Steve Jobs was many things. One thing is certain. His innovation, tenacity and drive made him successful at putting a "ding in the universe." Steve taught us all a few things too. He taught us to discover and follow our passions and to accept nothing but excellence, especially from ourselves.
Thank you Steve.
Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.
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.
Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
I want to put a ding in the universe.
My job is not to be easy on people. My jobs is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.
That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower
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.
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.
In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.
So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.”
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 other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. 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.
I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year…. It’s very character-building.
I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.
Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.
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.
I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.
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.
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.
Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?
