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The Thing That Drives Me And My Colleagues At Both Apple And Pixar Is That You See Something Very Compelling To You, And You Don't Quite Know How To Get To It, But You Know, Sometimes Intuitively, It's Within Your Grasp. And It's Worth Putting In Years Of Your Life To Make It Come Into Existence.

-Steve Jobs

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The Thing That Drives

Steve Jobs

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The Thing That Drives Me And My Colleagues At Both Apple And Pixar Is That You See Something Very Compelling To You, And You Don't Quite Know How To Get To It, But You Know, Sometimes Intuitively, It's Within Your Grasp. And It's Worth Putting In Years Of Your Life To Make It Come Into Existence.

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

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

I Can Help The Next Generation Remember The Lineage Of Great Companies Here And How To Continue The Tradition. The Valley Has Been Very Supportive Of Me. I Should Do My Best To Repay.

Every Good Product I've Ever Seen Is Because A Group Of People Cared Deeply About Making Something Wonderful That They And Their Friends Wanted. They Wanted To Use It Themselves.

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.

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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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

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

Packaging Can Be Theater, It Can Create A Story

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.

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

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

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

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.

If You Define The Problem Correctly, You Almost Have The Solution.

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.

Design Is The Fundamental Soul Of A Man-made Creation

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

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

Asking Questions

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.

Remembering That I'll Be Dead Soon Is The Most Important Tool I've Ever Encountered To Help Me Make The Big Choices In Life. Because Almost Everything - All External Expectations, All Pride, All Fear Of Embarrassment Or Failure - These Things Just Fall Away In The Face Of Death, Leaving Only What Is Truly Important.

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

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

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.

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

I Told [bill Gates] I Believed Every Word Of What I Said But That I Should Never Have Said It In Public. I Wish Him The Best, I Really Do. I Just Think He And Microsoft Are A Bit Narrow. He'd Be A Broader Guy If He Had Dropped Acid Once Or Gone Off To An Ashram When He Was Younger.

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

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.

In Most Cases, Strengths And Weaknesses Are Two Sides Of The Same Coin. A Strength In One Situation Is A Weakness In Another, Yet Often The Person Can't Switch Gears. It's A Very Subtle Thing To Talk About Strengths And Weaknesses Because Almost Always They're The Same Thing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I Had Been Rejected, But I Was Still In Love.

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.

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

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.

The Things I've Done In My Life Have Required A Lot Of Years Of Work Before They Took Off.

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

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.

There Are Times When You Run A Marathon And You Wonder, Why Am I Doing This? But You Take A Drink Of Water, And Around The Next Bend, You Get Your Wind Back, Remember The Finish Line, And Keep Going.

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.

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

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.

Let's Make A Dent In The Universe

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

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.

At Apple, People Are Putting In 18-hour Days. We Attract A Different Type Of Person—a Person Who Doesn’t Want To Wait Five Or Ten Years To Have Someone Take A Giant Risk On Him Or Her. Someone Who Really Wants To Get In A Little Over His Head And Make A Little Dent In The Universe. We Are Aware That We Are Doing Something Significant. We’re Here At The Beginning Of It And We’re Able To Shape How It Goes. Everyone Here Has The Sense That Right Now Is One Of Those Moments When We Are Influencing The Future.

People Think Focus Means Saying Yes To The Thing You've Got To Focus On. But That's Not What It Means At All. It Means Saying No To The Hundred Other Good Ideas That There Are. You Have To Pick Carefully. I'm Actually As Proud Of The Things We Haven't Done As The Things I Have Done. Innovation Is Saying No To 1,000 Things.

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

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That's My Job - To Make Sure Everything Is Great.

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.

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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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.

Probably Death Is The Best Invention Of Life.

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’d Like To Create An Integrated Television Set That Is Completely Easy To Use. It Would Be Seamlessly Synced With All Of Your Devices And With Icloud. It Will Have The Simplest User Interface You Could Imagine. I Finally Cracked It.

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.

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

Unintended Consequences

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.

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.

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

When You're Doing Something For Yourself, Or Your Best Friend Or Family, You're Not Going To Cheese Out. If You Don't Love Something, You're Not Going To Go The Extra Mile, Work The Extra Weekend, Challenge The Status Quo As Much.

Innovation Distinguishes Between A Leader And A Follower.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The World Doesn't Need Another Dell Or Compaq.

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

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

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.

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.

The Tragedy Is That Dell Didn't Win It - We Lost It.

So Let's Not Use A Stylus. We're Going To Use The Best Pointing Device In The World. We're Going To Use A Pointing Device That We're All Born With - Born With Ten Of Them. We're Going To Use Our Fingers. We're Going To Touch This With Our Fingers. And We Have Invented A New Technology Called Multi-touch, Which Is Phenomenal. It Works Like Magic.

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

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.

My Philosophy Is That Everything Starts With A Great Product.

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.

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.

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

You Need To Have A Collaborative Hiring Process.

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

The Most Precious Resource We Have Is Time.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Everything Around You That You Call Life Was Made Up By People That Were No Smarter Than You And You Can Change It, You Can Influence It, You Can Build Your Own Things That Other People Can Use.

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

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.

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.

We Don't Get A Chance To Do That Many Things, And Every One Should Be Really Excellent. Because This Is Our Life. Life Is Brief, And Then You Die, You Know? So This Is What We've Chosen To Do With Our Life. We Could Be Sitting In A Monastery Somewhere In Japan. We Could Be Out Sailing. Some Of The Team Could Be Playing Golf. They Could Be Running Other Companies. And We've All Chosen To Do This With Our Lives. So It Better Be Damn Good. It Better Be Worth It. And We Think It Is.

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

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.

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.

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.

I Know From My Own Education That If I Hadn't Encountered Two Or Three Individuals That Spent Extra Time With Me, I'm Sure I Would Have Been In Jail.

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

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

I 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.

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

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

Get Closer Than Ever To Your Customers. So Close That You Tell Them What They Need Well Before They Realize It Themselves

Loyal Customers

It's Not Like Windows Users Don't Have Any Power. I Think They Are Happy With Windows, And That's An Incredibly Depressing Thought

My Job Is To Make The Whole Executive Team Good Enough To Be Successors, So That's What I Try To Do.

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

Honest Feedback

Our Dna Is As A Consumer Company - For That Individual Customer Who's Voting Thumbs Up Or Thumbs Down. That's Who We Think About. And We Think That Our Job Is To Take Responsibility For The Complete User Experience. And If It's Not Up To Par, It's Our Fault, Plain And Simply.

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

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

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

I Began To Realize That An Intuitive Understanding And Consciousness Was More Significant Than Abstract Thinking And Intellectual Logical Analysis. Intuition Is A Very Powerful Thing, More Powerful Than Intellect, In My Opinion. That's Had A Big Impact On My Work.

The Unions Are The Worst Thing That Ever Happened To Education Because It's Not A Meritocracy. It Turns Into A Bureaucracy, Which Is Exactly What Has Happened. The Teachers Can't Teach And Administrators Run The Place And Nobody Can Be Fired. It's Terrible.

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

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

Creativity Comes From Spontaneous Meetings, From Random Discussions.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Mac Os X Tiger Will Come Out Long Before Longhorn.

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.

I Want To Make A Dent In The Universe.

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

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

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.

Stanford University

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

How Can You Get Fired From The Company You Started?

I Was In The Parking Lot, With The Key In The Car, And I Thought To Myself: If This Is My Last Night On Earth, Would I Rather Spend It At A Business Meeting Or With This Woman? I Ran Across The Parking Lot, Asked Her If She'd Have Dinner With Me. She Said Yes, We Walked Into Town, And We've Been Together Ever Since.

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.

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.

Let's Go Invent Tomorrow...

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.

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

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

Don't Just Live A Life; Build One.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

This Was A Very Typical Time. I Was Single. All You Needed Was A Cup Of Tea, A Light, And Your Stereo, You Know, And That's What I Had.

Technology Alone Is Not Enough.

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.

Older People Sit Down And Ask, 'what Is It?' But The Boy Asks, 'what Can I Do With It?'.

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?

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

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.

So When A Good Idea Comes, You Know, Part Of My Job Is To Move It Around, Just See What Different People Think, Get People Talking About It, Argue With People About It, Get Ideas Moving Among That Group Of 100 People, Get Different People Together To Explore Different Aspects Of It Quietly, And, You Know – Just Explore Things.

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

Your Work Is Going To Fill A Large Part Of Your Life, And The Only Way To Be Truly Satisfied Is To Do What You Believe Is Great Work. And The Only Way To Do Great Work Is To Love What You Do. If You Haven't Found It Yet, Keep Looking. Don't Settle. As With All Matters Of The Heart, You'll Know When You Find It.

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

Never Settle For Average.

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.

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

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

No One Is Going To Buy A Big Phone.

[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.

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.

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.

I Think The Macintosh Was Created By A Group Of People Who Felt That Ah There Wasn't A Strict Vision Between Sort Of Science And Art.

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.

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.

Fear Of Failure Falls Away In The Face Of Death.

Fear Of Failure

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.

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

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.

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

Follow Your Heart, But Check It With Your Head.

Follow Your Heart

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.

There Are Sneakers That Cost More Than An Ipod.

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'm Convinced That About Half Of What Separates The Successful Entrepreneurs From The Non-successful Ones Is Pure Perseverance... Unless You Have A Lot Of Passion About This, You're Not Going To Survive. You're Going To Give It Up. So You've Got To Have An Idea, Or A Problem Or A Wrong That You Want To Right That You're Passionate About Otherwise You're Not Going To Have The Perseverance To Stick It Through.

It's Understandable That The Music Companies That Are Comprised Of People That Are Successful By Making Good Creative Decisions - They Have To Decide Which Out Of Fifty Artists Is The Next Hot One, With No Data To Go From. It's An Intuitive Process, And That's What They Do Well When They're Successful. They Don't Understand Technology.

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

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

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

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.

Woz And I Started Apple In My Parents' Garage When I Was 20. We Worked Hard, And In 10 Years Apple Had Grown From Just The Two Of Us In A Garage Into A $2 Billion Company With Over 4,000 Employees.

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

Customers Always Want Something New

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.

To Go Forward You Have To Leave Something Behind

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

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Brian P. Cleary

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