 Years. One Was To Copy The Mac, And The Other Was To Copy Lotus' Success In The Spreadsheet - Basically, The Applications Business. And Over The Course Of The Last 10 Years, Microsoft Accomplished Both Of Those Goals. And Now They Are Completely Lost.

Design Is A Funny Word. Some People Think Design Means How It Looks. But Of Course, If You Dig Deeper, It's Really How It Works.

I'm As Proud Of What We Don't Do As I Am Of What We Do.

Apple Stores Are Intended Not Just To Move Boxes, But To Enrich Lives.

Your Customers Don't Care About You. They Don't Care About Your Product Or Service. They Care About Themselves, Their Dreams, Their Goals. Now, They Will Care Much More If You Help Them Reach Their Goals, And To Do That, You Must Understand Their Goals, As Well As Their Needs And Deepest Desires.

Right Now The New Is You, But Someday Not Too Long From Now, You Will Gradually Become The Old And Be Cleared Away. Sorry To Be So Dramatic, But It Is Quite True.

The Japanese Have Hit The Shores Like Dead Fish. They're Just Like Dead Fish Washing Up On The Shores.

You Can't Just Ask Customers What They Want And Then Try To Give That To Them. By The Time You Get It Built, They'll Want Something New.

Our Dna Is As A Consumer Company - For That Individual Customer Who's Voting Thumbs Up Or Thumbs Down. That's Who We Think About. And We Think That Our Job Is To Take Responsibility For The Complete User Experience. And If It's Not Up To Par, It's Our Fault, Plain And Simply.

Marketing Is About Values. It's A Complicated And Noisy World, And We're Not Going To Get A Chance To Get People To Remember Much About Us. No Company Is. So We Have To Be Really Clear About What We Want Them To Know About Us.

And It Comes From Saying No To 1,000 Things To Make Sure We Don't Get On The Wrong Track Or Try To Do Too Much. We're Always Thinking About New Markets We Could Enter, But It's Only By Saying No That You Can Concentrate On The Things That Are Really Important.

All The Work I've Done In My Life Will Be Obsolete By The Time I'm Fifty.

When You're Doing Something For Yourself, Or Your Best Friend Or Family, You're Not Going To Cheese Out. If You Don't Love Something, You're Not Going To Go The Extra Mile, Work The Extra Weekend, Challenge The Status Quo As Much.

If You Define The Problem Correctly, You Almost Have The Solution.

When You're A Carpenter Making A Beautiful Chest Of Drawers, You're Not Going To Use A Piece Of Plywood On The Back, Even Though It Faces The Wall And Nobody Will Ever See It. You'll Know It's There, So You're Going To Use A Beautiful Piece Of Wood On The Back.

You Are All Over The Map, Figure Out The Top 5 Things You Want To Focus On And Get Rid Of The Rest.

You Have To Trust In Something--your Gut, Destiny, Life, Karma, Whatever.

Now, We Are Selling Over 5 Million Songs A Day Now. Isn't That Unbelievable? That's 58 Songs Every Second Of Every Minute Of Every Hour Of Every Day.

Japan's Very Interesting. Some People Think It Copies Things. I Don't Think That Anymore. I Think What They Do Is Reinvent Things. They Will Get Something That's Already Been Invented And Study It Until They Thoroughly Understand It. In Some Cases, They Understand It Better Than The Original Inventor.

It's Not Like Windows Users Don't Have Any Power. I Think They Are Happy With Windows, And That's An Incredibly Depressing Thought

You Have To Trust That The Dots Will Somehow Connect In Your Future... The Only Way To Do Great Work Is To Love What You Do. If You Haven’t Found It Yet, Keep Looking. Don’t Settle. As With All Matters Of The Heart, You’ll Know When You Find It... Have The Courage To Follow Your Heart And Intuition. They Somehow Already Know What You Truly Want To Become. Everything Else Is Secondary.

I Want To Make A Dent In The Universe.

Innovation Distinguishes A Leader From A Follower.

If, For Some Reason, We Make Some Big Mistake And Ibm Wins, My Personal Feeling Is That We Are Going To Enter A Computer Dark Ages For About Twenty Years.

If I Knew In 1986 How Much It Was Going To Cost To Keep Pixar Going, I Doubt If I Would Have Bought The Company.

I Don't Really Care About Being Right, I Just Care About Success.

You Have To Trust In Something - Your Gut, Destiny, Life, Karma, Whatever. This Approach Has Never Let Me Down, And It Has Made All The Difference In My Life.

I Don't Want To Fail, Of Course. But Even Though I Didn't Know How Bad Things Really Were, I Still Had A Lot To Think About Before I Said Yes. I Had To Consider The Implications For Pixar, For My Family, For My Reputation. I Decided That I Didn't Really Care, Because This Is What I Want To Do. If I Try My Best And Fail, Well, I've Tried My Best.

Remembering That I’ll Be Dead Soon Is The Most Important Tool I’ve Ever Encountered To Help Make The Big Choices In Life. Remembering That You Are Going To Die Is The Best Way I Know To Avoid The Trap Of Thinking You Have Something To Lose.

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My Passion Has Been To Build An Enduring Company Where People Were Motivated To Make Great Products. Everything Else Was Secondary. Sure, It Was Great To Make A Profit, Because That Was What Allowed You To Make Great Products. But The Products, Not The Profits Were The Motivation.

Most People Never Pick Up The Phone And Call. Most People Never Ask, And That’s What Separates The People Who Do Things From The People Who Just Dream About Them.

It's Hard To Tell With These Internet Startups If They're Really Interested In Building Companies Or If They're Just Interested In The Money. I Can Tell You, Though: If They Don't Really Want To Build A Company, They Won't Luck Into It. That's Because It's So Hard That If You Don't Have A Passion, You'll Give Up.

When You Have Feelings Like Sadness Or Anger About Your Cancer Or Your Plight, To Mask Them Is To Lead An Artificial Life.

The Mark Of An Innovative Company Is Not Only That It Comes Up With New Ideas First, But Also That It Knows How To Leapfrog When It Finds Itself Behind.

If Macintosh Hadn't Been Successful, Then I Should Have Just Thrown In The Towel, Because My Vision Of The Whole Industry Would Have Been Totally Wrong.

One Of The Failures Of Technology Companies Is That They Build Technologies Thinking Everything Else Will Work Out.

To Have Your Whole Music Library With You At All Times Is A Quantum Leap In Listening To Music. How Do We Possibly Do This?

This Is What Customers Pay Us For - To Sweat All These Details So It's Easy And Pleasant For Them To Use Our Computers. We're Supposed To Be Really Good At This. That Doesn't Mean We Don't Listen To Customers, But It's Hard For Them To Tell You What They Want When They've Never Seen Anything Remotely Like It.

Guess Who Surprised Themselves And Changed Their Minds.

Digital Hub (center Of Our Universe) Is Moving From Pc To Cloud - Pc Now Just Another Client Alongside Iphone, Ipad, Ipod Touch, ... - Apple Is In Danger Of Hanging On To Old Paradigm Too Long (innovator's Dilemma) - Google And Microsoft Are Further Along On The Technology, But Haven't Quite Figured It Out Yet - Tie All Of Our Products Together, So We Further Lock Customers Into Our Ecosystem

The Best Innovation Is Sometimes The Company, The Way You Organize The Company

My Kids Accuse Me And My Wife Of Being Fascists And Overly Concerned About Tech, And They Say That None Of Their Friends Have The Same Rules... That's Because We Have Seen The Dangers Of Technology Firsthand. I've Seen It In Myself, I Don't Want To See That Happen To My Kids.

The Reason That Apple Is Able To Create Products Like Ipad Is Because We Always Try To Be At The Intersection Of Technology And Liberal Arts, To Be Able To Get The Best Of Both.

Everything Is Based On A Simple Rule: Quality Is The Best Business Plan, Period.

The Only Way To Do Great Work Is To Love What You Do. If You Haven't Found It Yet, Keep Looking. Don't Settle.

Some Mistakes Will Be Made Along The Way. That's Good. Because Some Decisions Are Being Made Along The Way. We'll Find The Mistakes. We'll Fix Them.

The World Doesn't Need Another Dell Or Compaq.

Sometimes Life's Going To Hit You In The Head With A Brick. Don't Lose Faith. I'm Convinced That The Only Thing That Kept Me Going Was That I Loved What I Did.

Stanford University

Technology Is Nothing. What's Important Is That You Have A Faith In People, That They're Basically Good And Smart, And If You Give Them Tools, They'll Do Wonderful Things With Them.

A Computer Is The Most Incredible Tool We've Ever Seen. It Can Be A Writing Tool, A Communications Center, A Supercalculator, A Planner, A Filer And An Artistic Instrument All In One, Just By Being Given New Instructions, Or Software, To Work From. There Are No Other Tools That Have The Power And Versatility Of A Computer.

I Was Worth About Over A Million Dollars When I Was 23 And Over Ten Million Dollars When I Was 24, And Over A Hundred Million Dollars When I Was 25 And... It Wasn't That Important — Because I Never Did It For The Money.

We're Going To Be Able To Ask Our Computers To Monitor Things For Us, And When Certain Conditions Happen, Are Triggered, The Computers Will Take Certain Actions And Inform Us After The Fact.

If You're Afraid Of Failing You Won't Get Very Far

It Is Piracy, Not Overt Online Music Stores, Which Is Our Main Competitor.

My Philosophy Is That Everything Starts With A Great Product.

I Met Woz When I Was 13, At A Friend's Garage. He Was About 18. He Was, Like, The First Person I Met Who Knew More Electronics Than I Did At That Point. We Became Good Friends, Because We Shared An Interest In Computer And We Had A Sense Of Humor. We Pulled All Kinds Of Pranks Together.

By Honoring The Lives Of Those We Admire, We Make Our Own Values Known.

The Most Corrosive Piece Of Technology That I've Ever Seen Is Called Television - But Then, Again, Television, At Its Best, Is Magnificent.

I Can Help The Next Generation Remember The Lineage Of Great Companies Here And How To Continue The Tradition. The Valley Has Been Very Supportive Of Me. I Should Do My Best To Repay.

I Think The Macintosh Was Created By A Group Of People Who Felt That Ah There Wasn't A Strict Vision Between Sort Of Science And Art.

In Order To Learn How To Do Something Well, You Have To Fail Sometimes. In Order To Fail, There Has To Be A Measurement System. And That's The Problem With Most Philanthropy - There's No Measurement System. You Give Somebody Some Money To Do Something And Most Of The Time You Can Really Never Measure Whether You Failed Or Succeeded In Your Judgment Of That Person Or His Ideas Or Their Implementation.

We Think The Mac Will Sell Zillions, But We Didn't Build The Mac For Anybody Else. We Built It For Ourselves. We Were The Group Of People Who Were Going To Judge Whether It Was Great Or Not. We Weren't Going To Go Out And Do Market Research. We Just Wanted To Build The Best Thing We Could Build.

Ad Campaigns Are Necessary For Competition. But Good Pr Educates People; That's All It Is.

We Have Never Worried About Numbers. In The Marketplace, Apple Is Trying To Focus The Spotlight On Products, Because Products Really Make A Difference. You Can't Con People In This Business. The Products Speak For Themselves.

My Job Is To Not Be Easy On People. My Job Is To Make Them Better. My Job Is To Pull Things Together From Different Parts Of The Company And Clear The Ways And Get The Resources For The Key Projects. And To Take These Great People We Have And To Push Them And Make Them Even Better, Coming Up With More Aggressive Visions Of How It Could Be.

Everything Around You That You Call Life Was Made Up By People That Were No Smarter Than You And You Can Change It, You Can Influence It, You Can Build Your Own Things That Other People Can Use.

We Believe People With Passion Can Change The World For The Better. That's What We Believe. And We Believe That Those People Who Are Crazy Enough To Think They Can Change The World Are The Ones That Actually Do.

I Was Actually A Fruitarian At That Point In Time. I Ate Only Fruit. Now I'm A Garbage Can Like Everyone Else. And We Were About Three Months Late In Filing A Fictitious Business Name So I Threatened To Call The Company Apple Computer Unless Someone Suggested A More Interesting Name By Five O'clock That Day. Hoping To Stimulate Creativity. And It Stuck. And That's Why We're Called Apple.

Woz And I Started Apple In My Parents' Garage When I Was 20. We Worked Hard, And In 10 Years Apple Had Grown From Just The Two Of Us In A Garage Into A $2 Billion Company With Over 4,000 Employees.

A Brand Is Simply Trust.

It Was One Of Those Sort Of Apocalyptic Moments. I Remember Within Ten Minutes Of Seeing The Graphical User Interface Stuff, Just Knowing That Every Computer Would Work This Way Someday. It Was So Obvious Once You Saw It. It Didn't Require Tremendous Intellect. It Was So Clear.

Make It Like A Sunflower.

Sometimes When You Innovate, You Make Mistakes. It Is Best To Admit Them Quickly, And Get On With Improving Your Other Innovations.

Bottom Line Is, I Didn't Return To Apple To Make A Fortune. I've Been Very Lucky In My Life And Already Have One. When I Was 25, My Net Worth Was $100 Million Or So. I Decided Then That I Wasn't Going To Let It Ruin My Life. There's No Way You Could Ever Spend It All, And I Don't View Wealth As Something That Validates My Intelligence.

Some People Can Do One Thing Magnificently, Like Michelangelo, And Others Make Things Like Semiconductors Or Build 747 Airplanes -- That Type Of Work Requires Legions Of People. In Order To Do Things Well, That Can't Be Done By One Person, You Must Find Extraordinary People.

I Found That There Were These Incredibly Great People At Doing Certain Things, And You Couldn't Replace One Of These People With Fifty Average People.

It's More Fun To Be A Pirate Than To Join The Navy. On The Importance Of Loving What You Do.

Loving What You Do

I Think The World's A Better Place Because Bill Realized That His Goal Isn't To Be The Richest Guy In The Cemetery, Right?

Somebody Once Told Me, ‘manage The Top Line, And The Bottom Line Will Follow.’ What's The Top Line? It's Things Like, Why Are We Doing This In The First Place? What's Our Strategy? What Are Customers Saying? How Responsive Are We? Do We Have The Best Products And The Best People? Those Are The Kind Of Questions You Have To Focus On.

When You Grow Up, You Tend To Get Told That The World Is The Way It Is, And Your Life Is Just To Live Your Life Inside The World. Try Not To Bash Into The Walls Too Much. Try To Have A Nice Family Life. Have Fun, Save A Little Money. That's A Very Limited Life. Life Can Be Much Broader, Once You Discover One Simple Fact, And That Is Everything Around That You Call Life Was Made Up By People Who Were No Smarter Than You. And You Can Change It. You Can Influence It. You Can Build Your Own Things That Other People Can Use. Once You Learn That, You'll Never Be The Same Again.

People Equated Burning Cds With Theft. That's Not What Burning Cds Is. Theft Is About Acquiring The Music From The Internet.

I Buy Everything From Costco. It's Great; They've Got Everything I Need.

There's An Old Wayne Gretzky Quote That I Love. 'i Skate To Where The Puck Is Going To Be, Not Where It Has Been.' And We've Always Tried To Do That At Apple. Since The Very, Very Beginning. And We Always Will.

Pixar Is Seen By A Lot Of Folks As An Overnight Success, But If You Really Look Closely, Most Overnight Successes Took A Long Time.

I Sat In A Garage And Invented The Future.

You're Missing It. This Is Not A One-man Show. What's Reinvigorating This Company Is Two Things: One, There's A Lot Of Really Talented People In This Company Who Listened To The World Tell Them They Were Losers For A Couple Of Years, And Some Of Them Were On The Verge Of Starting To Believe It Themselves. But They're Not Losers. What They Didn't Have Was A Good Set Of Coaches, A Good Plan. A Good Senior Management Team. But They Have That Now.

We Limit How Much Technology Our Kids Use At Home.

That's Been One Of My Mantras - Focus And Simplicity. Simple Can Be Harder Than Complex.

The Engineering Is Long Gone In Most Pc Companies. In The Consumer Electronics Companies, They Don't Understand The Software Parts Of It. And So You Really Can't Make The Products That You Can Make At Apple Anywhere Else Right Now. Apple's The Only Company That Has Everything Under One Roof.

I Naively Chose A College That Was Almost As Expensive As Stanford, And All Of My Working-class Parents Savings Were Being Spent On My College Tuition. After Six Months I Couldn't See The Value In It. I Had No Idea What I Wanted To Do With My Life And No Idea How College Was Going To Help Me Figure It Out.

You Have To Be Burning With "an Idea, Or A Problem, Or A Wrong That You Want To Right." If You're Not Passionate Enough From The Start, You'll Never Stick It Out.

The Most Precious Resource We Have Is Time.

There's Nothing That Makes My Day More Than Getting An E-mail From Some Random Person In The Universe Who Just Bought An Ipad Over In The Uk And Tells Me The Story About How It's The Coolest Product They've Ever Brought Home In Their Lives. That's What Keeps Me Going.

The Desktop Metaphor Was Invented Because One, You Were A Stand-alone Device, And Two, You Had To Manage Your Own Storage. That's A Very Big Thing In A Desktop World. And That May Go Away. You May Not Have To Manage Your Own Storage. You May Not Store Much Before Too Long.

We Hire People Who Want To Make The Best Things In The World.

There's A Lot Of Symbolism To Your Return. Is That Going To Be Enough To Reinvigorate The Company With A Sense Of Magic?

Fear Of Failure Falls Away In The Face Of Death.

Fear Of Failure

Innovation Has Nothing To Do With How Many R&d Dollars You Have. When Apple Came Up With The Mac, Ibm Was Spending At Least 100 Times More On R&d. It's Not About Money. It's About The People You Have, How You're Led, And How Much You Get It.

Customers Don't Measure You On How Hard You Tried, They Measure You On What You Deliver.

Our Friends Up North Spend Over Five Billion Dollars On Research And Development And All They Seem To Do Is Copy Google And Apple.

Research And Development

Stealing Things Is Everybody's Problem. We [apple Inc.] Own A Lot Of Intellectual Property, And We Don't Like When People Steal It. So People Are Stealing Stuff And We're Optimists. We Believe That 80 Percent Of The People Stealing Stuff Don't Want To Be; There's Just No Legal Alternative.

Stealing Things

With Our Technology, With Objects, Literally Three People In A Garage Can Blow Away What 200 People At Microsoft Can Do. Literally Can Blow It Away. Corporate America Has A Need That Is So Huge And Can Save Them So Much Money, Or Make Them So Much Money, Or Cost Them So Much Money If They Miss It, That They Are Going To Fuel The Object Revolution.

Companies Must Have A Noble Cause, And It's The Leaders Job To Transform That Noble Cause Into Such An Inspiring Vision, That It Will Attract The Most Talented People In The World To Want To Join It.

If You Don't Cannibalize Yourself, Someone Else Will.

I'm Convinced That About Half Of What Separates The Successful Entrepreneurs From The Non-successful Ones Is Pure Perseverance... Unless You Have A Lot Of Passion About This, You're Not Going To Survive. You're Going To Give It Up. So You've Got To Have An Idea, Or A Problem Or A Wrong That You Want To Right That You're Passionate About Otherwise You're Not Going To Have The Perseverance To Stick It Through.

To Do Anything Of Magnitude Takes At Least Five Years, More Likely Seven Or Eight. Rightfully Or Wrongfully, That's How I Think.

The Subscription Model Of Buying Music Is Bankrupt. I Think You Could Make Available The Second Coming In A Subscription Model And It Might Not Be Successful.

Click. Boom. Amazing!

You've Got To Find What You Love.

Stanford University

I'm The Only Person I Know That's Lost A Quarter Of A Billion Dollars In One Year. It's Very Character-building.

Follow Your Heart, But Check It With Your Head.

Follow Your Heart

If It Could Save A Person's Life, Could You Find A Way To Save Ten Seconds Off The Boot Time? If There Were Five Million People Using The Mac, And It Took Ten Seconds Extra To Turn It On Every Day, That Added Up To Three Hundred Million Or So Hours Per Year People Would Save, Which Was The Equivalent Of At Least One Hundred Lifetimes Saved Per Year.

It Takes A Lot Of Hard Work To Make Something Simple.

Whatever You Do, You Must Never Let The Voice In Your Head Control The Brain In Your Heart.

It's Like When Ibm Drove A Lot Of Innovation Out Of The Computer Industry Before The Microprocessor Came Along. Eventually, Microsoft Will Crumble Because Of Complacency, And Maybe Some New Things Will Grow. But Until That Happens, Until There's Some Fundamental Technology Shift, It's Just Over.

I Was In The Parking Lot, With The Key In The Car, And I Thought To Myself: If This Is My Last Night On Earth, Would I Rather Spend It At A Business Meeting Or With This Woman? I Ran Across The Parking Lot, Asked Her If She'd Have Dinner With Me. She Said Yes, We Walked Into Town, And We've Been Together Ever Since.

Your Thoughts Construct Patterns Like Scaffolding In Your Mind. You Are Really Etching Chemical Patterns. In Most Cases, People Get Stuck In Those Patterns, Just Like Grooves In A Record, And They Never Get Out Of Them.

In Your Life You Only Get To Do So Many Things And Right Now We've Chosen To Do This, So Let's Make It Great.

You Can't Win On Innovation Unless You Have A Way To Communicate It To Customers.

We Think Android Is Very, Very Fragmented, And Becoming More Fragmented By The Day. And As You Know, Apple Strives For The Integrated Model So That The User Isn't Forced To Be The Systems Integrator.

If Today Were My Last Day, Would I Do What I'm Doing?...if The Answer Was 'no' Too Many Days In A Row, I'd Make A Change.

For You To Sleep Well At Night, The Aesthetic, The Quality, Has To Be Carried All The Way Through.

If You Are Working On Something Exciting That You Really Care About, You Don't Have To Be Pushed. The Vision Pulls You.

I Always Thought Of Myself As A Humanities Person As A Kid, But I Liked Electronics. Then I Read Something That One Of My Heroes, Edwin Land Of Polaroid, Said About The Importance Of People Who Could Stand At The Intersection Of Humanities And Sciences, And I Decided That's What I Wanted To Do.

Pixar Is The Most Technically Advanced Creative Company; Apple Is The Most Creatively Advanced Technical Company.

So When These People Sell Out, Even Though They Get Fabulously Rich, They're Gypping Themselves Out Of One Of The Potentially Most Rewarding Experiences Of Their Unfolding Lives. Without It, They May Never Know Their Values Or How To Keep Their Newfound Wealth In Perspective.

If You Tell People They Can't Burn Cds Of Their Music, As Almost Every Current Legal Music Service Has Done, Or They Can Only Burn One Cd With A Track Or Pay Per Track Per Burn Extra, Nobody Is Going To Go For It.

My Model For Business Is The Beatles. They Were Four Guys Who Kept Each Other Kind Of Negative Tendencies In Check. They Balanced Each Other And The Total Was Greater Than The Sum Of The Parts. That's How I See Business: Great Things In Business Are Never Done By One Person, They're Done By A Team Of People.

I Think We Need Editorial Oversight Now More Than Ever. Anything We Can Do To Help Newspapers Find New Ways Of Expression That Will Help Them Get Paid, I Am All For.

Do Your Best At Every Job. Don't Sleep! Success Generates More Success So Be Hungry For It. Hire Good People With A Passion For Excellence.

Without Passion, Any Rational Person Would Give Up!

If You Live Each Day As It Was Your Last, Someday You'll Most Certainly Be Right

Stanford University

Music Companies Are Not Technology Companies Any More Than Technology Companies Are Music Companies. They're Really Different From Each Other.

Taking Lsd Was A Profound Experience, One Of The Most Important Things In My Life.

It Isn't The Consumers' Job To Know What They Want.

We Had The Hardware Expertise, The Industrial Design Expertise And The Software Expertise, Including Itunes. One Of The Biggest Insights We Have Was That We Decided Not To Try To Manage Your Music Library On The Ipod, But To Manage It In Itunes. Other Companies Tried To Do Everything On The Device Itself And Made It So Complicated That It Was Useless.

People Need To Have The Incentive That If They Invest And Succeed, They Can Make A Fair Profit. Otherwise They'll Stop Investing.

Innovation Means Saying 'no' To A Thousand Things.

Breakthrough Is How To Distinguish A Leader And Who Followed

Don't Settle, As With All Matters Of The Heart You'll Know When You Find It

Don't Just Live A Life; Build One.

Each Year Has Been So Robust With Problems And Successes And Learning Experiences And Human Experienes That A Year Is A Lifetime At Apple. So This Has Been Ten Lifetimes.

My Job Is To Make The Whole Executive Team Good Enough To Be Successors, So That's What I Try To Do.

So Let's Not Use A Stylus. We're Going To Use The Best Pointing Device In The World. We're Going To Use A Pointing Device That We're All Born With - Born With Ten Of Them. We're Going To Use Our Fingers. We're Going To Touch This With Our Fingers. And We Have Invented A New Technology Called Multi-touch, Which Is Phenomenal. It Works Like Magic.

Your Work Is Going To Fill A Large Part Of Your Life, And The Only Way To Be Truly Satisfied Is To Do What You Believe Is Great Work. And The Only Way To Do Great Work Is To Love What You Do. If You Haven't Found It Yet, Keep Looking. Don't Settle. As With All Matters Of The Heart, You'll Know When You Find It.

When We Hire Someone, Even If They Are Going To Be In Marketing, I Will Have Them Talk To The Design Folks And The Engineers.

Everybody In This Country Should Learn How To Program A Computer, Because It Teaches You How To Think.

I'm As Proud Of Many Of The Things We Haven't Done As The Things We Have Done. Innovation Is Saying No To A Thousand Things.

Death Is Very Likely The Single Best Invention Of Life.

Nobody Has Tried To Swallow Us Since I've Been Here. I Think They Are Afraid How We Would Taste.

To Go Forward You Have To Leave Something Behind

You Need To Have A Collaborative Hiring Process.

Do You Create Anything, Or Just Criticize Others Work And Belittle Their Motivations?

Our Goal Is To Make The Best Devices In The World, Not To Be The Biggest.

We Try To Use The Talents We Do Have To Express Our Deep Feelings, To Show Our Appreciation Of All The Contributions That Came Before Us, And To Add Something To That Flow. That's What's Driven Me.

The Most Important Thing Is A Person. A Person Who Incites Your Curiosity And Feeds Your Curiosity; And Machines Cannot Do That In The Same Way That People Can.

I Feel Like Somebody Just Punched Me In The Stomach And Knocked All My Wind Out. I'm Only 30 Years Old And I Want To Have A Chance To Continue Creating Things. I Know I've Got At Least One More Great Computer In Me. And Apple Is Not Going To Give Me A Chance To Do That.

Creating Things

It Places Value On Experience Versus Intellectual Understanding. I Saw A Lot Of People Contemplating Things But It Didn't Seem To Lead To Too Many Places. I Got Very Interested In People Who Had Discovered Something More Significant Than An Intellectual, Abstract Understanding.

The Day I Was Born Songs Were On Records, Phones Were Tied Down, Computers Needed Rooms And The Web Was Fiction. Change The World. You Can.

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