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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
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your life selling sugared
water or do you want a chance to
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change the world?
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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.
Our DNA is as a consumer company – for that individual
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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.
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Creativity
is just connecting things.
Innovation is the ability to see
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change
as an
opportunity – not a threat.
I’ve always wanted to own and control the
primary
technology in everything we do.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Quality
Be a yardstick of
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quality. Some
people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.
Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better
than two doubles.
Personal Life
I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with
Socrates.
My girlfriend always laughs during sex – no matter what she's
reading.
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