Steve Jobs Quotes

Do What You Love To Do and Make a Difference

• You've got to find what you love. 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.

• 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.

• Do you want to spend the rest of → your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to → change the world?  >>>

• I want to put a ding in the universe.

• 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… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but 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 ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

• 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.

Do Your Best

• 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.

• We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life.

• I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.

• Get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.

→ Customer Care

• 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. And we think that our job is to take responsibility for the complete user experience. And if it’s not up to par, it’s our fault, plain and simply.

• People don’t want to just buy personal computers anymore. They want to know what they can do with them, and we’re going to show people exactly that.

Innovation

• → Innovation distinguishes between a → leader and a follower.

• We’re gambling on our → vision, and we’d rather do that than make ‘me-too’ products.

• → Creativity is just connecting things.

• Innovation is the ability to see → change as an opportunity – not a threat.

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

• → 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.

• To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to → innovate for years, it requires → a lot of disciplines.

• My experience has been that creating a compelling new technology is so much harder than you think it will be that you're almost dead when you get to the other shore.

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

New Product Development

• 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.

• 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.

• Some people say you have to be a little crazy to buy a Mac. Well, in that craziness we see genius and that’s who we make tools for.

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

• 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.

Idea Management

• So 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.

• People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.

• I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do... Our leadership 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....it’s only by saying 'no' that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

Winning Organization and People

• 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.

• 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.

• The only thing that works is → management by values. Find people who are competent and really bright, but more importantly, people who care exactly about the same things you care about.

• 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... We just want to make great products.

• My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better.

• 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.

• 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.