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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.

-Steve Jobs

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Ultimately, It Comes Down

Steve Jobs

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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.

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

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There Are Sneakers That Cost More Than An Ipod.

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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.

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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.

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.

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

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.

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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.

The Reason We Wouldn't Make A Seven-inch Tablet Isn't Because We Don't Want To Hit A Price Point, It's Because We Don't Think You Can Make A Great Tablet With A Seven-inch Screen.

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It Wasn't All Romantic. I Didn't Have A Dorm Room, So I Slept On The Floor In Friends' Rooms, I Returned Coke Bottles For The 5¢ Deposits To Buy Food With, And I Would Walk The 7 Miles Across Town Every Sunday Night To Get One Good Meal A Week At The Hare Krishna Temple. I Loved It.

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.

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

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.'

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

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Without Death There Would Be Very Little Progress.

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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Oh Wow. Oh Wow. Oh Wow.

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I'm One Of The Few People Who Understands How Producing Technology Requires Intuition And Creativity, And How Producing Something Artistic Takes Real Discipline.

As Regis Mckenna Once Said, The Best Marketing Is Education

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.

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.

I Would Rather Gamble On Our Vision Than Make A 'me, Too' Product.

By Honoring The Lives Of Those We Admire, We Make Our Own Values Known.

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

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

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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.

Taking Lsd Was A Profound Experience, One Of The Most Important Things In My Life.

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.

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.

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.

We Had The Hardware Expertise, The Industrial Design Expertise And The Software Expertise, Including Itunes. One Of The Biggest Insights We Have Was That We Decided Not To Try To Manage Your Music Library On The Ipod, But To Manage It In Itunes. Other Companies Tried To Do Everything On The Device Itself And Made It So Complicated That It Was Useless.

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

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

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.

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

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

Overnight Success Stories Take A Long Time.

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.

Why Join The Navy If You Can Be A Pirate?

The Reason That Apple Is Able To Create Products Like Ipad Is Because We Always Try To Be At The Intersection Of Technology And Liberal Arts, To Be Able To Get The Best Of Both.

In Your Life You Only Get To Do So Many Things And Right Now We've Chosen To Do This, So Let's Make It Great.

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.

No One Is Going To Buy A Big Phone.

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.

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

Unintended Consequences

Click. Boom. 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

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

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

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.

So When These People Sell Out, Even Though They Get Fabulously Rich, They're Gypping Themselves Out Of One Of The Potentially Most Rewarding Experiences Of Their Unfolding Lives. Without It, They May Never Know Their Values Or How To Keep Their Newfound Wealth In Perspective.

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.

Apple Stores Are Intended Not Just To Move Boxes, But To Enrich Lives.

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

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

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

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.

How Can You Get Fired From The Company You Started?

Don't Be Evil Is A Load Of Crap.

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

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

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.

Companies Must Have A Noble Cause, And It's The Leaders Job To Transform That Noble Cause Into Such An Inspiring Vision, That It Will Attract The Most Talented People In The World To Want To Join It.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Team, It Turned Out That Michael Dell Wasn't Perfect At Predicting The Future. Based On Today's Stock Market Close, Apple Is Worth More Than Dell. Stocks Go Up And Down And Things May Be Different Tomorrow But I Thought It Was Worth A Moment Of Reflection Today.

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.

Design Is Not Just What It Looks Like And Feels Like. Design Is How It Works.

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

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.

To Go Forward You Have To Leave Something Behind

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

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.

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

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

I Don't Really Care About Being Right, I Just Care About Success. I Don't Mind Being Wrong, And I'll Admit That I'm Wrong A Lot. It Doesn't Really Matter To Me Too Much. What Matters To Me Is That We Do The Right Thing.

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

Stanford University

School Was Pretty Hard For Me At The Beginning.

If You Haven't Found It Yet, Keep Looking. Don't Settle. As With All Matters Of The Heart, You'll Know When You Find It. And, Like Any Great Relationship, It Just Gets Better And Better As The Years Roll On.

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Thomas Jefferson

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