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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.

-Steve Jobs

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I'm Convinced That About

Steve Jobs

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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.

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Bill Gates'd Be A Broader Guy If He Had Dropped Acid Once Or Gone Off To An Ashram When He Was Younger.

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.

I'd Rather Be A Pirate Than Join The Navy

A Lot Of Time, People Don't Do Great Things Becoz' Great Things Really Aren't Expected Of Them.

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A-plus Players Like To Work Together And They Don't Like It If You Tolerate B Work.

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When We Started Off We Didn't Know How To Spell Software.

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Focus Is About Saying, No. And The Result Of That Focus Is Going To Be Some Really Great Products Where The Total Is Much Greater Than The Sum Of The Parts.

My Mother Taught Me To Read Before I Went To School, So I Was Pretty Bored In School, And I Turned Into A Little Terror. You Should Have Seen Us In Third Grade. We Basically Destroyed Our Teacher. We Would Let Snakes Loose In The Classroom And Explode Bombs.

Innovation Means Saying 'no' To A Thousand Things.

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.

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.

The Ipod Is Not A New Category. Music Is Not New. It's Not A Speculative Market. It's A Very, Very Large Market. It's Been Around For Thousands Of Years And Will Be Around As Long As Humans Exist.

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

Don’t Let The Noise Of Others’ Opinions Drown Out Your Own Inner Voice.

We're Gambling On Our Vision, And We Would Rather Do That Than Make "me Too" Products. Let Some Other Companies Do That. For Us, It's Always The Next Dream.

When The Sales Guys Run The Company, The Product Guys Do Not Matter So Much, And A Lot Of Them Just Turn Off.

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

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.

Be Honest With Yourself And With People Always Do Everything On Time. Never Give Up, Go To Your Goals, Even If All The Bad. In This Life, All Really, You Only Need To Do. The More I Talk To People, The More I Am Convinced That In General They Have One Goal - To Become The Richest Dead In The Cemetery.

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?

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What Had Been The Focus Of My Entire Adult Life Was Gone, And It Was Devastating. I Didn't Really Know What To Do For A Few Months. I Felt That I Had Let The Previous Generation Of Entrepreneurs Down. I Was A Very Public Failure.

I'm Going To Destroy Android, Because It's A Stolen Product. I'm Willing To Go Thermonuclear War On This.

I Just Had A Romance That I Really Care About, A Lot-i Mean, A Lot-go Up In Smoke. Because Of The Stress, And The Sort Of Other Woman That Macintosh Is.

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.

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I Don't Think Of My Life As A Career. I Do Stuff. I Respond To Stuff. That's Not A Career - It's A Life!

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The Minute I Dropped Out I Could Stop Taking The Required Classes That Didn't Interest Me, And Begin Dropping In On The Ones That Looked Interesting.

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Strategy Is Figuring Out What Not To Do.

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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.

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I'd Say We [apple Inc.] Are The Most Creative Of The Technology Companies And Definitely The Most Artist-friendly. Almost Everyone In The Music Business Uses A Mac And Everyone Has An Ipod.

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

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‎experts Are Clueless.

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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.

I've Read Something That Bill Gates Said About Six Months Ago. He Said, ‘i Worked Really, Really Hard In My 20s.’ And I Know What He Means, Because I Worked Really, Really Hard In My 20s Too. Literally, You Know, 7 Days A Week, A Lot Of Hours Every Day. And It Actually Is A Wonderful Thing To Do, Because You Can Get A Lot Done. But You Can't Do It Forever, And You Don't Want To Do It Forever, And You Have To Come Up With Ways Of Figuring Out What The Most Important Things Are And Working With Other People Even More.

It Doesn’t Make Sense To Hire Smart People And Tell Them What To Do; We Hire Smart People So They Can Tell Us What To Do.

The Most Compelling Reason For Most People To Buy A Computer For The Home Will Be To Link It To A Nationwide Communications Network. We're Just In The Beginning Stages Of What Will Be A Truly Remarkable Breakthrough For Most People - As Remarkable As The Telephone.

Compelling Reason

I Make 50 Cents For Showing Up... And The Other 50 Cents Is Based On My Performance.

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.

Creativity Comes From Spontaneous Meetings, From Random Discussions.

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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.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

I Think Right Now It's A Battle For The Mindshare Of Developers And For The Mindshare Of Customers, And Right Now Iphone And Android Are Winning That Battle.

I Was Lucky - I Found What I Love To Do Early In Life.

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

We've Demonstrated A Strong Track Record Of Being Very Disciplined With The Use Of Our Cash. We Don't Let It Burn A Hole In Our Pocket, We Don't Allow It To Motivate Us To Do Stupid Acquisitions. And So I Think That We'd Like To Continue To Keep Our Powder Dry, Because We Do Feel That There Are One Or More Strategic Opportunities In The Future.

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.

Sometimes Life Hits You In The Head With A Brick. Don't Lose Faith.

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.

Ultimately, It Comes Down To Taste. It Comes Down To Trying To Expose Yourself To The Best Things That Humans Have Done And Then Try To Bring Those Things Into What You're Doing. Picasso Had A Saying: Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal. And We Have Always Been Shameless About Stealing Great Ideas, And I Think Part Of What Made The Macintosh Great Was That The People Working On It Were Musicians And Poets And Artists And Zoologists And Historians Who Also Happened To Be The Best Computer Scientists In The World.

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.

Combine Science And Humanities.

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

The Creative Industries Tend To Dismiss Technology As Just Something To Buy And Not Understand How Hard It Is And How Creative It Can Be As Well.

Because Believing That The Dots Will Connect Down The Road Will Give You The Confidence To Follow Your Heart Even When It Leads You Off The Well Worn Path.

Why Join The Navy If You Can Be A Pirate?

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.

You've Heard Of Plug-and-play. This Is Plug, Unplug And Play. It's So Simple To Use, It's Unbelievable.

In The First 30 Years Of Your Life, You Make Your Habits. For The Last 30 Years Of Your Life, Your Habits Make You.

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The Only Problem With Microsoft Is They Just Have No Taste. They Have Absolutely No Taste. And I Don't Mean That In A Small Way, I Mean That In A Big Way, In The Sense That They Don't Think Of Original Ideas, And They Don't Bring Much Culture Into Their Products.

We Do Not Say Anything About Future Products. We Work On Them In Secret, Then We Announce Them.

The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum And We Can Do Anything We Want.

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.

We Don't Get A Chance To Do That Many Things, And Every One Should Be Really Excellent. Because This Is Our Life. Life Is Brief, And Then You Die, You Know? So This Is What We've Chosen To Do With Our Life.

Don't Just Live A Life; Build One.

Pretty Much, Apple And Dell Are The Only Ones In This Industry Making Money. They Make It By Being Wal-mart. We Make It By Innovation.

You Can't Look At The Competition And Say You're Going To Do It Better. You Have To Look At The Competition And Say You're Going To Do It Differently.

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

The Difference Between The Best Worker On Computer Hardware And The Average May Be 2 To 1, If You're Lucky. With Automobiles, Maybe 2 To 1. But In Software, It's At Least 25 To 1. The Difference Between The Average Programmer And A Great One Is At Least That. The Secret Of My Success Is That We Have Gone To Exceptional Lengths To Hire The Best People In The World. And When You're In A Field Where The Dynamic Range Is 25 To 1, Boy, Does It Pay Off.

I'm Sure A Lot Of You Had This Experience When You're Changing. You're Growing As A Person And People Tend To Treat You Like You Were 18 Months Ago, And It's Really Frustrating Sometimes When You're Growing Up And You're More Capable. It's The Same Thing With A Company And The Press. The Press Is Going To Have A Lag Time. The Best Thing We Can Do About The Press Is Embrace Them And Do The Best Thing We Can To Educate Them About Our Strategy. But To Keep Our Eye On The Prize, That Is Turning Out Some Great Products. The Press And The Stock Prize Will Take Care Of Themselves.

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.

School Was Pretty Hard For Me At The Beginning.

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.

Unfortunately, People Are Not Rebelling Against Microsoft. They Don't Know Any Better.

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.

Whenever You Do Any One Thing Intensely Over A Period Of Time You Have To Give Up Other Lives You Could Be Living. You Have To Have A Real Single-minded Kind Of Tunnel Vision If You Want To Get Anything Significant Accomplished. Especially If The Desire Is Not To Be A Businessman, But To Be A Creative Person.

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.

Without Death There Would Be Very Little Progress.

Great Engineers Are A Huge Multiplier.

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.

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.

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

I Don't Need A Hard Disk In My Computer If I Can Get To The Server Faster... Carrying Around These Non-connected Computers Is Byzantine By Comparison.

We Don't Have A Good Language To Talk About This Kind Of Thing. In Most People's Vocabularies, Design Means Veneer... But To Me, Nothing Could Be Further From The Meaning Of Design. Design Is The Fundamental Soul Of A Man-made Creation.

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.

I'm One Of The Few People Who Understands How Producing Technology Requires Intuition And Creativity, And How Producing Something Artistic Takes Real Discipline.

I Don't Think I've Ever Worked So Hard On Something, But Working On Macintosh Was The Neatest Experience Of My Life. Almost Everyone Who Worked On It Will Say That. None Of Us Wanted To Release It At The End. It Was As Though We Knew That Once It Was Out Of Our Hands, It Wouldn't Be Ours Anymore.

It's Not A Faith In Technology. It's Faith In People.

I Have Always Said If There Ever Came A Day When I Could No Longer Meet My Duties And Expectations As Apple's Ceo, I Would Be The First To Let You Know. Unfortunately, That Day Has Come.

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.

Ask For Feedback From People With Diverse Backgrounds. Each One Will Tell You One Useful Thing. If You're At The Top Of The Chain, Sometimes People Won't Give You Honest Feedback Because They're Afraid. In This Case, Disguise Yourself, Or Get Feedback From Other Sources.

Honest Feedback

If You Ask Who Are The Customers Of Education, The Customers Of Education Are The Society At Large, The Employers Who Hire People, Things Like That. But Ultimately I Think The Customers Are The Parents. Not Even The Students But The Parents. The Problem That We Have In This Country Is That The Customers Went Away. The Customers Stopped Paying Attention To Their Schools, For The Most Part.

The Best Way To Create Value In The 21st Century Is To Connect Creativity With Technology

Deciding What Not To Do Is As Important As Deciding What To Do.

But Innovation Comes From People Meeting Up In The Hallways Or Calling Each Other At 10:30 At Night With A New Idea, Or Because They Realized Something That Shoots Holes In How We've Been Thinking About A Problem.

Click. Boom. Amazing!

It Wasn't All Romantic. I Didn't Have A Dorm Room, So I Slept On The Floor In Friends' Rooms, I Returned Coke Bottles For The 5¢ Deposits To Buy Food With, And I Would Walk The 7 Miles Across Town Every Sunday Night To Get One Good Meal A Week At The Hare Krishna Temple. I Loved It.

The Were Good Times, There Were Hard Times, But There Were Never Bad Times

There’s A Temptation In Our Networked Age To Think That Ideas Can Be Developed By Email And Ichat. That’s Crazy. Creativity Comes From Spontaneous Meetings, From Random Discussions. You Run Into Someone, You Ask What They’re Doing, You Say ‘wow,’ And Soon You’re Cooking Up All Sorts Of Ideas.

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.

Stanford University

When I Was Young, There Was An Amazing Publication Called The Whole Earth Catalog, Which Was One Of The Bibles Of My Generation. It Was Created By A Fellow Named Stewart Brand Not Far From Here In Menlo Park, And He Brought It To Life With His Poetic Touch. This Was In The Late 1960's, Before Personal Computers And Desktop Publishing, So It Was All Made With Typewriters, Scissors, And Polaroid Cameras. It Was Sort Of Like Google In Paperback Form, 35 Years Before Google Came Along: It Was Idealistic, And Overflowing With Neat Tools And Great Notions.

Stanford University

What's New Is This Amazingly Efficient Distribution System For Stolen Property Called The Internet - And No One's Gonna Shut Down The Internet.

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.

When You're Young, You Look At Television And Think, There's A Conspiracy. The Networks Have Conspired To Dumb Us Down. But When You Get A Little Older, You Realize That's Not True. The Networks Are In Business To Give People Exactly What They Want.

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

The Cure For Apple Is Not Cost-cutting. The Cure For Apple Is To Innovate Its Way Out Of Its Current Predicament.

Death Is Very Likely The Single Best Invention Of Life. It Is Life's Change Agent. It Clears Out The Old To Make Way For The New.

I'd Like The People Teaching My Kids To Be Good Enough That They Could Get A Job At The Company I Work For, Making A Hundred Thousand Dollars A Year. Why Should They Work At A School For Thirty-five To Forty Thousand Dollars If They Could Get A Job Here At A Hundred Thousand Dollars A Year?

Make It Like A Sunflower.

We Had Nothing To Lose And Everything To Gain.

Nothing To Lose

A Lot Of People In Our Industry Haven't Had Very Diverse Experiences. So They Don't Have Enough Dots To Connect, And They End Up With Very Linear Solutions Without A Broad Perspective On The Problem. The Broader One's Understanding Of The Human Experience, The Better Design We Will Have.

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.

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.

I Hate It When People Call Themselves 'entrepreneurs' When What They're Really Trying To Do Is Launch A Startup And Then Sell Of Go Public, So They Can Cash In And Move On. They're Unwilling To Do The Work It Takes To Build A Real Company, Which Is The Hardest Work In Business.

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.

There's No Other Company That Could Make A Macbook Air And The Reason Is That Not Only Do We Control The Hardware, But We Control The Operating System. And It Is The Intimate Interaction Between The Operating System And The Hardware That Allows Us To Do That. There Is No Intimate Interaction Between Windows And A Dell Notebook.

I Hate The Way People Use Slide Presentations Instead Of Thinking. People Would Confront A Problem By Creating A Presentation. I Wanted Them To Engage, To Hash Things Out At The Table, Rather Than Show A Bunch Of Slides. People Who Know What They're Talking About Don't Need Powerpoint.

You Know, You Keep On Innovating, You Keep On Making Better Stuff. And If You Always Want The Latest And Greatest, Then You Have To Buy A New Ipod At Least Once A Year.

The Hardest Thing When You Think About Focusing. You Think Focusing Is About Saying "yes." No. Focusing Is About Saying "no." And When You Say "no," You Piss Off People.

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Michelle Rodriguez

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