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We Wanted To More Richly Experience Why We Were Alive, Not Just Make A Better Life, And So People Went In Search Of Things. The Great Thing That Came From Those That Time Was To Realize That There Was Definitely More To Life Than The Materialism Of The Late Sixties And Early Sixties. We Were Going In Search Of Something Deeper.

-Steve Jobs

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We Wanted To More

Steve Jobs

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We Wanted To More Richly Experience Why We Were Alive, Not Just Make A Better Life, And So People Went In Search Of Things. The Great Thing That Came From Those That Time Was To Realize That There Was Definitely More To Life Than The Materialism Of The Late Sixties And Early Sixties. We Were Going In Search Of Something Deeper.

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Focusing Is All About Saying No

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

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.

And It Comes From Saying No To 1,000 Things To Make Sure We Don't Get On The Wrong Track Or Try To Do Too Much. We're Always Thinking About New Markets We Could Enter, But It's Only By Saying No That You Can Concentrate On The Things That Are Really Important.

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.

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

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

Innovation Distinguishes A Leader From A Follower.

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

[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 Tell People They Can't Burn Cds Of Their Music, As Almost Every Current Legal Music Service Has Done, Or They Can Only Burn One Cd With A Track Or Pay Per Track Per Burn Extra, Nobody Is Going To Go For It.

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.

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.

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

The World Doesn't Need Another Dell Or Compaq.

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

When We Hire Someone, Even If They Are Going To Be In Marketing, I Will Have Them Talk To The Design Folks And The Engineers.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Remembering That I’ll Be Dead Soon Is The Most Important Tool I’ve Ever Encountered To Help Make The Big Choices In Life. Remembering That You Are Going To Die Is The Best Way I Know To Avoid The Trap Of Thinking You Have Something To Lose.

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Focus Does Not Mean Saying Yes, It Means Saying No.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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I Buy Everything From Costco. It's Great; They've Got Everything I Need.

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

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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.

Without Passion, Any Rational Person Would Give Up!

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.

Creativity Comes From Spontaneous Meetings, From Random Discussions.

I Naively Chose A College That Was Almost As Expensive As Stanford, And All Of My Working-class Parents Savings Were Being Spent On My College Tuition. After Six Months I Couldn't See The Value In It. I Had No Idea What I Wanted To Do With My Life And No Idea How College Was Going To Help Me Figure It Out.

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This Revolution, The Information Revoultion, Is A Revolution Of Free Energy As Well, But Of Another Kind: Free Intellectual Energy. It's Very Crude Today, Yet Our Macintosh Computer Takes Less Power Than A 100-watt Bulb To Run It And It Can Save You Hours A Day. What Will It Be Able To Do Ten Or 20 Years From Now, Or 50 Years From Now?

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.

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

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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.

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

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.

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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.

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

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.

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It's Not About Money. It's About The People You Have, How You're Led, And How Much You Get It.

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.

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

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

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

As Regis Mckenna Once Said, The Best Marketing Is Education

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.

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.

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

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We're Just Enthusiastic About What We Do.

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

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

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.

Strategy Is Figuring Out What Not To Do.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

Guess Who Surprised Themselves And Changed Their Minds.

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

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.

When You Start Looking At A Problem And It Seems Really Simple, You Don't Really Understand The Complexity Of The Problem. Then You Get Into The Problem, And You See That It's Really Complicated, And You Come Up With All These Convoluted Solutions. That's Sort Of The Middle, And That's Where Most People Stop... But The Really Great Person Will Keep On Going And Find The Key, The Underlying Principle Of The Problem - And Come Up With An Elegant, Really Beautiful Solution That Works.

Fear Of Failure Falls Away In The Face Of Death.

Fear Of Failure

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

I Just Had A Romance That I Really Care About, A Lot-i Mean, A Lot-go Up In Smoke. Because Of The Stress, And The Sort Of Other Woman That Macintosh Is.

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

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

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

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 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'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.

There’s A Temptation In Our Networked Age To Think That Ideas Can Be Developed By Email And Ichat. That’s Crazy. Creativity Comes From Spontaneous Meetings, From Random Discussions. You Run Into Someone, You Ask What They’re Doing, You Say ‘wow,’ And Soon You’re Cooking Up All Sorts Of Ideas.

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 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.

And No, We Don't Know Where It Will Lead. We Just Know There's Something Much Bigger Than Any Of Us Here.

It Takes A Lot Of Hard Work To Make Something Simple.

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

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

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

To Go Forward You Have To Leave Something Behind

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

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.

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.

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

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. If I Had Never Dropped Out, I Would Have Never Dropped In On This Calligraphy Class, And Personal Computers Might Not Have The Wonderful Typography That They Do. Of Course It Was Impossible To Connect The Dots Looking Forward When I Was In College. But It Was Very, Very Clear Looking Backward 10 Years Later.

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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.

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

There Are Sneakers That Cost More Than An Ipod.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

There's Nothing That Makes My Day More Than Getting An E-mail From Some Random Person In The Universe Who Just Bought An Ipad Over In The Uk And Tells Me The Story About How It's The Coolest Product They've Ever Brought Home In Their Lives. That's What Keeps Me Going.

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.

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.

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

Never Settle For Average.

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.

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

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.

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

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 More Fun To Be A Pirate Than To Join The Navy. On The Importance Of Loving What You Do.

Loving What You Do

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

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

Working Together

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.

We Hire People Who Want To Make The Best Things In The World.

You've Got To Have A Problem That You Want To Solve; A Wrong That You Want To Right.

It Wasn't That Microsoft Was So Brilliant Or Clever In Copying The Mac, It's That The Mac Was A Sitting Duck For 10 Years. That's Apple's Problem: Their Differentiation Evaporated.

My Philosophy Is That Everything Starts With A Great Product.

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

We Have Always Been Shameless About Stealing Great Ideas.

Follow Your Heart, But Check It With Your Head.

Follow Your Heart

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Creativity Is Just Connecting Things.

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.

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.

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.

You Know We're Constantly Taking. We Don't Make Most Of The Food We Eat, We Don't Grow It, Anyway. We Wear Clothes Other People Make, We Speak A Language Other People Developed, We Use A Mathematics Other People Evolved And Spent Their Lives Building. I Mean We're Constantly Taking Things. It's A Wonderful Ecstatic Feeling To Create Something And Put It Into The Pool Of Human Experience And Knowledge.

The Design Of The Mac Wasn't What It Looked Like, Although That Was Part Of It. Primarily, It Was How It Worked. To Design Something Really Well, You Have To Get It. You Have To Really Grok What It's All About. It Takes A Passionate Commitment To Really Thoroughly Understand Something, Chew It Up, Not Just Quickly Swallow It.

If You Haven't Found It Yet, Keep Looking.

Inspirational Life

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.

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.

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

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.

When The Sales Guys Run The Company, The Product Guys Do Not Matter So Much, And A Lot Of Them Just Turn Off.

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.

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.

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

Do Your Best At Every Job. Don't Sleep! Success Generates More Success So Be Hungry For It. Hire Good People With A Passion For Excellence.

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

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 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.

I'm As Proud Of Many Of The Things We Haven't Done As The Things We Have Done. Innovation Is Saying No To A Thousand Things.

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

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.

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

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

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.

These Technologies Can Make Life Easier, Can Let Us Touch People We Might Not Otherwise. You May Have A Child With A Birth Defect And Be Able To Get In Touch With Other Parents And Support Groups, Get Medical Information, The Latest Experimental Drugs. These Things Can Profoundly Influence Life. I'm Not Downplaying That.

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.

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

We Had Nothing To Lose And Everything To Gain.

Nothing To Lose

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.

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.

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.

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

Mac Os X Tiger Will Come Out Long Before Longhorn.

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.

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