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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.

-Steve Jobs

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My Passion Has Been

Steve Jobs

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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.

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Find People Who Are Competent And Really Bright, But More Importantly, People Who Care Exactly About The Same Things You Care About.

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.

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

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.

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

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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.

Intuition Is A Very Powerful Thing, More Powerful Than Intellect.

Abstract Thinking

I Wish Developing Great Products Was As Easy As Writing A Check. If That Was The Case, Microsoft Would Have Great Products.

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.

There Will Always Be Music On The Internet That People Can Steal. What's New Is Not Theft. What's New Is A Distribution Channel For Stolen Property Called The Internet. So There Will Always Be Illegal Music On The Internet.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Quality Is More Important Than Quantity. One Home Run Is Much Better Than Two Doubles.

You're Already Naked. There Is No Reason Not To Follow Your Heart.

You‘ve Got To Start With The Customer Experience And Work Back Toward The Technology - Not The Other Way Around.

Simplicity Is The Ultimate Sophistication. It Takes A Lot Of Hard Work To Make Something Simple, To Truly Understand The Underlying Challenges And Come Up With Elegant Solutions. [...] It's Not Just Minimalism Or The Absence Of Clutter. It Involves Digging Through The Depth Of Complexity. To Be Truly Simple, You Have To Go Really Deep. [...] You Have To Deeply Understand The Essence Of A Product In Order To Be Able To Get Rid Of The Parts That Are Not Essential.

I Think Death Is The Most Wonderful Invention Of Life. It Purges The System Of These Old Models That Are Obsolete.

Who Wants A Stylus. You Have To Get Em And Put Em Away, And You Lose Em. Yuck. Nobody Wants A Stylus.

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.

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.

Making An Enduring Company Was Both Harder And More Important Than Making A Great Product.

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.

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

Love What You Do...don't Settle

When Companies Get Bigger They Try To Replicate Their Success. But They Assume Their Magic Came From Process. They Try To Use Processes To Substitute Content.

School Was Pretty Hard For Me At The Beginning.

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

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

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.

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.

Your Customers Dream Of A Happier And Better Life. Don't Move Products. Instead, Enrich Lives.

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.

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.

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

It Is Hard To Think That A $2 Billion Company With 4,300-plus People Couldn't Compete With Six People In Blue Jeans.

The Most Precious Resource We Have Is Time.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Design Is The Fundamental Soul Of A Man-made Creation

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.

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?

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.

We Just Wanted To Build The Best Thing We Could Build

Everyone Here Has The Sense That Right Now Is One Of Those Moments When We Are Influencing The Future.

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

I Got Very Interested In People Who Had Discovered Something More Significant Than ... Intellectual, Abstract Understanding.

I Would Trade All Of My Technology For An Afternoon With Socrates.

If You Keep Your Eye On The Profit, You’re Going To Skimp On The Product. But If You Focus On Making Really Great Products, Then The Profits Will Follow.

The Seven-inch Tablets Are Tweeners: Too Big To Compete With A Smartphone, And Too Small To Compete With An Ipad.

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.

The World Doesn't Need Another Dell Or Compaq.

A Brand Is Simply Trust.

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.'

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

I Think This Is The Start Of Something Really Big. Sometimes That First Step Is The Hardest One, And We've Just Taken It.

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.

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

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.

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.

I Don't View Wealth As Something That Validates My Intelligence.

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.

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.

There Are Downsides To Everything; There Are Unintended Consequences To Everything.

Unintended Consequences

The Web Is Just Going To Be One More Of Those Major Change Factors That Businesses Face Every Decade.

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

A Lot Of People Think Big Business In America Is A Bad Thing. I Think It's A Really Good Thing. Most People In Business Are Ethical, Hard-working, Good People. And It's A Meritocracy.

Woz Is Living His Own Life Now. He Hasn't Been Around Apple For About Five Years. But What He Did Will Go Down In History.

It Took Us Three Years To Build The Next Computer. If We'd Given Customers What They Said They Wanted, We'd Have Built A Computer They'd Have Been Happy With A Year After We Spoke To Them - Not Something They'd Want Now.

We Believe People With Passion Can Change The World For The Better." -steve Jobs

It's Not About Charisma And Personality, It's About Results And Products And Those Very Bedrock Things That Are Why People At Apple And Outside Of Apple Are Getting More Excited About The Company And What Apple Stands For And What Its Potential Is To Contribute To The Industry.

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

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.

Recruiting Is Hard. It's Just Finding The Needles In The Haystack. You Can't Know Enough In A One-hour Interview.

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?

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

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

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.

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 Greatest Artists Like Dylan, Picasso And Newton Risked Failure. And If We Want To Be Great, We've Got To Risk It, Too.

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.

Creativity Is Just Connecting Things.

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.

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

The Manual For Wordstar, The Most Popular Word-processing Program, Is 400 Pages Thick. To Write A Novel, You Have To Read A Novel - One That Reads Like A Mystery To Most People. They're Not Going To Learn Slash Q-z Any More Than They're Going To Learn Morse Code. That Is What Macintosh Is All About.

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

Innovation Distinguishes Between A Leader And A Follower.

It's Really Hard To Design Products By Focus Groups. A Lot Of Times, People Don't Know What They Want Until You Show It To Them.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

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.

You Cannot Mandate Productivity, You Must Provide The Tools To Let People Become Their Best.

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.

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.

There Are Sneakers That Cost More Than An Ipod.

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.

Customers Always Want Something New

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

It's Rare That You See An Artist In His 30s Or 40s Able To Really Contribute Something Amazing. Of Course, There Are Some People Who Are Innately Curious, Forever Little Kids In Their Awe Of Life, But They're Rare.

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.

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

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.

One Of My Beliefs Very Strongly Is That Any Democracy Depends On A Free, Healthy Press.

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.

You Need To Have A Collaborative Hiring Process.

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

Guess Who Surprised Themselves And Changed Their Minds.

It's Not The Tools That You Have Faith In - Tools Are Just Tools. They Work, Or They Don't Work. It's People You Have Faith In Or Not. Yeah, Sure, I'm Still Optimistic I Mean, I Get Pessimistic Sometimes But Not For Long.

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.

You Know, Dr. Edwin Land Was A Troublemaker. He Dropped Out Of Harvard And Founded Polaroid. Not Only Was He 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. Polaroid Did That For Some Years, But Eventually Dr. Land, One Of Those Brilliant Troublemakers, Was Asked To Leave His Own Company - Which Is One Of The Dumbest Things I've Ever Heard Of.

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

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.

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

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.

If I Had Never Dropped In On That Single Course In College, The Mac Would Have Never Had Multiple Typefaces Or Proportionally Spaced Fonts. And Since Windows Just Copied The Mac, It's Likely That No Personal Computer Would Have Them.

Stanford University

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.

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.

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.

I Think Pixar Has The Opportunity To Be The Next Disney - Not Replace Disney - But Be The Next Disney.

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.

You've Got To Start With The Customer Experience And Work Backwards To The Technology. You Can't Start With The Technology And Try To Figure Out Where You're Going To Sell It.

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.

Listen To Me. We're Here To Make A Dent In The Universe. Otherwise Why Even Be Here?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Design Isn't Just How It Looks. It's How It Works.

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

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

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

Stanford University

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.

We Don't Settle For Anything Less Than Excellence.

I Hate The Way People Use Powerpoints Instead Of Thinking

Kick-start Your Brain. New Ideas Come From Watching Something, Talking To People, Experimenting, Asking Questions And Getting Out Of The Office!

Asking Questions

Believe Things Will Work Out. How Was I Ever To Know That The Girl Who Broke My Heart In University Would Lead To My Soulmate? How Was I To Know That The ‘dream Job’ I Was Rejected From Out Of College Would Lead Me To A Year Of Entrepreneurship And Adventure In Spain? How Was I To Know That Taking A Miserable Job Back In The States Would Be Just The Push I Needed To Vow To Never Do Something I Wasn’t Passionate About Again? Everything Works Out. I Mean Everything. As Long As You Believe It Will. When You Do, You Will Find The Silver Lining. That Will Take You To The Next Level.

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

When I Went To School, It Was Right After The '60s And Before This General Wave Of Practical Purposefulness Had Set In.... The Idealistic Wind Of The '60s Was Still At Our Backs, Though, And Most Of The People I Know Who Are My Age Have That Engrained In Them Forever.

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.

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

We Make Tools For People. Tools To Create, Tools To Communicate. The Age We're Living In, These Tools Surprise You. ... That's Why I Love What We Do. Because We Make These Tools, And We're Constantly Surprised With What People Do With Them.

Your Work Is Going To Fill A Large Part Of Your Life... So Love What You Do. Your Time Is Limited. Don't Waste It.

Strategy Is Figuring Out What Not To Do.

Let's Go Invent Tomorrow Instead Of Worrying About What Happened Yesterday.

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.

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.

The Customer Is The Final Inspector.

Service Culture

Breakthrough Is How To Distinguish A Leader And Who Followed

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

Your Time Is Limited, So Don't Waste It Living Someone Else's Life.

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.

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.

Great Engineers Are A Huge Multiplier.

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.

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.

We're Not Going To Be The First To This Party, But We're Going To Be The Best.

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.

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.

We Don't Believe It's Possible To Protect Digital Content. What's New Is This Amazingly Efficient Distribution System For Stolen Property Called The Internet-- And No One's Gonna Shut Down The Internet. And It Only Takes One Stolen Copy To Be On The Internet. And The Way We Expressed It To Them Is: Pick One Lock--open Every Door. It Only Takes One Person To Pick A Lock. Worst Case: Somebody Just Takes The Analog Outputs Of Their Cd Player And Rerecords It-- Puts It On The Internet. You'll Never Stop That. So What You Have To Do Is Compete With It.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Focusing Is About Saying No.

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.

It's More Fun To Be A Pirate Than To Join The Navy.

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

To Go Forward You Have To Leave Something Behind

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.

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

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

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

A Lot Of Companies Have Chosen To Downsize, And Maybe That Was The Right Thing For Them. We Chose A Different Path. Our Belief Was That If We Kept Putting Great Products In Front Of Customers, They Would Continue To Open Their Wallets.

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.

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.

My Favorite Things In Life Don't Cost Any Money. It's Really Clear That The Most Precious Resource We All Have Is Time.

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.

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.

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