Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
– Steve Jobs
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
– Steve Jobs
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.
– Steve Jobs
Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.
– Steve Jobs
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.
– Steve Jobs
You have to have a lot of passion for what you are 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 and you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don’t love, if you’re not having fun doing it, you don’t really love it, you’re gonna give up. And that’s what happens to most people actually. 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, often times, it’s the ones that are successful love what they did so they could persevere. You know, when it got really tough. And the ones that didn’t love it quit.
– Steve Jobs
No matter how smart you are, you need a team of great people.
– Steve Jobs
Apple is like a ship with a hole in the bottom, leaking water, and my job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction.
– Steve Jobs
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 comittees. We are organized like a start-up. One person’s in charge of iPhone OS software, one person is in charge of Mac hardware, one person is in charge of iPhone hardware engineering, another person is in charge of worldwide marketing, another person is in charge of operations. It’s organized like a start-up. We’re the biggest start-up on the planet.
– Steve Jobs
Picasso had a saying: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.
– Steve Jobs
The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people – as remarkable as the telephone.
– Steve Jobs, 1985
We’ve got cards and letters from lots of people that say that iTunes is their favorite app on windows. It’s like giving a glass of ice water to someone in hell.
– Steve Jobs
Unfortunately, people are not rebelling against Microsoft. They don’t know any better.
– Steve Jobs
I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year. It’s very character-building.
– Steve Jobs
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.
– Steve Jobs
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.
– Steve Jobs
Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.
– Steve Jobs
I wish developing great products was as easy as writing a check. If that was the case, Microsoft would have great products.
– Steve Jobs
Ad campaigns are necessary for competition; IBM’s ads are everywhere. But good PR educates people; that’s all it is. You can’t con people in this business. The products speak for themselves.
– Steve Jobs
Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.
– Steve Jobs
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.
– Steve Jobs
I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.
– Steve Jobs
If you live each day as it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.
– Steve Jobs
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.
– Steve Jobs
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.
– Steve Jobs
When I hire somebody really senior, competence is the ante. They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, are they going to fall in love with Apple? Because if they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself. They’ll want to do what’s best for Apple, not what’s best for them, what’s best for Steve, or anybody else.
– Steve Jobs
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.
– Steve Jobs
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.
– Steve Jobs
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? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it. – Steve Jobs
Apple has some tremendous assets, but I believe without some attention, the company could, could, could – I’m searching for the right word – could, could die.
– Steve Jobs
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.
– Steve Jobs
We’re gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make “me too” products. Let some other companies do that. For us, it’s always the next dream.
– Steve Jobs
A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.
– Steve Jobs
I was worth over $1,000,000 when I was 23, and over $10,000,000 when I was 24, and over $100,000,000 when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.
– Steve Jobs
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.
– Steve Jobs
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.
– Steve Jobs
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.
– Steve Jobs
We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.
– Steve Jobs
Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.
– Steve Jobs
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.
– Steve Jobs
We used to dream about this stuff. Now, we get to build it. It’s pretty neat.
– Steve Jobs
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.
– Steve Jobs
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.
– Steve Jobs
Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.
– Steve Jobs
Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
– Steve Jobs
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.
– Steve Jobs
We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.
– Steve Jobs
My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.
– Steve Jobs
Focus is about saying No.
– Steve Jobs
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.
– Steve Jobs
We’ve never worried about numbers. In the market place, Apple is trying to focus the spotlight on products, because products really make a difference.
– Steve Jobs