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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.

-Steve Jobs

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When You're Doing Something

Steve Jobs

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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 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.

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We're Just Enthusiastic About What We Do.

Innovation Distinguishes Between A Leader And A Follower.

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But It's A Disservice To Constantly Put Things In This Radical New Light - That It's Going To Change Everything. Things Don't Have To Change The World To Be Important.

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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.

Guess Who Surprised Themselves And Changed Their Minds.

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.

Great Engineers Are A Huge Multiplier.

The Only Way To Be Truly Satisfied Is To Do What You Believe Is Great Work

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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.

Fear Of Failure Falls Away In The Face Of Death.

Fear Of Failure

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.

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.

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.

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

Follow Your Heart, But Check It With Your Head.

Follow Your Heart

Design Is The Fundamental Soul Of A Man-made Creation That Ends Up Expressing Itself In Successive Outer Layers Of The Product Or Service. The Imac Is Not Just The Color Or Translucence Or The Shape Of The Shell. The Essence Of The Imac Is To Be The Finest Possible Consumer Computer In Which Each Element Plays Together.

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.

I Met Woz When I Was 13, At A Friend's Garage. He Was About 18. He Was, Like, The First Person I Met Who Knew More Electronics Than I Did At That Point. We Became Good Friends, Because We Shared An Interest In Computer And We Had A Sense Of Humor. We Pulled All Kinds Of Pranks Together.

I Want To Make A Dent In The Universe.

The Minute That You Understand That You Can Poke Life And Actually Something Will Pop Out The Other Side, That You Can Change It, You Can Mold It. That's Maybe The Most Important Thing. It's To 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. I Think That's Very Important And However You Learn That, Once You Learn It, You'll Want To Change Life And Make It Better, Cause It's Kind Of Messed Up, In A Lot Of Ways. Once You Learn That, You'll Never Be The Same Again.

I'm Not Worried About The Country's Long-term Future. This Country Is Insanely Great. What I'm Worried About Is That We Don't Talk Enough About Solutions.

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.

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.

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.

When You First Start Off Trying To Solve A Problem, The First Solutions You Come Up With Are Very Complex, And Most People Stop There. But If You Keep Going, And Live With The Problem And Peel More Layers Of The Onion Off, You Can Often Times Arrive At Some Very Elegant And Simple Solutions.

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

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

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.

You Can't Look At The Competition And Say You're Going To Do It Better. You Have To Look At The Competition And Say You're Going To Do It Differently.

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

It Doesn’t Make Sense To Hire Smart People And Tell Them What To Do; We Hire Smart People So They Can Tell Us What To Do.

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

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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.

It's Really Hard To Design Products By Focus Groups. A Lot Of Times, People Don't Know What They Want Until You Show It To Them.

You'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.

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.

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.

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.

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

When You’re In A Startup, The First Ten People Will Determine Whether The Company Succeeds Or Not.

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.

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.

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.

Focusing Is All About Saying No

Design Is The Fundamental Soul Of A Man-made Creation

Recruiting Is Hard. It's Just Finding The Needles In The Haystack. You Can't Know Enough In A One-hour Interview. So, In The End, It's Ultimately Based On Your Gut. How Do I Feel About This Person? What Are They Like When They're Challenged? I Ask Everybody That: 'why Are You Here?' The Answers Themselves Are Not What You're Looking For. It's The Meta-data.

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

Make It Like A Sunflower.

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

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.

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.

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.

Have The Courage To Follow Your Heart And Intuition.

Stanford University

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.

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

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

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.

Stanford University

Packaging Can Be Theater, It Can Create A Story

We're Here To Make A Dent In The Universe. Otherwise, Why Even Be Here? We're Creating A Completely New Consciousness, Like An Artist Or A Poet. That’s How You Have To Think Of This. We're Rewriting The History Of Human Thought With What We're Doing.

Innovation Distinguishes A Leader From A Follower.

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Arthur Phillips

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