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If You Want To Live Your Life In A Creative Way, As An Artist, You Have To Not Look Back Too Much. You Have To Be Willing To Take Whatever You've Done And Whoever You Were And Throw Them Away.

-Steve Jobs

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If You Want To

Steve Jobs

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If You Want To Live Your Life In A Creative Way, As An Artist, You Have To Not Look Back Too Much. You Have To Be Willing To Take Whatever You've Done And Whoever You Were And Throw Them Away.

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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.

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.

You Know, My Main Reaction To This Money Thing Is That It's Humorous, All The Attention To It, Because It's Hardly The Most Insightful Or Valuable Thing That's Happened To Me.

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

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I'm Not Worried About The Country's Long-term Future. This Country Is Insanely Great. What I'm Worried About Is That We Don't Talk Enough About Solutions.

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.

The Customer Is The Final Inspector.

Service Culture

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's Technology Married With Liberal Arts, Married With The Humanities, That Yields Us The Results That Make Our Heart Sing.

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.

What We're Doing Here Will Send A Giant Ripple Through The Universe.

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

The Desktop Computer Industry Is Dead. Innovation Has Virtually Ceased. Microsoft Dominates With Very Little Innovation. That's Over. Apple Lost. The Desktop Market Has Entered The Dark Ages, And It's Going To Be In The Dark Ages For The Next 10 Years, Or Certainly For The Rest Of This Decade.

I've Always Wanted To Own And Control The Primary Technology In Everything We Do.

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.

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

The System Is That There Is No System. That Doesn't Mean We Don't Have Process. Apple Is A Very Disciplined Company, And We Have Great Processes. But That's Not What It's About. Process Makes You More Efficient.

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

Death Is Very Likely The Single Best Invention Of Life.

Computers Themselves, And Software Yet To Be Developed, Will Revolutionize The Way We Learn.

Our Approach Is To Think Of Companies Not As Businesses But As Collections Of People. We [apple]want To Qualitatively Change The Way People Work. We Don't Just Want To Help Them Do Word Processing Faster Or Add Numbers Faster. We Want To Change The Way They Can Communicate With One Another. We're Seeing Less Paper Flying Around And More Quality Of Communication.

I Know You Have 1000 Great Ideas For Things That Itunes Could Do. And We Have 1000 More. But Innovation Is Not About Saying "yes" To Everything. It's About Saying "no" To All But The Most Crucial Features.

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 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.

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

The System Is That There Is No System. That Doesn't Mean We Don't Have Process. Apple Is A Very Disciplined Company, And We Have Great Processes. But That's Not What It's About. Process Makes You More Efficient ... 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. It's Ad Hoc Meetings Of Six People Called By Someone Who Thinks He Has Figured Out The Coolest New Thing Ever And Who Wants To Know What Other People Think Of His Idea.

I Think The Artistry Is In Having An Insight Into What One Sees Around Them. Generally Putting Things Together In A Way No One Else Has Before And Finding A Way To Express That To Other People Who Don't Have That Insight.

You'll See More And More Perfection Of That - Computer As Servant. But The Next Thing Is Going To Be Computer As A Guide Or Agent.

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.

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

So [polaroid's Dr. Edwin] Land, At 75, Went Off To Spend The Remainder Of His Life Doing Pure Science, Trying To Crack The Code Of Color Vision. The Man Is A National Treasure. I Don't Understand Why People Like That Can't Be Held Up As Models: This Is The Most Incredible Thing To Be - Not An Astronaut, Not A Football Player - But This.

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

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.

All We Are Is Our Ideas, Or People. That's What Keeps Us Going To Work In The Morning, To Hang Around These Great Bright People. I've Always Thought That Recruiting Is The Heart And Soul Of What We Do.

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.

If You Don't Have A Passion, You'll Give Up.

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.

There Are Sneakers That Cost More Than An Ipod.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Never Settle For Average.

If You Want To Live Your Life In A Creative Way, As An Artist, You Have To Not Look Back Too Much. You Have To Be Willing To Take Whatever You've Done And Whoever You Were And Throw Them Away.

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

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.

Our Job Is To Read Things That Are Not Yet On The Page.

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.

We Limit How Much Technology Our Kids Use At Home.

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.

The Broader One's Understanding Of The Human Experience, The Better Design We Will Have.

I Used To Sleep On The Floor In Friends' Rooms, Returning Coke Bottles For Food, Money, And Getting Weekly Free Meals At A Local Temple

Fear Of Failure Falls Away In The Face Of Death.

Fear Of Failure

We've Gone Through The Operating System And Looked At Everything And Asked How Can We Simplify This And Make It More Powerful At The Same Time.

Operating Systems

For Most Of My Life, I’ve Felt That There Must Be More To Our Existence Than Meets The Eye. This Is Who I Am, And You Can’t Expect Me To Be Someone I’m Not.

It's Very Simple: The More Successful You Are, The More You'll Earn. But If You're Not Successful, You Will Not Earn A Dime.

As Regis Mckenna Once Said, The Best Marketing Is Education

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

We're Not A Media Company. We Don't Own Media. We Don't Own Music. We Don't Own Films Or Television. We're Not A Media Company. We're Just Apple.

It Takes These Very Simple-minded Instructions - 'go Fetch A Number, Add It To This Number, Put The Result There, Perceive If It's Greater Than This Other Number' - But Executes Them At A Rate Of, Let's Say, 1,000,000 Per Second. At 1,000,000 Per Second, The Results Appear To Be Magic.

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.

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

Innovation Is Saying 'no' To 1,000 Things.

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.

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

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

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.

The Only Way To Be Truly Satisfied Is To Do What You Believe Is Great Work

Loving What You Do

If You View Computer Designers As Artists, They're Really Into More Of An Art Form That Can Be Mass-produced, Like Records, Or Like Prints, Than They Are Into Fine Arts. They Want Something Where They Can Express Themselves To A Large Number Of People Through Their Medium, And Their Medium Is Technology And Manufacturing.

What We Want To Do Is Make A Leapfrog Product That Is Way Smarter Than Any Mobile Device Has Ever Been, And Super-easy To Use. This Is What Iphone Is. Ok? So, We're Going To Reinvent The Phone.

The Journey Is The Reward

You Should Never Go To A Meeting Or Make A Telephone Call Without A Clear Idea Of What You Are Trying To Achieve.

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.

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.

Pursue Your Dreams And See The Opportunities In Life's Setbacks.

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.

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.

I Mean, Some People Say, 'oh, God, If [jobs] Got Run Over By A Bus, Apple Would Be In Trouble.' And, You Know, I Think It Wouldn't Be A Party, But There Are Really Capable People At Apple. My Job Is To Make The Whole Executive Team Good Enough To Be Successors, So That's What I Try To Do.

Apple's Market Share Is Bigger Than Bmw's Or Mercedes's Or Porsche's In The Automotive Market. What's Wrong With Being Bmw Or Mercedes?

Without Passion, Any Rational Person Would Give Up!

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.

Most People Make The Mistake Of Thinking Design Is What It Looks Like. People Think It's This Veneer - That The Designers Are Handed This Box And Told, 'make It Look Good!' That's Not What We Think Design Is. It's Not Just What It Looks Like And Feels Like. Design Is How It Works.

Imac Is Next Year's Computer For $1,299, Not Last Year's Computer For $999.

Let's Make A Dent In The Universe

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.

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.

Do You Want To Spend The Rest Of Your Life Selling Sugared Water Or Do You Want A Chance To Change The World?

Mac Os X Tiger Will Come Out Long Before Longhorn.

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

Recruiting Is Hard. It's Just Finding The Needles In The Haystack. You Can't Know Enough In A One-hour Interview. So, In The End, It's Ultimately Based On Your Gut. How Do I Feel About This Person? What Are They Like When They're Challenged? I Ask Everybody That: 'why Are You Here?' The Answers Themselves Are Not What You're Looking For. It's The Meta-data.

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 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.

The People Who Are Doing The Work Are The Moving Force Behind The Macintosh. My Job Is To Create A Space For Them, To Clear Out The Rest Of The Organization And Keep It At Bay.

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.

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.

Electronics Was Something I Could Always Fall Back On When I Needed Food On The Table.

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.

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.

Do Not Try To Do Everything. Do One Thing Well.

Focus And Simplicity...once You Get There, You Can Move Mountains.

Focusing Is All About Saying No

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

How Can You Get Fired From The Company You Started?

The Most Precious Resource We Have Is Time.

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.

Design Is The Fundamental Soul Of A Man-made Creation That Ends Up Expressing Itself In Successive Outer Layers Of The Product Or Service. The Imac Is Not Just The Color Or Translucence Or The Shape Of The Shell. The Essence Of The Imac Is To Be The Finest Possible Consumer Computer In Which Each Element Plays Together.

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.

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

Follow Your Heart, But Check It With Your Head.

Follow Your Heart

This Is A Very Noisy World, So We Have To Be Very Clear What We Want Them To Know About Us

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.

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 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.

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.

My Philosophy Is That Everything Starts With A Great Product.

And We've All Chosen To Do This With Our Lives. So It Better Be Damn Good. It Better Be Worth It.

Being The Richest Man In The Cemetery Doesn't Matter To Me.

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!

Design Is The Fundamental Soul Of A Man-made Creation

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.

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

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

Don't Be Afraid, You Can Do It.

What Is Apple, After All? Apple Is About People Who Think 'outside The Box,' People Who Want To Use Computers To Help Them Change The World, To Help Them Create Things That Make A Difference, And Not Just To Get A Job Done.

I Want To Put A Ding In The Universe.

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.

School Was Pretty Hard For Me At The Beginning.

I Have Enough To Last For The Rest Of My Life.

Your Time Is Limited, So Don't Waste It Living Someone Else's Life. Don't Be Trapped By Dogma - Which Is Living With The Results Of Other People's Thinking. Don't Let The Noise Of Others' Opinions Drown Out Your Own Inner Voice. And Most Important, Have The Courage To Follow Your Heart And Intuition.

A Small Team Of A+ Players Can Run Circles Around A Giant Team Of B And C Players.

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

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.

Details Matter, It's Worth Waiting To Get It Right.

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

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

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.

We Did Not Enter The Search Business. Google Entered The Phone Business. Make No Mistake They Want To Kill The Iphone. We Won't Let Them.

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

What A Computer Is To Me Is It's The Most Remarkable Tool That We Have Ever Come Up With. It's The Equivalent Of A Bicycle For Our Minds.

My Job Is Not To Be Easy On People. My Job Is To Take These Great People We Have And To Push Them And Make Them Even Better.

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

The Juice Goes Out Of Christianity When It Becomes Too Based On Faith Rather Than On Living Like Jesus Or Seeing The World As Jesus Saw It.

I'm Very Excited About Having The Internet In My Den.

Every Once In A While, A Revolutionary Product Comes Along That Changes Everything.

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.

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.

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. And, Like Any Great Relationship, It Just Gets Better And Better As The Years Roll On.

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

Stealing Music Is Not Right, And I Can Understand People Being Very Upset About Their Intellectual Property Being Stolen.

People Don't Know What They Want Until You Show It To Them. That's Why I Never Rely On Marketing Research. Our Task Is To Read Things That Are Not Yet On The Page.

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

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.

Lsd...reinforc Ed My Sense Of What Was Important-creat Ing Great Things Instead Of Making Money, Putting Things Back Into The Stream Of History And Of Human Consciousness As Much As I Could.

Again, You Can't Connect The Dots Looking Forward; You Can Only Connect Them Looking Backwards. So You Have To Trust That The Dots Will Somehow Connect In Your Future. 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.

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

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

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

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

Probably Death Is The Best Invention Of Life.

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.

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?

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

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.

The Macintosh Was Supposed To Be The Computer For People That Just Wanted To Use A Computer Without Having To Learn How To Use One.

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

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

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

Decisions You Make

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.

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

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

Working Together

When You’re In A Startup, The First Ten People Will Determine Whether The Company Succeeds Or Not.

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.

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

Of Course It Was Impossible To Connect The Dots Looking Forward When I Was In College. But It Was Very, Very Clear Looking Backwards 10 Years Later.

I'll Always Stay Connected With Apple. I Hope That Throughout My Life I'll Sort Of Have The Thread Of My Life And The Thread Of Apple Weave In And Out Of Each Other, Like A Tapestry. There May Be A Few Years When I'm Not There, But I'll Always Come Back.

You've Got To Find What You Love. And That Is As True For Your Work As It Is For Your Lovers.

Stanford University

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.

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

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.

We Live In An Information Economy. The Problem Is That Information's Usually Impossible To Get, At Least In The Right Place, At The Right Time.

I Am Saddened, Not By Microsoft's Success — I Have No Problem With Their Success. They've Earned Their Success, For The Most Part. I Have A Problem With The Fact That They Just Make Really Third-rate Products.

Strategy Is Figuring Out What Not To Do.

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

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.

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.

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.

Life Is About Creating And Living Experiences That Are Worth Sharing.

We Had Nothing To Lose And Everything To Gain.

Nothing To Lose

I Think If You Do Something And It Turns Out Pretty Good, Then You Should Go Do Something Else Wonderful, Not Dwell On It For Too Long. Just Figure Out What's Next.

Guess Who Surprised Themselves And Changed Their Minds.

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

It's Not About Pop Culture, And It's Not About Fooling People, And It's Not About Convincing People That They Want Something They Don't. We Figure Out What We Want. And I Think We're Pretty Good At Having The Right Discipline To Think Through Whether A Lot Of Other People Are Going To Want It, Too. That's What We Get Paid To Do.

Shake Off This Erroneous Notion That Life Is There And You're Just Gonna Live In It, Versus Embrace It, Change It, Improve It, Make Your Mark Upon It.

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.

[my Teacher] Basically Bribed Me Back Into Learning With Candy And Money And What Was Really Remarkable Was Before Very Long I Had Such A Respect For Her That It Sort Of Re-ignited My Desire To Learn.

No One Wants To Die. Even People Who Want To Go To Heaven Don't Want To Die To Get There.

Stanford University

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