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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.

-Steve Jobs

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You Know We're Constantly

Steve Jobs

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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.

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To Go Forward You Have To Leave Something Behind

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

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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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It's Not The Consumers' Job To Figure Out What They Want

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I Thought Deeply About This. I Ended Up Concluding That The Worst Thing That Could Possibly Happen As We Get Big And As We Get A Little More Influence In The World Is If We Change Our Core Values And Start Letting It Slide, I Can't Do That. I'd Rather Quit.

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.

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.

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.

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Don't Be Evil Is A Load Of Crap.

Customers Always Want Something New

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.

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.

Every Once In A While A Revolutionary Product Comes Along That Changes Everything. It's Very Fortunate If You Can Work On Just One Of These In Your Career. ... Apple's Been Very Fortunate In That It's Introduced A Few Of These.

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.

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.

We Just Wanted To Build The Best Thing We Could Build

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.

Innovation Is The Only Way To Win.

Japan's Very Interesting. Some People Think It Copies Things. I Don't Think That Anymore. I Think What They Do Is Reinvent Things. They Will Get Something That's Already Been Invented And Study It Until They Thoroughly Understand It. In Some Cases, They Understand It Better Than The Original Inventor.

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 ... 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. It's Ad Hoc Meetings Of Six People Called By Someone Who Thinks He Has Figured Out The Coolest New Thing Ever And Who Wants To Know What Other People Think Of His Idea.

Creativity Comes From Spontaneous Meetings, From Random Discussions.

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

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.

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.

The Broader One's Understanding Of The Human Experience, The Better Design We Will Have.

My Mother Taught Me To Read Before I Went To School, So I Was Pretty Bored In School, And I Turned Into A Little Terror. You Should Have Seen Us In Third Grade. We Basically Destroyed Our Teacher. We Would Let Snakes Loose In The Classroom And Explode Bombs.

I Used To Sleep On The Floor In Friends' Rooms, Returning Coke Bottles For Food, Money, And Getting Weekly Free Meals At A Local Temple

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

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.

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.

I Know From My Own Education That If I Hadn't Encountered Two Or Three Individuals That Spent Extra Time With Me, I'm Sure I Would Have Been In Jail.

Guess Who Surprised Themselves And Changed Their Minds.

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.

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.

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.

Probably Death Is The Best Invention Of Life.

You've Got To Find What You Love.

Stanford University

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

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

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.

Stealing 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.

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Richard M. Nixon

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