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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.

-Steve Jobs

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The Difference Between The

Steve Jobs

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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.

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

The Good Music Companies Do An Amazing Thing. They Have People Who Can Pick The Person That's Gonna Be Successful Out Of 5,000 Candidates. And There's Not Enough Information To Do That - It's An Intuitive Process.

People Say Sometimes, "you Work In The Fastest-moving Industry In The World." I Don't Feel That Way. I Think I Work In One Of The Slowest. It Seems To Take Forever To Get Anything Done.

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 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.

Focusing Is About Saying No.

The Problem Is I'm Older Now, I'm 40 Years Old, And This Stuff Doesn't Change The World. It Really Doesn't.

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

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

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 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.

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.

I Think It's Brought The World A Lot Closer Together, And Will Continue To Do That. There Are Downsides To Everything; There Are Unintended Consequences To Everything. The Most Corrosive Piece Of Technology That I've Ever Seen Is Called Television - But Then, Again, Television, At Its Best, Is Magnificent.

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

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

It Gave A Tremendous Level Of Self-confidence, That Through Exploration And Learning One Could Understand Seemingly Very Complex Things In One's Environment.

Self Confidence

The Real Art Is Knowing What To Leave Out, Not What To Put In.

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.

We Limit How Much Technology Our Kids Use At Home.

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.

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.

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.

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

I Have A Great Respect For Incremental Improvement, And I've Done That Sort Of Thing In My Life, But I've Always Been Attracted To The More Revolutionary Changes. I Don't Know Why. Because They're Harder. They're Much More Stressful Emotionally. And You Usually Go Through A Period Where Everybody Tells You That You've Completely Failed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Fear Of Failure Falls Away In The Face Of Death.

Fear Of Failure

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

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 Was At Reed [college] For Only A Few Months. My Parents Intended For Me To Stay There For All Four Years But I Decided That College Wasn't Right For Me. I Had No Idea What I Wanted To Do I Didn't See How College Was Going To Help Me.

This Revolution, The Information Revolution, Is A Revolution Of Free Energy As Well, But Of Another Kind: Free Intellectual Energy.

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

Start Small, Think Big. Don’t Worry About Too Many Things At Once. Take A Handful Of Simple Things To Begin With, And Then Progress To More Complex Ones. Think About Not Just Tomorrow, But The Future. Put A Ding In The Universe.

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

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.

The Web Is Not Going To Change The World, Certainly Not In The Next 10 Years. It's Going To Augment The World. And Once You're In This Web-augmented Space, You're Going To See That Democratization Takes Place.

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

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

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I Hate The Way People Use Powerpoints Instead Of Thinking

When You're In A Start-up, The First Ten People Will Determine Whether The Company Succeeds Or Not. Each Is 10 Percent Of The Company. So Why Wouldn't You Take As Much Time As Necessary To Find All The A Players? If Three Were Not So Great, Why Would You Want A Company Where 30 Percent Of Your People Are Not So Great? A Small Company Depends On Great People Much More Than A Big Company Does.

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.

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.

Unless You've A Lot Of Passion About This, You're Not Gonna Survive. You're Gonna Give It Up. So You've Got To Have An Idea Or A Wrong That You Want To Right That You're Passionate About, Otherwise You're Not Gonna Have The Perseverance To Stick It Through. I Think It's Half The Battle Right There.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I Didn't See It Then, But It Turned Out That Getting Fired From Apple Was The Best Thing That Could Have Ever Happened To Me. The Heaviness Of Being Successful Was Replaced By The Lightness Of Being A Beginner Again, Less Sure About Everything. It Freed Me To Enter One Of The Most Creative Periods Of My Life.

Apple Has Some Tremendous Assets, But I Believe Without Some Attention, The Company Could, Could, Could - I'm Searching For The Right Word - Could, Could Die.

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.

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

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

No One Wants To Die. Even People Who Want To Go To Heaven Don't Want To Die To Get There. And Yet 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. It Is Life's Change Agent. It Clears Out The Old To Make Way For The New.

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Somewhere Between The Janitor And The Ceo, Reasons Stop Mattering.

I Think We're Having Fun. I Think Our Customers Really Like Our Products. And We're Always Trying To Do Better.

Coming Back To America Was, For Me, Much More Of A Culture Shock Than Going To India. The People In The Indian Countryside Don't Use Their Intellect Like We Do, They Use Their Intuition Instead, And Their Intuition Is Far More Developed Than In The Rest Of The World. Intuition Is A Very Powerful Thing, More Powerful Than Intellect In My Opinion. That's Had A Big Impact On My Work.

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

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

We Have Always Been Shameless About Stealing Great Ideas.

Overnight Success Stories Take A Long Time.

I'd Rather Be A Pirate Than Join The Navy

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.

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.

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.

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

To Turn Really Interesting Ideas And Fledgling Technologies Into A Company That Can Continue To Innovate For Years, It Requires A Lot Of Disciplines.

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.

No One Is Going To Buy A Big Phone.

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.

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

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

To Follow The Path That Others Have Laid Before You Is A Reasonable Course Of Action; Therefore All Progress Is Made By Unreasonable Men.

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.

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

You Know, I've Got A Plan That Could Rescue Apple. I Can't Say Any More Than That It's The Perfect Product And The Perfect Strategy For Apple. But Nobody There Will Listen To Me.

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

Creating Things

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Here's To The Crazy Ones, The Misfits, The Rebels, The Troublemakers, The Round Pegs In The Square Holes... The Ones Who See Things Differently - They're Not Fond Of Rules... You Can Quote Them, Disagree With Them, Glorify Or Vilify Them, But The Only Thing You Can't Do Is Ignore Them Because They Change Things... They Push The Human Race Forward, And While Some May See Them As The Crazy Ones, We See Genius, Because The Ones Who Are Crazy Enough To Think That They Can Change The World, Are The Ones Who Do.

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.

Learn Continually - There's Always "one More Thing" To Learn!

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

Breakthrough Is How To Distinguish A Leader And Who Followed

Do You Want To Sell Sugar Water All Your Life, Or Do You Want To Come With Me And Change The World?

Have The Courage To Follow Your Heart And Intuition.

Stanford University

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.

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

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

Decisions You Make

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

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 Dropped Out Of Reed College [portland, Oregon] After The First Six Months, But Then Stayed Around As A Drop-in For Another 18 Months Or So Before I Really Quit. So Why Did I Drop Out?

Portland Oregon

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.

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.

You've Probably Had Somebody Punch You In The Stomach And It Knocks The Wind Of You And You Can't Breathe. That's How I Felt.

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

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.

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.

My Philosophy Is That Everything Starts With A Great Product.

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

We Just Wanted To Build The Best Thing We Could Build

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

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.

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.

Oh Wow. Oh Wow. Oh Wow.

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.

You Go To Your Tv To Turn Your Brain Off. You Go To The Computer When You Want To Turn Your Brain On.

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

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.

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.

The Journey Is The Reward

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.

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.'

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.

You Need To Have A Collaborative Hiring Process.

Strategy Is Figuring Out What Not To Do.

Guess Who Surprised Themselves And Changed Their Minds.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Be Ready To Catch The Ball When It Is Thrown By Life.

Focusing Is All About Saying No

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.

Never Settle For Average.

It Comes Down To Trying To Expose Yourself To The Best Things Humans Have Done. And Then Try To Bring Those Things In To What You're Doing.

We Don't Settle For Anything Less Than Excellence.

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

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

Innovation Is Usually The Result Of Connections Of Past Experiences. But If You Have The Same Experiences As Everyone Else, You Are Unlikely To Look In A Different Direction.

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.

To Go Forward You Have To Leave Something Behind

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

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

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

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

Most People Do Not Ever Pick Up The Phone. They Never Ask, And That Is What Separates The People That Do Things From The People That Just Dream About Them. You Have To Act, And You Have To Be Willing To Fail. You Have To Be Willing To Crash And Burn, Because If You Are Afraid Of Failing, You Will Not Get Very Far.

The Most Powerful Person In The World Is The Story Teller. The Storyteller Sets The Vision, Values And Agenda Of An Entire Generation That Is To Come.

I Want To Put A Ding In The Universe.

Be A Yardstick Of Quality. Some People Aren't Used To An Environment Where Excellence Is Expected.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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

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

You Can Tell A Lot About A Person By Who His Or Her Heroes Are.

Forget Everything

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.

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.

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

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

I Sat In A Garage And Invented The Future.

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.

Probably Death Is The Best Invention Of Life.

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

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

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

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

Without Passion, Any Rational Person Would Give Up!

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

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

Customers Always Want Something New

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.

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.

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've Got To Tell You, The Internet Is A Place You Go When You Want To Turn Your Brain On, And Television Is A Place You Go When You Want To Turn Your Brain Off. I'm Not At All Convinced That The Twain Will Meet.

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