Let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.
I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out ok.
I do not adopt softness towards others because I want to make them better.
The doers are the major thinkers. The people that really
create the things that change this industry are both the thinker and
doer in one person.
You can build your own things that other people can use. And once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
Once you discover one simple fact, and that is everything
around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no
smarter than you.
I always advise people – Don’t wait! Do something when you are young, when you have nothing to lose, and keep that in mind.
That’s why we started Apple, we said you know, we have
absolutely nothing to lose. I was 20 years old at the time, Woz was
24-25, so we have nothing to lose. We have no families, no children, no
houses. Woz had an old car. I had a Volkswagen van, I mean, all we were
going to lose is our cars and the shirts off our back.
We he had everything to gain. And we figured even if we
crash and burn, and lose everything, the experience will have been worth
ten times the cost.
That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity.
The most precious thing that we all have with us is time.
The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
On the blue box: That was what we learned: was that us,
too, we didn’t know much. We could build a little thing that could
control a giant thing and that was an incredible lesson.
Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart.
Don’t take it all too seriously. 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.
I don’t care about being right. I care about success and doing the right thing.
One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.
People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.
We were really working fourteen-to-eighteen-hour days,
seven days a week. For like, two years, three years. That was our life.
But we loved it, we were young, and we could do it.
You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.
People judge you on your performance, so focus on the
outcome. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an
environment where excellence is expected.
You have to believe that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
Now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you, ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish’.
It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.
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.
And most important, have the courage to follow your heart
and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
Everything else is secondary.
Famous Apple Ad with Einstein, Picasso, etc. (Video):
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, and they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify and vilify them. About
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 crazy,
we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can
change the world, are the ones who do.
Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to
me… Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s
what matters to me.
Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice.
Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.
If today were the last of your life, would you do what you were going to do today?
I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like:
‘If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most
certainly be right.’ It made an impression on me, and since then, for
the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked
myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I
am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘no’ for too
many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
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 and don’t settle.
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.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I
know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are
already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
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.
There is no reason not to follow your heart.
And you can change it, you can influence it.
In the broadest context, the goal is to seek enlightenment – however you define it.
If you want it, you can fly, you just have to trust you a lot.
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 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 than that.
The only thing you have in your life is time. If you
invest that time in yourself to have great experiences that are going to
enrich you, then you can’t possibly lose.
There was a constant flow of intellectual questioning
about the truth of life. That was a time when every college student in
this country read Be Here Now and Diet for a Small Planet – there were
about ten books.
On being fired from Apple and called back 12 years later: What a circle of life. You know? Life is just always mysterious and surprising, and you never know what’s around the next corner.
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 executive 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.
In business, if I knew earlier what I know now, I’d have
probably done some things a lot better than I did, but I also would’ve
probably done some other things a lot worse. But so what? It’s more
important to be engaged in the present.
I think the things you most regret in life are things you didn’t do. What you really regret was never asking that girl to dance.
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.
I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete.
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. It is life’s change agent, it clears out
the old to make way for the new.
I’ve always felt that death is the greatest invention of
life. I’m sure that life evolved without death at first and found that
without death, life didn’t work very well because it didn’t make room
for the young.
Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.
Without death, there would be very little progress.
I’ve been rejected, but I was still in love.
If you don’t love it, you’re going to fail.
I was lucky, I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20.
People say you have to have a lot of passion for what
you’re doing and it’s totally true. And the reason is because it’s so
hard that if you don’t, any rational person would give up. It’s really
hard. And you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you
don’t love it, if you’re not having fun doing it, you don’t really love
it, you’re going to give up.
If you really look at the ones that ended up, you know,
being “successful” in the eyes of society and the ones that didn’t,
oftentimes, it’s the ones who were successful and loved what they did so
they could persevere, you know, when it got really tough. And the ones
that didn’t love it quit because they’re sane, right? Who would want to
put up with this stuff if you don’t love it?
So it’s a lot of hard work and it’s a lot of worrying
constantly and if you don’t love it, you’re going to fail. So you’ve got
to love it and you’ve got to have passion and I think that’s the high-order bit.
That was one of the things that came out most clearly
from this whole experience [with cancer]. I realized that I love my
life. I really do. I’ve got the greatest family in the world, and I’ve
got my work. And that’s pretty much all I do. I don’t socialize much or
go to conferences. I love my family, and I love running Apple, and I
love Pixar. And I get to do that. I’m very lucky.
You get your wind back, remember the finish line, and keep going.
At Apple, people are putting in 18-hour days.
I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.
It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are
such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don’t
blame them. It’s really tough and it consumes your life.
If you’ve got a family and you’re in the early days of a
company, I can’t imagine how one could do it. I’m sure it’s been done
but it’s rough. It’s pretty much an eighteen hour day job, seven days a
week for awhile. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not
going to survive. You’re going to give it up.
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. I think that’s half
the battle right there.
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.
I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard on something, but
working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost
everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it
at the end.
On the MacIntosh: When we finally presented it at the
shareholders’ meeting, everyone in the auditorium gave it a five-minute
ovation. What was incredible to me was that I could see the Mac team in
the first few rows. It was as though none of us could believe we’d
actually finished it. Everyone started crying.
As it was clear that the Sixties were over, it was also
clear that a lot of the people who had gone through the Sixties ended up
not really accomplishing what they set out to accomplish, and because
they had thrown their discipline to the wind, they didn’t have much to
fall back on.
Pixar has been a marathon, not a sprint. 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.
On the MacIntosh: It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn’t be ours anymore.
My wife deserves all the credit for keeping me at it.
On his father: He was a machinist by trade and worked
very hard and was kind of a genius with his hands. He had a workbench
out in his garage where, when I was about five or six, he sectioned off a
little piece of it and said “Steve, this is your workbench now.” And he
gave me some of his smaller tools and showed me how to use a hammer and
saw and how to build things. It really was very good for me. He spent a
lot of time with me… teaching me how to build things, how to take
things apart, put things back together.
I can tell you this: I’ve been married for 8 years, and
that’s had a really good influence on me. I’ve been very lucky, through
random happenstance I just happened to sit next to this wonderful woman
who became my wife. And it was a big deal. We have 3 kids, and it’s been
a big deal. You see the world differently.
I’ve never been so tired in my life. I’d come home at
about ten o’clock at night and flop straight into bed, then haul myself
out at six the next morning and take a shower and go to work. My wife
deserves all the credit for keeping me at it. She supported me and kept the family together with a husband in absentia.
Most people don’t get those experiences because they
never ask. I’ve never found anybody that didn’t want to help me if I
asked them for help.
Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people
never ask. And that’s what separates sometimes the people that do
things from the people that just dream about them.
As you may know, I was basically fired from Apple when I
was 30 and was invited to come back 12 years later so that was difficult
when it happened but maybe the best thing that could ever happen to me.
[…] you just move on, life goes on and you learn from it.
If you act like you can do something, then it will work.
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.
We’ve done so many hardware products where Jony and I
have looked at each other and said, ‘We don’t know how to make it any
better than this, we just don’t know how to make it’. But we always do;
we realize another way. And then it’s not long after the new thing comes
out that we look at the older thing and go, ‘How can we ever have done
that?’
Life goes on and you learn from it.
Each year has been so robust with problems and successes
and learning experiences and human experiences that a year is a lifetime
at Apple.
When I was 12 or 13, I wanted to build something and I
needed some parts, so I picked up the phone and called Bill Hewlett – he
was listed in the Palo Alto phone book. He answered the phone and he
was real nice. He chatted with me for, like, 20 minutes. He didn’t know
me at all, but he ended up giving me some parts and he got me a job that
summer working at Hewlett-Packard on the line, assembling frequency
counters. Assembling may be too strong. I was putting in screws. It
didn’t matter; I was in heaven.
I’ve never found anyone who’s said no or hung up the
phone when I called-I just asked. And when people ask me, I try to be as
responsive, to pay that debt of gratitude back.
You gotta act. And you’ve gotta be willing to fail, you
gotta be ready to crash and burn, with people on the phone, with
starting a company, with whatever. If you’re afraid of failing, you
won’t get very far.
When you die, it doesn’t just all disappear.
Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50-50 maybe.
Ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it
more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of – maybe it’s
’cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn’t
just all disappear. The wisdom
you’ve accumulated. Somehow it lives on, but sometimes I think it’s
just like an on-off switch. Click and you’re gone. And that’s why I
don’t like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.
I think different religions are different doors to the
same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t.
It’s the great mystery.
But I believe life is an intelligent thing, that things aren’t random.
I’m a long-term kind of person.
Fortunately, my training has been in doing things that
take a long time. You know? I was at Apple 10 years. I would have
preferred to be there the rest of my life. So I’m a long-term kind of
person.
I have been trained to think in units of time that are
measured in several years. With what I’ve chosen to do with my life, you
know, even a small thing takes a few years. To do anything of magnitude takes at least five years, more likely seven or eight. Rightfully or wrongfully, that’s how I think.
I hate it when people call themselves “entrepreneurs”
when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell
or go public, so they can cash in and move on.
I’m a tool builder. That’s how I think of myself. I want
to build really good tools that I know in my gut and my heart will be
valuable. And then, whatever happens, is… you can’t really predict
exactly what will happen, but you can feel the direction that we’re
going. And that’s about as close as you can get. Then you just stand
back and get out of the way, and these things take on a life of their
own.
If you are willing to work hard and ask lots of questions, you can learn business pretty fast.
On starting Apple with Steve Wozniak: 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 4000 employees.
I remember many late nights coming out of the Mac
building when I would have the most incredibly powerful feelings about
my life.
Steve Jobs Sayings On Startups
We used to dream about this stuff. Now we get to build it. It’s pretty great.
The smallest company in the world can look as large as the largest company on the web.
I think this is the start of something really big. Sometimes that first step is the hardest one, and we’ve just taken it.
Another priority was to make Apple more entrepreneurial
and startup-like. So we immediately reorganized, drastically narrowed
the product line, and changed compensation for senior managers so they
get a lot of stock but no cash bonuses. The upshot is that the place
feels more like a young company.
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.
One of the keys to Apple is Apple’s an incredibly
collaborative company. You know how many committees we have at Apple?
Zero. We have no committees. We are organized like a start-up. One
person’s in charge of iPhone OS software, one person’s in charge of Mac
hardware, one person’s in charge of iPhone hardware engineering, another
person’s in charge of worldwide marketing, another person’s in charge
of operations. We are organized like a startup. We are the biggest
startup on the planet.
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.
Most of the time, we’re taking things. Neither you nor I
made the clothes we wear; we don’t make the food or grow the foods we
eat; we use a language that was developed by other people; we use
another society’s mathematics. Very rarely do we get a chance to put
something back into that pool. I think we have that opportunity now.
No, we don’t know where it will lead. We just know there’s something much bigger than any of us here.
There’s something much bigger than any of us here.
We’re trying to use the swiftness and creativity in a
younger-style company, and yet bring to bear the tremendous resources of
a company the size of Apple to do large projects that you could never
handle at a startup.
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.
Steve Jobs Sayings On Teamwork
The best ideas have to win.
My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys
who kept each other’s 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 have wonderful arguments. […] If you want to hire
great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them
make a lot of decisions and you have to, you have to be run by ideas,
not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise, good people don’t
stay.
When you work with somebody that close and you go through
experiences like the ones we went through, there’s a bond in life.
Whatever hassles you have, there is a bond. And even though he may not
be your best friend as time goes on, there’s still something that
transcends even friendship, in a way.
I contribute ideas, sure. Why would I be there if I didn’t?
Steve Jobs Sayings On Vision
We are gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make ‘me-too’ products. For us, it’s always the next dream.
If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.
When we create stuff, we do it because we listen to
customers, get their inputs and also throw in what we’d like to see,
too. We cook up new products. You never really know if people will love
them as much as you do.
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.
Part 1. There needs to be someone who is the keeper and
reiterator of the vision. […] A lot of times, when you have to walk a
thousand miles and you take the first step, it looks like a long way,
and it really helps if there’s someone there saying, “Well we’re one
step closer. The goal definitely exists; it’s not just a mirage out
there”.
Part 2. So in a thousand and one little, and sometimes larger ways, the vision needs to be reiterated. I do that a lot.
When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more
room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, ‘Get
it away!’ and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look
backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.
The hard part of what we’re up against now is that people
ask you about specifics and you can’t tell them. A hundred years ago,
if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, ‘What are you going to be
able to do with a telephone?’ he wouldn’t have been able to tell him the
ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn’t know that people
would use the telephone to call up and find out what movies were playing
that night or to order some groceries or call a relative on the other
side of the globe.
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.
Neither of us had any idea that this would go anywhere.
Woz is motivated by figuring things out. He concentrated more on the
engineering and proceeded to do one of his most brilliant pieces of
work, which was the disk drive, another key engineering feat that made
the Apple II a possibility. I was trying to build the company, trying to
find out what a company was. I don’t think it would have happened
without Woz and I don’t think it would have happened without me.
Even a great brand needs investment and caring if it’s
going to retain its relevance and vitality and the Apple brand has
clearly suffered from neglect in this area in the last few years, and we
need to bring it back. The way to do that is not to talk about speed
and fees, it’s not to talk about bits and mega-hertz, it’s not to talk
about why we are better than Windows.
The best example of all and one of the greatest jobs of
marketing that the universe has ever seen, is Nike. Remember, Nike sells
a commodity. They sell shoes. And yet, when you think of Nike, you feel
something different than a shoe company. In their ads, as you know,
they don’t ever talk about the product. They don’t ever tell you about
their air soles.
What does Nike do in their advertising? They honor great
athletes, and they honor great athletics. That’s who they are, that’s
what they are about.
More important than building a product, we are in the
process of architecting a company that will hopefully be much more
incredible, the total will be much more incredible than the sum of its
parts.
Steve Jobs Lines On Ambition And Changing The World
Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?
My dream is that every person in the world will have
their own Apple computer. To do that, we’ve got to be a great marketing
company.
I’ll tell you what our goal is: our goal is to make the
best personal computers in the world and to make products we are proud
to sell and recommend to our family and friends, and, we want to do that
at the lowest price we can.
None of the really bright people I knew in college went
into politics. They all sensed that, in terms of making a change in the
world, politics wasn’t the place to be in the late Sixties and
Seventies. All of them are in business now, which is funny, because they
were the same people who trekked off to India or who tried in one way
or another to find some sort of truth about life.
Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world.
We have a major opportunity to influence where Apple is
going. As every day passes, the work fifty people are doing here is
going to send a giant ripple through the universe. I am really impressed
with the quality of our ripple. I know I might be a little hard to get
on with, but this is the most fun I’ve had in my life. I’m having a
blast.
We attract a different kind 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 a little over his head
and make a little dent in the universe.
Steve Jobs Lines On Management And Leadership
My job is to say when something sucks rather than sugarcoat it.
What I’m best at doing is finding a group of talented people and making things with them.
What I do all day, is meet with teams of people, and work
on ideas, and solve problems, to make new products, to make new
marketing programs, whatever it is.
The greatest people are self-managing – they don’t need
to be managed. Once they know what to do, they’ll go figure out how to
do it. What they need is a common vision. And that’s what leadership is:
[h]aving a vision; being able to articulate that so the people around
you can understand it; and getting a consensus on a common vision.
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.
Don’t get hung up on who owns the idea. Pick the best one, and let’s go.
We’ve got 25,000 people at Apple. About 10,000 of them
are in the stores. And my job is to work with sort of the top 100
people, that’s what I do. That doesn’t mean they’re all vice presidents.
Some of them are just key individual contributors.
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.
My job is to create a space for them.
Companies, as they grow to become multi-billion-dollar
entities, somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of
middle management between the people running the company and the people
doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or a passion about
the products.
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.
My job is not to 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.
On why he is brutal to most colleagues: I’m brutally
honest, because the price of admission to being in the room with me is I
get to tell you your full of shit if you’re full of shit, and you get
to say to me I’m full of shit, and we have some rip-roaring fights. And
that keeps the B players, the bozos, from larding the organization, only
the A players survive. And the people who do survive, say, ‘Yeah, he
was rough.’ They say things even worse than ‘He cut in line in front of
me,’ but they say, ‘This was the greatest ride I’ve ever had, and I
would not give it up for anything.’
On meetings: We don’t have a lot of process at Apple, but that’s one of the few things we do just to all stay on the same page.
Fact: Steve was named one of America’s toughest bosses in 1993.
Steve Jobs Lines On Hiring
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 want to see what people are like under pressure.
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.
We hire people who want to make the best things in the
world. You’d be surprised how hard people work over around here. They
work nights and weekends, sometimes not seeing their families for a
while. Sometimes people work through Christmas to make sure the tooling
is just right at some factory in some corner of the world so our product
comes out the best it can be. People care so much, and it shows.
They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, are they going to fall in love with Apple?
All we are is our ideas or people. That’s what keeps us
going to work in the morning, to hang around these great bright people.
I’ve always thought that recruiting is the heart and soul of what we do.
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.
Recruiting is hard. It’s just finding the needles in the haystack.
We do it ourselves and we spend a lot of time at it. I’ve
participated in the hiring of maybe 5,000+ people in my life. So I take
it very seriously.
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? Why are they here? I
ask everybody that: ‘Why are you here?’ The answers themselves are not
what you’re looking for. It’s the meta-data.
My number one job here at Apple is to make sure that the top 100 people are A+ players. And everything else will take care of itself.
It’s painful when you have some people who are not the
best people in the world and you have to get rid of them; but I found my
job has sometimes exactly been that – to get rid of some people who
didn’t measure up and I’ve always tried to do it in a humane way. But
nonetheless it has to be done and it is never fun.
Many times in an interview I will purposely upset
someone: I’ll criticize their prior work. I’ll do my homework, find out
what they worked on, and say, “God, that really turned out to be a bomb.
That really turned out to be a bozo product. Why did you work on
that?…”.
I want to see if they just fold or if they have firm conviction, belief, and pride in what they did.
Steve Jobs Lines On Money
Well, they’re just yardsticks, you know.
You should never start a company with the goal of getting
rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a
company that will last.
I think money is a wonderful thing because it enables you
to do things, it enables you to invest in ideas that don’t have a
short-term payback and things like that.
It’s very interesting, I was worth about over a million
dollars when I was 23 and over 10 million when I was 24 and over a
hundred million when I was 25 and it wasn’t that important because I
never did it for the money.
But especially at that point in my life it was not the
most important thing, the most important thing was the company, the
people, the products we were making, what we were going to enable people
to do with these products so I didn’t think about it a great deal, and I
never sold any stock, just really believe that the company would do
very well over the long term.
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.
I’m not going to let it ruin my life. Isn’t it kind of
funny? 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 in the past ten
years.
It makes me feel old, sometimes, when I speak at a campus
and I find that what students are most in awe of is the fact that I’m a
millionaire.
I still don’t understand it. It’s a large responsibility to have more than you can spend in your lifetime, and I feel I have to spend it.
If you die, you certainly don’t want to leave a large amount to your
children. It will just ruin their lives. And if you die without kids, it
will all go to the Government. Almost everyone would think that he
could invest the money back into humanity in a much more astute way than
the Government could. The challenges are to figure out how to live with
it and to reinvest it back into the world, which means either giving it
away or using it to express your concerns or values.
It was giant! We did about $200,000 when our business was
in the garage, in 1976. In 1977, about $7,000,000 in business. I mean,
it was phenomenal! And in 1978, we did $17,000,000. In 1979, we did
$47,000,000. That’s when we all really sensed that this was just going
through the rafters. In 1980, we did $117,000,000. In 1981, we did
$335,000,000. In 1982, we did $583,000,000. In 1983, we did
$985,000,000, I think. This year, it will be a billion and a half.
Well, they’re just yardsticks, you know. The neatest
thing was, by 1979, I was able to walk into classrooms that had 15 Apple
computers and see the kids using them. And those are the kinds of
things that are really the milestones.
None of those people care about the money. I mean, a lot
of them made a lot of money, but they don’t really care. Their
lifestyles haven’t particularly changed. It was the chance to actually
try something, to fail, to succeed, to grow.
Steve Jobs Lines On Marketing
To me, marketing is about values.
It’s a very complicated world. It’s a very noisy world.
And we not gonna get a chance to get people to remember much about us.
No company is. So we have to be really clear on what we want them to
know about us.
We don’t stand a chance of advertising with features and
benefits and with RAMs and with charts and comparisons. The only chance
we have of communicating is with a feeling.
You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try
to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want
something new.
You saw the 1984 commercial. Macintosh was basically this
relatively small company in Cupertino, California, taking on the
Goliath, IBM, and saying, “Wait a minute, your way is wrong. This is now
the way we want computers to go. This is not the legacy we want to
leave. This is not what we want our kids to be learning. This is wrong
and we are going to show you the right way to do it and here it is. It’s
called Macintosh and it is so much better.
We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. We just want to make great products.
5 great quotes on marketing:
Best way to sell something – don’t sell anything. Earn the awareness, respect, & trust of those who might buy. Rand Fishkin
The culture is your brand. Tony Hsieh
Make your marketing so useful people would pay you for it. Jay Baer
The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing. Tom Fishburne
The consumer is not a moron; she is your wife. David Ogilvy
Fact 1: ‘Empathy, Focus, and Impute‘. Those were the 3 goals of the initial ‘Apple Marketing Philosophy‘ released in 1977.
Steve Jobs Words On Technology
We have no idea how far it’s going to go.
Humans are tool builders. We create things to amplify
ourselves. The computer will rank at the top -it’s the most awesome tool
ever.
What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that
we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our
minds.
We think basically you watch television to turn your
brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your
brain on.
I think everybody in this country should learn how to
program a computer, should learn a computer language because it teaches
you how to think.
Talking about bicycles: Human are tool builders, and we
build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human abilities. We
actually ran an ad like this early at Apple that the personal computer
is the bicycle of the mind and I believe that with every bone in my body
that all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near,
if not at the top, as history unfolds and we look back.
It is the most awesome tool that we ever invented (the
computer). And I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place
in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time historically where this
invention has taken form.
A computer is the most incredible tool we’ve ever seen.
It can be a writing tool, a communications center, a super calculator, 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.
Right now, computers make our lives easier. They do work
for us in fractions of a second that would take us hours. They increase
the quality of life, some of that by simply automating drudgery and some
of that by broadening our possibilities. As things progress, they’ll be
doing more and more for us.
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 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.
On how will the Web impact our society: We live in an
information economy, but I don’t believe we live in an information
society. People are thinking less than they used to. It’s primarily
because of television. People are reading less and they’re certainly
thinking less.
I don’t see most people using the Web to get more information. We’re already in information overload. No matter how much information the Web can dish out, most people get far more information than they can assimilate anyway.
But the next thing is going to be computer as guide or
agent. And what that means is that it’s going to do more in terms of
anticipating what we want and doing it for us, noticing connections and
patterns in what we do, asking us if this is some sort of generic thing
we’d like to do regularly, so that we’re going to have, as an example,
the concept of triggers.
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.
The point is that tools are always going to be used for
certain things we don’t find personally pleasing. And it’s ultimately
the wisdom of people, not the tools themselves, that is going to
determine whether or not these things are used in positive, productive
ways.
I do feel there is another way we have an effect on society besides our computers.
They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.
Steve Jobs Words On Apple
One of the things that made Apple great was that, in the early days, it was built from the heart.
And boy, have we patented it. (First announcement of the iPhone, Macworld 2006)
The roots of Apple were to build computers for people, not for corporations. The world doesn’t need another Dell or Compaq.
You know, everybody has a cell phone, but I don’t know
one person who likes their cell phone. I want to make a phone that
people love.
What if Apple didn’t exist? Think about it. Time wouldn’t
get published next week. Some 70% of the newspaper in the U.S. wouldn’t
publish tomorrow morning. Some 60% of the kids wouldn’t have computers;
64% of the teachers wouldn’t have computers. More than half the
Websites created on Macs wouldn’t exist. So there’s something worth
saving here. See?
What are the great brands? Levi’s, Coke, Disney, Nike.
Most people would put Apple in that category. You could spend billions
of dollars building a brand not as good as Apple. Yet Apple hasn’t been
doing anything with this incredible asset.
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.
Apple’s the only company left in this industry that
designs the whole widget. Hardware, software, developer relations,
marketing.
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.
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 had this idea of being able to get rid of the keyboard,
type on a multi-touch glass display, and I asked our folks, “Could we
come up with a multi-touch display?
We designed iMac to deliver the things consumers care about most: the excitement of the Internet and the simplicity of the Mac.
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.
Talking about the iPod Nano: We’re in uncharted territory. We’ve never sold this many of anything before.
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.
The older I get, the more I see how much motivations
matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really
love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love
music.
I am saddened, not by Microsoft 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.
Their products have no spirit of enlightenment about
them, they are very pedestrian. The sad part is that customers don’t
have a lot of that spirit either, but the way that we’re going to
ratchet up our species is to take the best and to spread it around
everybody so that everybody grows up with better things and starts to
understand the subtlety of these better things.
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.
Their products have no spirit to them.
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.
With our technology, with objects, literally three people in a garage can blow away what 200 people at Microsoft can do.
Our friends up north spend over five billion dollars on
research and development and all they seem to do is copy Google and
Apple.
I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes.
It’s very easy to take credit for the thinking. The doing
is more concrete. But somebody, it’s very easy to say “Oh, I thought of
these three years ago”. But usually when you dig a little deeper, you
find that the people that really did it were also the people that really
worked through the hard intellectual problems as well.
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 discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the
company, the way you organize a company. The whole notion of how you
build a company is fascinating.
Leonardo [da Vinci] was the artist but he also mixed all
his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist. He knew about
pigments, knew about human anatomy. And combining all of those skills together, the art and the science, the thinking and the doing, was what resulted in the exceptional result.
When companies get bigger they try to replicate their success. But they assume their magic came from process.
The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers.
Actually, making an insanely great product has a lot to
do with the process of making the product, how you learn things and
adopt new ideas and throw out old ideas.
People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of
electrochemical computers. Your thoughts construct patterns like
scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In
most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a
record, and they never get out of them. It’s a rare person who etches
grooves that are other than a specific way of looking at things, a
specific way of questioning things.
You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could
have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he
didn’t. He had to move on, and when he did, by going electric in 1965,
he alienated a lot of people. His 1966 Europe tour was his greatest.
The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving,
moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do – keep
moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you are not busy being born, you’re
busy dying.
I don’t think that my role in life is to run big organizations and do incremental improvements.
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.
The people who go to see our movies are trusting us with
something very important – their time and their imagination. So in order
to respect that trust, we have to keep changing; we have to challenge
ourselves and try to surprise our audiences with something new every
time.
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.
You can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next
big thing is. There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If
I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A
faster horse’.
My philosophy is that everything starts with a great
product. So, you know, I obviously believed in listening to customers,
but customers can’t tell you about the next breakthrough that’s going to
happen next year that’s going the change the whole industry. So you
have to listen very carefully. But then you have to go and sort of stow
away – you have to go hide away with people that really understand the
technology, but also really care about the customers, and dream up this next breakthrough.
Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is
best to admit them quickly and get on with improving your other
innovations.
Steve Jobs Words On Thinking Differently
The theme of the campaign is ‘Think different’. It’s honoring the people who think different, and who move this world forward.
Apple is built on refugees from other companies. These
are the extremely bright individual contributors who were troublemakers
at other companies.
The people who made Mac are sort of on the edge.
On if he is a nerd or a hippie: If I had to pick one of
those two I’m clearly a hippie. All the people that I worked with were
clearly in that category too.
I think the artistry is in having an insight into what
one sees around them. Generally putting things together in a way no one
else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who
don’t have that insight.
5 quotes on thinking differently
I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking. Albert Einstein
If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old. Peter Drucker
Obsession is the wellspring of genius and madness. Michel de Montaigne
Be yourself, everyone else is already taken. Oscar Wilde
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect). Mark Twain
Steve Jobs Words On Creativity
Creativity is just connecting things.
When you ask creative people how they did something, they
feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw
something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they
were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.
And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
The way to ratchet up our species is to get better things to more people -products with spirit and creativity.
I don’t think that most of the really best people that
I’ve worked with worked with computers for the sake of working with
computers. They worked with computers because they are the medium that
is best capable of transmitting some feeling that you have, that you
want to share with other people.
What I do see is a small group of people who are artists
and care more about their art than they do about almost anything else.
It’s more important than finding a girlfriend, it’s more important… than
cooking a meal, it’s more important than joining the Marines, it’s more
important than whatever.
Look at the way artists work. They’re not typically the
most ‘balanced’ people in the world. Now, yes, we have a few workaholics
here who are trying to escape other things, of course. But the majority
of people out here have made very conscious decisions; they really
have.
One of my role models is Bob Dylan. As I grew up, I
learned the lyrics to all his songs and watched him never stand still.
If you look at the artists, if they get really good, it always occurs to
them at some point that they can do this one thing for the rest of
their lives, and they can be really successful to the outside world but
not really be successful to themselves. That’s the moment that an artist
really decides who he or she is. If they keep on risking failure,
they’re still artists.
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.
As you are growing and changing, the more the outside
world tries to reinforce an image of you that it thinks you are, the
harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times,
artists have to go, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting
out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.
3 simple ways to improve your creativity like Steve
- Walk.
Steve was famous for his walking meetings. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
too, Jack Dorsey (Twitter), Charles Dickens, and Beethoven.
- Travel. Steve visited India in 1974 searching new experiences and a deeper meaning of life.
- Meditate.
After his trip to India, Steve became a practitioner of Zen Buddhism
and meditation. He even went to meditation retreats every few months.
Try it yourself, you could improve your creativity, clarity, and focus.
Steve Jobs Words On Design And User Experience (UX)
We are very careful about what features we add because we can’t take them away.
You’ve baked a really lovely cake, but then you’ve used dog shit for frosting.
Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation
that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product
or service.
I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s
inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the
back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.
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. Most people don’t take the
time to do that.
Many companies forget what it means to make great
products. After initial success, sales and marketing people take over
and the product people eventually make their way out.
When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of
drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even
though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s
there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back.
I love it when you can bring really great design and
simple capability to something that doesn’t cost much. It was the
original vision for Apple. That’s what we tried to do with the first
Mac. That’s what we did with the iPod.
For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
It takes a lot of hard work,” Jobs said, “to make
something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come
up with elegant solutions.
A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse
experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up
with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem.
We will make them bright and pure and honest about being
high-tech, rather than a heavy industrial look of black, black, black,
black, like Sony.
We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the
trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but
also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our
wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most
about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care
about using a quarter of the water?
We spent two weeks talking about this every night at the
dinner table. We’d get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And
the talk was about design.
People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are
handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think
design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
You’re asking, where does aesthetic judgment come from?
With many things: high-performance automobiles, for example, the
aesthetic comes right from the function, and I suppose electronics is no
different.
I’ve also found that the best companies pay attention to
aesthetics. They take the extra time to lay out grids and proportion
things appropriately, and it seems to pay off for them. I mean, beyond
the functional benefits, the aesthetic communicates something about how
they think of themselves, their sense of discipline in engineering, how
they run their company, stuff like that.
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.
The products suck! There’s no sex in them anymore!
Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in
your brain, these concepts and fitting them all together in kind of
continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get
what you want.
Every day you discover something new that is a new
problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little
differently.
I have always found Buddhism – Japanese Zen Buddhism in
particular – to be aesthetically sublime. The most sublime thing I’ve
ever seen are the gardens around Kyoto.
Look at the Mercedes design, the proportion of sharp
detail to flowing lines. Over the years, they have made the design
softer but the details starker. That’s what we have to do with the
Macintosh.
You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the technology.
What we’re trying to do is remove the barrier of having to learn how to use a computer.
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.
It’s hard for them to tell you what they want when
they’ve never seen anything remotely like it. Take desktop video
editing. I never got one request from someone who wanted to edit movies
on his computer. Yet now that people see it, they say, ‘Oh my God,
that’s great!’.
What we’re going to do is make the products high-tech,
and we’re going to package them cleanly so that you know they’re
high-tech. We will fit them in a small package, and then we can make
them beautiful and white, just like Braun does with its electronics.
On making simple designs:
It’s insane: We all have busy lives, we have jobs, we have interests,
and some of us have children. Everyone’s lives are just getting busier,
not less busy, in this busy society. You just don’t have time to learn
this stuff, and everything’s getting more complicated… We both don’t
have a lot of time to learn how to use a washing machine or a phone.
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.
We think that our job is to take responsibility for the complete user experience.
3 great quotes on user experience:
Customer service is the new marketing. Derek Sivers
Customer service shouldn’t just be a department, it should be the entire company. Tony Hsieh
The single most important thing is to make people happy.
If you are making people happy, as a side effect, they will be happy to
open up their wallets and pay you. Derek Sivers
Steve Jobs Words On Culture, Arts And Music
We want to stand at the intersection of computers and humanism.
Besides Dylan, I was interested in Eastern mysticism, which hit the shores at about the same time.
Woz and I very much liked Bob Dylan’s poetry, and we spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of that stuff.
I started to listen to music a whole lot and I started to
read more outside of just science and technology, Shakespeare, Plato. I
loved ‘King Lear’.
Apple is about something more than that, Apple, at the
core, its core value, is that we believe that people with passion can
change the world for the better.
Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to
trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and
then try to bring those things into what you’re doing.
Learning to program teaches you how to think. Computer science is a liberal art.
Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists
steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and
I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people
working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and
historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the
world.
On why he made everybody sign the Mac cases: Because the
people that worked on it consider themselves and I certainly consider
them artists. These are the people that under different circumstances
would be painters and poets but because of that time that we live in
this new medium has appeared in which to express oneself to one’s fellow
species and that’s a medium of computing.
How do you know the direction to head with products? It
boils down to taste. Emerge yourself with the best ideas from the
humanities. And integrate them. Pull interests from diverse areas.
A lot of people that would have been artists and
scientists have gone into this field to express their feeling and so it
seemed like the right thing to do.
The finest dozen computer scientists I know are all musicians.
The key thing that comes true is that they had a variety
of experiences which they could draw upon, in order to try to solve a
problem or to attack a particular dilemma in a kind of unique way.
Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist and a great scientist.
Michelangelo knew a tremendous amount about how to cut stone at the quarry.
The finest dozen computer scientists I know are all
musicians. Some are better than others, but they all consider that an
important part of their life. I don’t believe that the best people in
any of these fields see themselves as one branch of a forked tree. I
just don’t see that. People bring these things together a lot.
Anyway, one of our biggest challenges, and the one I
think John Sculley and I should be judged on in five to ten years, is
making Apple an incredibly great 10 or 20 billion-dollar company. ‘Will
it still have the spirit it does today?’ We’re charting new territory.
If Apple becomes a place where computers are a commodity
item, where the romance is done, and where people forget that computers
are the most incredible invention that man has ever invented, I’ll feel I
have lost Apple. But if I’m a million miles away, and all those people
still feel those things… then I will feel that my genes are still there.
You know, Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid.
On Dr. Edwin Land: Not only was he one of the great
inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of
art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that.
You need a very product-oriented culture, even in a
technology company. Lots of companies have tons of great engineers and
smart people. But ultimately, there needs to be some gravitational force
that pulls it all together. Otherwise, you can get great pieces of
technology all floating around the universe. But it doesn’t add up to
much.
We did iTunes because we all love music. We made what we
thought was the best jukebox in iTunes. Then we all wanted to carry our
whole music libraries around with us. The team worked really hard. And
the reason that they worked so hard is because we all wanted one. You
know? I mean, the first few hundred customers were us.
What are we, anyway? Most of what we think we are is just
a collection of likes and dislikes, habits, patterns. At the core of
what we are is our values, and what decisions and actions we make
reflect those values.
Steve Jobs Words On Learning, Education, Meditation
Well, I was thrown out of school a few times.
I think all of us need to be on guard against arrogance which knocks at the door whenever you’re successful.
Invest time in yourself to have great experiences that are going to enrich you.
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.
Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.
The key thing to remember about me is that I’m still a student. I’m still in boot camp. If anyone is reading any of my thoughts, I’d keep that in mind.
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.
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.
We wanted to more richly experience why were we were
alive, not just make a better life, and so people went in search of
things. The great thing that came from that time was to realize that
there was definitely more to life than the materialism of the late 50’s
and early sixties. We were going in search of something deeper.
Between my sophomore and junior years, I got stoned for
the first time; I discovered Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, and all that
classic stuff. I read Moby Dick and went back as a junior taking
creative-writing classes.
You could get LSD fresh made from Stanford. You could
sleep on the beach at night with your girlfriend. California has a sense
of experimentation and a sense of openness – openness to new
possibilities.
Human minds settle into fixed ways of looking at the
world and that’s always been true and it’s probably always going to be
true.
There’s a phrase in Buddhism, ‘Beginner’s mind’. It’s wonderful to have a beginner’s mind.
I’m completely stunned. I’m 19 years old, in a foreign
country, up in the Himalayas, and here is this bizarre Indian baba who
has just dragged me away from the rest of the crowd, shaving my head
atop this mountain peak. I’m still not sure why he did it.
I bought an apartment in New York, but it’s because I
love that city. I’m trying to educate myself, being from a small town in
California, not having grown up with the sophistication and culture of a
large city. I consider it part of my education.
I used to think that technology could help education.
I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools
than anybody else on the planet. But I’ve had to come to the inevitable
conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to
solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No
amount of technology will make a dent.
The most important thing is a person. A person who
incites and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the
same way that people can.
One of the saints in my life is this woman named Imogene
Hill, who was a fourth-grade teacher who taught this advanced class. She
got hip to my whole situation in about a month and kindled a passion in
me for learning things. I learned more that year than I think I learned
in any year in school.
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.
School was pretty hard for me at the beginning.
My mother taught me how to read before I got to school
and so when I got there I really just wanted to do two things. I wanted
to read books because I loved reading books and I wanted to go outside
and chase butterflies. You know, do the things that five-year-olds like
to do. I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever
encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got
me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.
Obviously, one of the great challenges of an education is to teach us how to think.
What we’re finding is that computers are actually going to affect the
quality of thinking as more and more of our children have these tools
available to them.
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.
When you’re young, a little bit of course correction goes a long way. I think it takes pretty talented people to do that.
