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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.

-Steve Jobs

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When You Start Looking

Steve Jobs

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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.

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Of Course, We Can Not Connect Imprint Future, You Can Just Hook Them To Look Back. So Rest Assured That The Dots, The Events In Your Life In One Way Or Another Will Affect Your Future. You Have To Have Faith In Something - The Courage, Destiny, Life, Destiny Or Whatever - Thinking That Has Made The Difference In My Life

The Axis Today Is Not Liberal And Conservative, The Axis Is Constructive-destructive.

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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Death Is The Destination We All Share, No One Has Ever Escaped It. And That Is As It Should Be Because Death Is Very Likely The Single Best Invention Of Life.

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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.

The Minute I Dropped Out I Could Stop Taking The Required Classes That Didn't Interest Me, And Begin Dropping In On The Ones That Looked Interesting.

To Do Anything Of Magnitude Takes At Least Five Years, More Likely Seven Or Eight. Rightfully Or Wrongfully, That's How I Think.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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.

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

Don't Be Evil Is A Load Of Crap.

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

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

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I Think It's Brought The World A Lot Closer Together, And Will Continue To Do That. There Are Downsides To Everything; There Are Unintended Consequences To Everything. The Most Corrosive Piece Of Technology That I've Ever Seen Is Called Television - But Then, Again, Television, At Its Best, Is Magnificent.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

If I Knew In 1986 How Much It Was Going To Cost To Keep Pixar Going, I Doubt If I Would Have Bought The Company.

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But Innovation Comes From People Meeting Up In The Hallways Or Calling Each Other At 10:30 At Night With A New Idea, Or Because They Realized Something That Shoots Holes In How We've Been Thinking About A Problem.

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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.

Probably Death Is The Best Invention Of Life.

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

Have The Courage To Follow Your Heart And Intuition. They Somehow Already Know What You Truly Want To Become. Everything Else Is Secondary.

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

The Macintosh Was Supposed To Be The Computer For People That Just Wanted To Use A Computer Without Having To Learn How To Use One.

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.

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

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

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

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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.

When Companies Get Bigger They Try To Replicate Their Success. But They Assume Their Magic Came From Process. They Try To Use Processes To Substitute Content.

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

There Are Sneakers That Cost More Than An Ipod.

We're Just Enthusiastic About What We Do.

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I'm Convinced That About Half Of What Separates Successful Entrepreneurs From The Non-successful Ones Is Pure Perseverance.

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

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We Had Nothing To Lose And Everything To Gain.

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‎experts Are Clueless.

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

You Need To Have A Collaborative Hiring Process.

Overnight Success Stories Take A Long Time.

Whenever You Do Any One Thing Intensely Over A Period Of Time You Have To Give Up Other Lives You Could Be Living. You Have To Have A Real Single-minded Kind Of Tunnel Vision If You Want To Get Anything Significant Accomplished. Especially If The Desire Is Not To Be A Businessman, But To Be A Creative Person.

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.

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I'd Like The People Teaching My Kids To Be Good Enough That They Could Get A Job At The Company I Work For, Making A Hundred Thousand Dollars A Year. Why Should They Work At A School For Thirty-five To Forty Thousand Dollars If They Could Get A Job Here At A Hundred Thousand Dollars A Year?

Electronics Was Something I Could Always Fall Back On When I Needed Food On The Table.

The People Who Built Silicon Valley Were Engineers. They Learned Business, They Learned A Lot Of Different Things, But They Had A Real Belief That Humans, If They Worked Hard With Other Creative, Smart People, Could Solve Most Of Humankind's Problems. I Believe That Very Much.

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

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

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

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.

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.

You Have To Trust That The Dots Will Somehow Connect In Your Future... The Only Way To Do Great Work Is To Love What You Do. If You Haven’t Found It Yet, Keep Looking. Don’t Settle. As With All Matters Of The Heart, You’ll Know When You Find It... Have The Courage To Follow Your Heart And Intuition. They Somehow Already Know What You Truly Want To Become. Everything Else Is Secondary.

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

Most People Do Not Ever Pick Up The Phone. They Never Ask, And That Is What Separates The People That Do Things From The People That Just Dream About Them. You Have To Act, And You Have To Be Willing To Fail. You Have To Be Willing To Crash And Burn, Because If You Are Afraid Of Failing, You Will Not Get Very Far.

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're Going To Be Able To Ask Our Computers To Monitor Things For Us, And When Certain Conditions Happen, Are Triggered, The Computers Will Take Certain Actions And Inform Us After The Fact.

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

The 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.

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.

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

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I Dropped Out Of Reed College [portland, Oregon] After The First Six Months, But Then Stayed Around As A Drop-in For Another 18 Months Or So Before I Really Quit. So Why Did I Drop Out?

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

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

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The Hd Revolution Is Over, It Happened. Hd Won. Everybody Wants Hd.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Don’t Let The Noise Of Others’ Opinions Drown Out Your Own Inner Voice.

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

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

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.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

What A Computer Is To Me Is It's The Most Remarkable Tool That We Have Ever Come Up With. It's The Equivalent Of A Bicycle For Our Minds.

If You Don't Cannibalize Yourself, Someone Else Will.

Death Is Very Likely The Single Best Invention Of Life.

I Mean, Some People Say, 'oh, God, If [jobs] Got Run Over By A Bus, Apple Would Be In Trouble.' And, You Know, I Think It Wouldn't Be A Party, But There Are Really Capable People At Apple. My Job Is To Make The Whole Executive Team Good Enough To Be Successors, So That's What I Try To Do.

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?

You Have To Be Burning With "an Idea, Or A Problem, Or A Wrong That You Want To Right." If You're Not Passionate Enough From The Start, You'll Never Stick It Out.

If Today Were My Last Day, Would I Do What I'm Doing?...if The Answer Was 'no' Too Many Days In A Row, I'd Make A Change.

Our Approach Is To Think Of Companies Not As Businesses But As Collections Of People. We [apple]want To Qualitatively Change The Way People Work. We Don't Just Want To Help Them Do Word Processing Faster Or Add Numbers Faster. We Want To Change The Way They Can Communicate With One Another. We're Seeing Less Paper Flying Around And More Quality Of Communication.

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.

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.

Innovation Distinguishes A Leader From A Follower.

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

Each Year Has Been So Robust With Problems And Successes And Learning Experiences And Human Experienes That A Year Is A Lifetime At Apple. So This Has Been Ten Lifetimes.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Most Important Thing Is A Person. A Person Who Incites Your Curiosity And Feeds Your Curiosity; And Machines Cannot Do That In The Same Way That People Can.

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 Sat In A Garage And Invented The Future.

Don't Just Live A Life; Build One.

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.

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

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.

I Think Pcs Are Going To Be Like Trucks. Less People Will Need Them. And This Is Going To Make Some People Uneasy.

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.

We Don't Settle For Anything Less Than Excellence.

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

School Was Pretty Hard For Me At The Beginning.

I'm Going To Destroy Android, Because It's A Stolen Product. I'm Willing To Go Thermonuclear War On This.

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

Forget Everything

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

I've Read Something That Bill Gates Said About Six Months Ago. He Said, ‘i Worked Really, Really Hard In My 20s.’ And I Know What He Means, Because I Worked Really, Really Hard In My 20s Too. Literally, You Know, 7 Days A Week, A Lot Of Hours Every Day. And It Actually Is A Wonderful Thing To Do, Because You Can Get A Lot Done. But You Can't Do It Forever, And You Don't Want To Do It Forever, And You Have To Come Up With Ways Of Figuring Out What The Most Important Things Are And Working With Other People Even More.

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

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

Stanford University

The Most Precious Resource We Have Is Time.

You Know, I've Got A Plan That Could Rescue Apple. I Can't Say Any More Than That It's The Perfect Product And The Perfect Strategy For Apple. But Nobody There Will Listen To Me.

We Have Never Worried About Numbers. In The Marketplace, Apple Is Trying To Focus The Spotlight On Products, Because Products Really Make A Difference. You Can't Con People In This Business. The Products Speak For Themselves.

I Make 50 Cents For Showing Up... And The Other 50 Cents Is Based On My Performance.

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.

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

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.

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.

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