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When You Grow Up, You Tend To Get Told That The World Is The Way It Is, And Your Life Is Just To Live Your Life Inside The World. Try Not To Bash Into The Walls Too Much. Try To Have A Nice Family Life. Have Fun, Save A Little Money. That's A Very Limited Life. Life Can Be Much Broader, Once You Discover One Simple Fact, And That Is Everything Around That You Call Life Was Made Up By People Who 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. Once You Learn That, You'll Never Be The Same Again.

-Steve Jobs

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When You Grow Up,

Steve Jobs

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When You Grow Up, You Tend To Get Told That The World Is The Way It Is, And Your Life Is Just To Live Your Life Inside The World. Try Not To Bash Into The Walls Too Much. Try To Have A Nice Family Life. Have Fun, Save A Little Money. That's A Very Limited Life. Life Can Be Much Broader, Once You Discover One Simple Fact, And That Is Everything Around That You Call Life Was Made Up By People Who 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. Once You Learn That, You'll Never Be The Same Again.

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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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I Think The Biggest Innovations Of The 21st Century Will Be At The Intersection Of Biology And Technology. A New Era Is Beginning.

Somebody Once Told Me, ‘manage The Top Line, And The Bottom Line Will Follow.’ What's The Top Line? It's Things Like, Why Are We Doing This In The First Place? What's Our Strategy? What Are Customers Saying? How Responsive Are We? Do We Have The Best Products And The Best People? Those Are The Kind Of Questions You Have To Focus On.

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.

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.

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

The Journey Is The Reward

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.

Customers Always Want Something New

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

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.

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

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.

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

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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.

Make It Like A Sunflower.

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

Forget Everything

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

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

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'd Rather Be A Pirate Than Join The Navy

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

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.

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

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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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Abstract Thinking

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

Pointing Is A Metaphor We All Know. We've Done A Lot Of Studies And Tests On That, And It's Much Faster To Do All Kinds Of Functions, Such As Cutting And Pasting, With A Mouse, So It's Not Only Easier To Use But More Efficient.

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

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

Simplicity Is The Ultimate Sophistication-- Steve Jobs Turned This Into The Slogan Behind An Early Mac Advertising Campaign. Which Doesn't Make It Less True.

There's An Old Wayne Gretzky Quote That I Love. 'i Skate To Where The Puck Is Going To Be, Not Where It Has Been.' And We've Always Tried To Do That At Apple. Since The Very, Very Beginning. And We Always Will.

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.

Shake Off This Erroneous Notion That Life Is There And You're Just Gonna Live In It, Versus Embrace It, Change It, Improve It, Make Your Mark Upon It.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

You've Heard Of Plug-and-play. This Is Plug, Unplug And Play. It's So Simple To Use, It's Unbelievable.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

There Are Sneakers That Cost More Than An Ipod.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

All The Work I've Done In My Life Will Be Obsolete By The Time I'm Fifty.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Desktop Computer Industry Is Dead. Innovation Has Virtually Ceased. Microsoft Dominates With Very Little Innovation. That's Over. Apple Lost. The Desktop Market Has Entered The Dark Ages, And It's Going To Be In The Dark Ages For The Next 10 Years, Or Certainly For The Rest Of This Decade.

You Can't Win On Innovation Unless You Have A Way To Communicate It To Customers.

Oh Wow. Oh Wow. Oh Wow.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Probably Death Is The Best Invention Of Life.

We Limit How Much Technology Our Kids Use At Home.

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.

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'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.

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.

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

I Was Lucky To Get Into Computers When It Was A Very Young And Idealistic Industry. There Weren't Many Degrees Offered In Computer Science, So People In Computers Were Brilliant People From Mathematics, Physics, Music, Zoology, Whatever. They Loved It, And No One Was Really In It For The Money.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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'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.

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

This Is What Customers Pay Us For - To Sweat All These Details So It's Easy And Pleasant For Them To Use Our Computers. We're Supposed To Be Really Good At This. That Doesn't Mean We Don't Listen To Customers, But It's Hard For Them To Tell You What They Want When They've Never Seen Anything Remotely Like It.

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

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

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

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

As Regis Mckenna Once Said, The Best Marketing Is Education

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 Know, My Main Reaction To This Money Thing Is That It's Humorous, All The Attention To It, Because It's Hardly The Most Insightful Or Valuable Thing That's Happened To Me.

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.

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

I Don't Think Of My Life As A Career. I Do Stuff. I Respond To Stuff. That's Not A Career - It's A Life!

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.

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.

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.

Don't Just Live A Life; Build One.

Focusing Is About Saying No.

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.

Our Goal Is To Make The Best Devices In The World, Not To Be The Biggest.

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.

The World Doesn't Need Another Dell Or Compaq.

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.

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

We Don't Settle For Anything Less Than Excellence.

To Go Forward You Have To Leave Something Behind

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.

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.

Much Of What I Stumbled Into By Following My Curiosity And Intuition Turned Out To Be Priceless Later On.

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

Unintended Consequences

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

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.

Let's Go Invent Tomorrow...

The Subscription Model Of Buying Music Is Bankrupt. I Think You Could Make Available The Second Coming In A Subscription Model And It Might Not Be Successful.

I Hate The Way People Use Powerpoints Instead Of Thinking

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

What We're Doing Here Will Send A Giant Ripple Through The Universe.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

If You Want To Live Your Life In A Creative Way, As An Artist, You Have To Not Look Back Too Much. You Have To Be Willing To Take Whatever You've Done And Whoever You Were And Throw Them Away.

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.

Innovation Distinguishes A Leader From A Follower.

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.

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

Working Together

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

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.

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.

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.

I'm One Of Those People That Think Thomas Edison And The Light Bulb Changed The World More Than Karl Marx Ever Did.

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 The World's A Better Place Because Bill Realized That His Goal Isn't To Be The Richest Guy In The Cemetery, Right?

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.

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.

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

Innovation Distinguishes Between A Leader And A Follower.

Packaging Can Be Theater, It Can Create A Story

When I Was Young, There Was An Amazing Publication Called The Whole Earth Catalog, Which Was One Of The Bibles Of My Generation. It Was Created By A Fellow Named Stewart Brand Not Far From Here In Menlo Park, And He Brought It To Life With His Poetic Touch. This Was In The Late 1960's, Before Personal Computers And Desktop Publishing, So It Was All Made With Typewriters, Scissors, And Polaroid Cameras. It Was Sort Of Like Google In Paperback Form, 35 Years Before Google Came Along: It Was Idealistic, And Overflowing With Neat Tools And Great Notions.

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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.

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 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.

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

Loyal Customers

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 Have Enough To Last For The Rest Of My Life.

I Was Actually A Fruitarian At That Point In Time. I Ate Only Fruit. Now I'm A Garbage Can Like Everyone Else. And We Were About Three Months Late In Filing A Fictitious Business Name So I Threatened To Call The Company Apple Computer Unless Someone Suggested A More Interesting Name By Five O'clock That Day. Hoping To Stimulate Creativity. And It Stuck. And That's Why We're Called Apple.

It Takes These Very Simple-minded Instructions - 'go Fetch A Number, Add It To This Number, Put The Result There, Perceive If It's Greater Than This Other Number' - But Executes Them At A Rate Of, Let's Say, 1,000,000 Per Second. At 1,000,000 Per Second, The Results Appear To Be Magic.

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