Steve Jobs that is. Founder of Apple. America's last revolutionary.
February 24, 1955 - October 5, 2011.
His most famous quotes from the Book of Jobs...
1) “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.”
2)
“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.”
3) “Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other opinions drown 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.”
4) “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.”
5)
“Quality is much better than quantity. One home run is much better than two
doubles.”
6)
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
7)
“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them
quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”
8)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
see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of
wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality,
has to be carried all the way through.”
9)
“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.”
10)
“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.”
11)
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
12)
“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.”
13)
“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.”
14)
“It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.”
15)
“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
16)
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking
backward. 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.”
17)
“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.”
18)
“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where
excellence is expected.”
19)
“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.”
20)
“Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself
to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things
into what you’re doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists
steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I
think 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.”
Former Apple VP of
Worldwide Marketing Communication Allison Johnson said the two words Steve Jobs
hated most, the most “dreaded, hated” words at Apple under Steve Jobs were
“branding” and “marketing.”
“In Steve’s mind,” she
recalls, “people associated brands with television advertising and commercials
and artificial things. The most important thing was people’s relationship to
the product. So any time we said ‘brand’ it was a dirty word.”
On the subject of
marketing, Johnson says that “marketing is when you have to sell to
somebody. If you aren’t providing value, if you’re not educating them about the
product, if you’re not helping them get the most out of the product, you’re
selling. And you shouldn’t be in that mode.”
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