Steve Jobs

All of us need to be on guard against arrogance, which knocks at the door whenever you are successful.

Half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from non-successful ones is pure perseverance.

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.

We're gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make 'me too' products.

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.

Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.

Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.

And we've all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Creativity is just connecting things.

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.

The journey is the reward

A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players.

Do not try to do everything. Do one thing well.

The only way to do great work is to love what you do.

Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.

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 or 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 the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

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.

My goal wasn't to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers.

The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it.

We're just enthusiastic about what we do.

My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

This revolution, the information revoultion, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. It's very crude today, yet our Macintosh computer takes less power than a 100-watt bulb to run it and it can save you hours a day. What will it be able to do ten or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now?

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.

I'm an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals.

Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.

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.

As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what's happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don't seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.

Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.

It's not the tools that you have faith in - tools are just tools. They work, or they don't work. It's people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I'm still optimistic I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes but not for long.

I want to put a ding in the universe.

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.

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works.

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.

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.

I believe life is an intelligent thing: that things aren't random.

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.

The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts.

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.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.

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.

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.

Great things in business are never done by one person. They're done by a team of people.

If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

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. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

We hire people who want to make the best things in the world.

The over-all point is that new technology will not necessarily replace old technology, but it will date it. By definition. Eventually, it will replace it. But it's like people who had black-and-white TVs when color came out. They eventually decided whether or not the new technology was worth the investment.

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.

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.

My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each others' negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts.

Who wants a stylus. You have to get em and put em away, and you lose em. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus.

For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

If you're gonna make connections which are innovative... you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn't been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

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. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn't be ours anymore.

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.

You'll see more and more perfection of that - computer as servant. But the next thing is going to be computer as a guide or agent.

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.

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.

And one more thing.

I've always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do.

Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn.

It's not a faith in technology. It's faith in people.

We made the buttons on the screen look so good you'll want to lick them.

Older people sit down and ask, 'What is it?' but the boy asks, 'What can I do with it?'.

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.

Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet 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.

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.

That's been one of my mantras - focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

My favorite things in life don't cost any money. It's really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator... these are NOT three separate devices! And we are calling it iPhone! Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. And here it is.

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. They see things differently. They're not fond of rules. Because they change things. They push the human race forward.

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.

Design means nothing if you don’t ship it.

It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

Some years you win, some years you build character.

The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.

It's not the customer's job to know what they want.

Greatness does not come from intelligence. Greatness comes from character, and character isn't isn't formed out of smart people: it's formed out of people who have suffered.

Focusing is about saying no.

Design isn’t just what it looks like and feels like — design is how it works.

If you live each day as if it were your last, someday you'll be right.

Your time is precious, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

You can’t just ask the customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.

Don’t be a career. The enemy of most dreams and intuitions, and one of the most dangerous and stifling concepts ever invented by humans, is the “Career”.

If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.

You have to start with the customer experience and work your way back to technology.

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

Perhaps millions of people, in the last few thousand years, have had ideas for improving it. All I did was take things a little further than just having the idea.

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.