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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.

-Steve Jobs

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I Was Actually A

Steve Jobs

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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.

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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.

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.

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When You First Start Off Trying To Solve A Problem, The First Solutions You Come Up With Are Very Complex, And Most People Stop There. But If You Keep Going, And Live With The Problem And Peel More Layers Of The Onion Off, You Can Often Times Arrive At Some Very Elegant And Simple Solutions.

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We've Had One Of These Before, When The Dot-com Bubble Burst. What I Told Our Company Was That We Were Just Going To Invest Our Way Through The Downturn, That We Weren't Going To Lay Off People, That We'd Taken A Tremendous Amount Of Effort To Get Them Into Apple In The First Place; The Last Thing We Were Going To Do Is Lay Them Off.

Every Once In A While A Revolutionary Product Comes Along That Changes Everything. It's Very Fortunate If You Can Work On Just One Of These In Your Career. ... Apple's Been Very Fortunate In That It's Introduced A Few Of These.

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Compelling Reason

I'm Convinced That About Half Of What Separates Successful Entrepreneurs From The Non-successful Ones Is Pure Perseverance.

It's Rare That You See An Artist In His 30s Or 40s Able To Really Contribute Something Amazing.

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.

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Taking Lsd Was A Profound Experience, One Of The Most Important Things In My Life. Lsd Shows You That There’s Another Side To The Coin, And You Can’t Remember It When It Wears Off, But You Know It. It Reinforced My Sense Of What Was Important—creating Great Things Instead Of Making Money, Putting Things Back Into The Stream Of History And Of Human Consciousness As Much As I Could.

The Biggest Effect Of The Personal Computer Revolution Has Been To Allow Millions And Millions Of People To Experience Computers Themselves Decades Before They Ever Would Have In The Old Paradigm.

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.

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Being The Richest Man In The Cemetery Doesn't Matter To Me ... Going To Bed At Night Saying We've Done Something Wonderful... That's What Matters To Me.

You Have To Have A Lot Of Passion For What You Do... Because If You Don't, Any Rational Person Would Give Up.

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.

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

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.

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

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 I Hire Somebody Really Senior, Competence Is The Ante. They Have To Be Really Smart. But The Real Issue For Me Is, Are They Going To Fall In Love With Apple? Because If They Fall In Love With Apple, Everything Else Will Take Care Of Itself. They'll Want To Do What's Best For Apple, Not What's Best For Them, What's Best For Steve, Or Anybody Else.

Falling In Love

You Know We're Constantly Taking. We Don't Make Most Of The Food We Eat, We Don't Grow It, Anyway. We Wear Clothes Other People Make, We Speak A Language Other People Developed, We Use A Mathematics Other People Evolved And Spent Their Lives Building. I Mean We're Constantly Taking Things. It's A Wonderful Ecstatic Feeling To Create Something And Put It Into The Pool Of Human Experience And Knowledge.

Design Is The Fundamental Soul Of A Human-made Creation That Ends Up Expressing Itself In Successive Outer Layers Of The Product Or Service.

First Was The Mouse. The Second Was The Click Wheel. And Now, We're Going To Bring Multi-touch To The Market. And Each Of These Revolutionary Interfaces Has Made Possible A Revolutionary Product - The Mac, The Ipod And Now The Iphone.

One Way To Drive Fear Out Of A Relationship Is To Realize That Your Partner's Values Are The Same As Yours, That What You Care About Is Exactly What They Care About. In My Opinion, That Drives Fear Out And Makes For A Great Partnership, Whether It's A Corporate Partnership Or A Marriage.

I'm Sorry, It's True. Having Children Really Changes Your View On These Things. We're Born, We Live For A Brief Instant, And We Die. It's Been Happening For A Long Time. Technology Is Not Changing It Much - If At All.

The Axis Today Is Not Liberal And Conservative, The Axis Is Constructive-destructive.

I Was Lucky To Get Into Computers When It Was A Very Young And Idealistic Industry. There Weren't Many Degrees Offered In Computer Science, So People In Computers Were Brilliant People From Mathematics, Physics, Music, Zoology, Whatever. They Loved It, And No One Was Really In It For The Money.

Not Only Was [edwin Land] One Of The Great Inventors Of Our Time But, More Important, He Saw The Intersection Of Art And Science And Business And Built An Organization To Reflect That.

Make It Like A Sunflower.

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I'm An Optimist In The Sense That I Believe Humans Are Noble And Honorable, And Some Of Them Are Really Smart. I Have A Very Optimistic View Of Individuals.

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.

If You Want To Hire Great People And Have Them Stay, You Have To Be Run By Ideas, Not Hierarchy. The Best Ideas Have To Win.

Focus Does Not Mean Saying Yes, It Means Saying No.

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.

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.

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.

Great Things In Business Are Never Done By One Person, They're Done By A Team Of People.

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.

The Most Precious Resource We Have Is Time.

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.

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.'

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.

Each Dream You Leave Behind Is A Part Of Your Future That Will No Longer Exist.

The Over-all Point Is That New Technology Will Not Necessarily Replace Old Technology, But It Will Date It. By Definition. Eventually, It Will Replace It. But It's Like People Who Had Black-and-white Tvs When Color Came Out. They Eventually Decided Whether Or Not The New Technology Was Worth The Investment.

Black And White

Great Engineers Are A Huge Multiplier.

Let Them Know Precisely What You Are Going To Do With Their Data

Death Is The Destination We All Share, No One Has Ever Escaped It. And That Is As It Should Be Because Death Is Very Likely The Single Best Invention Of Life.

Stanford University

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.

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.

My Opinion Is That The Only Two Computer Companies That Are Software-driven Are Apple And Next, And I Wonder About Apple.

That's What Walt Disney Did, And Hewlett And Packard, And The People Who Built Intel. They Created A Company To Last, Not Just To Make Money. That's What I Want Apple To Be.

It Wasn't That Microsoft Was So Brilliant Or Clever In Copying The Mac, It's That The Mac Was A Sitting Duck For 10 Years. That's Apple's Problem: Their Differentiation Evaporated.

What This Means Is That People Are Seeing A Stable Business, Which Is Good, And A Business That Is In Control, Which Is Also Good.

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

The Roots Of Apple Were To Build Computers For People, Not For Corporations. The World Doesn't Need Another Dell Or Compaq.

The Journey Is The Reward

I Thought Deeply About This. I Ended Up Concluding That The Worst Thing That Could Possibly Happen As We Get Big And As We Get A Little More Influence In The World Is If We Change Our Core Values And Start Letting It Slide, I Can't Do That. I'd Rather Quit.

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.

We're Here To Make A Dent In The Universe. Otherwise, Why Even Be Here? We're Creating A Completely New Consciousness, Like An Artist Or A Poet. That’s How You Have To Think Of This. We're Rewriting The History Of Human Thought With What We're Doing.

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.

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

Innovation Distinguishes Between A Leader And A Follower.

It [what You Choose To Do] Has Got To Be Something That You're Passionate About Because Otherwise You Won't Have The Perseverance To See It Through.

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!

Let's Make A Dent In The Universe

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Muqtada Al Sadr

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