Steve jobs quotes

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we've been thinking about a problem.

Without passion, any rational person would give up!

The difference between the best worker on computer hardware and the average may be 2 to 1, if you're lucky. With automobiles, maybe 2 to 1. But in software, it's at least 25 to 1. The difference between the average programmer and a great one is at least that. The secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world. And when you're in a field where the dynamic range is 25 to 1, boy, does it pay off.

Each dream you leave behind is a part of your future that will no longer exist.

Customers don't measure you on how hard you tried, they measure you on what you deliver.

The customer is the final inspector.

To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on marketing research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that's what I try to do.

Whatever you do, you must never let the voice in your head control the brain in your heart.

You'll see more and more perfection of that - computer as servant. But the next thing is going to be computer as a guide or agent.

The most precious resource we have is time.

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

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.

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 actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

Believe things will work out. How was I ever to know that the girl who broke my heart in university would lead to my soulmate? How was I to know that the ‘dream job’ I was rejected from out of college would lead me to a year of entrepreneurship and adventure in Spain? How was I to know that taking a miserable job back in the states would be just the push I needed to vow to never do something I wasn’t passionate about again? Everything works out. I mean everything. As long as you believe it will. When you do, you will find the silver lining. That will take you to the next level.

Find people who are competent and really bright, but more importantly, people who care exactly about the same things you care about.

Shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you're just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.

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.

I've got to tell you, the Internet is a place you go when you want to turn your brain on, and television is a place you go when you want to turn your brain off. I'm not at all convinced that the twain will meet.

Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves

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.

Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

If you want to hire great people and have them stay, you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win.

Start small, think big. Don’t worry about too many things at once. Take a handful of simple things to begin with, and then progress to more complex ones. Think about not just tomorrow, but the future. Put a ding in the universe.

Most people do not ever pick up the phone. They never ask, and that is what separates the people that do things from the people that just dream about them. You have to act, and you have to be willing to fail. You have to be willing to crash and burn, because if you are afraid of failing, you will not get very far.

In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.

We've got to make the small things unforgettable.

My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

You have to be burning with "an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right." If you're not passionate enough from the start, you'll never stick it out.

If you live each day as it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right

If you're afraid of failing you won't get very far

Ask for feedback from people with diverse backgrounds. Each one will tell you one useful thing. If you're at the top of the chain, sometimes people won't give you honest feedback because they're afraid. In this case, disguise yourself, or get feedback from other sources.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life... so love what you do. Your time is limited. Don't waste it.

I'm one of those people that think Thomas Edison and the light bulb changed the world more than Karl Marx ever did.

We don't believe it's possible to protect digital content. What's new is this amazingly efficient distribution system for stolen property called the Internet-- and no one's gonna shut down the Internet. And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. And the way we expressed it to them is: Pick one lock--open every door. It only takes one person to pick a lock. Worst case: Somebody just takes the analog outputs of their CD player and rerecords it-- puts it on the Internet. You'll never stop that. So what you have to do is compete with it.

The most powerful person in the world is the story teller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.

You can't win on innovation unless you have a way to communicate it to customers.

One way to drive fear out of a relationship is to realize that your partner's values are the same as yours, that what you care about is exactly what they care about. In my opinion, that drives fear out and makes for a great partnership, whether it's a corporate partnership or a marriage.

Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect.

The engineering is long gone in most PC companies. In the consumer electronics companies, they don't understand the software parts of it. And so you really can't make the products that you can make at Apple anywhere else right now. Apple's the only company that has everything under one roof.

Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity - not a threat

Let's go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday.

We don't settle for anything less than excellence.

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.

We live in an information economy. The problem is that information's usually impossible to get, at least in the right place, at the right time.

Follow your heart, but check it with your head.

Everything is based on a simple rule: Quality is the best business plan, period.

Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions.

Customers always want something new

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 others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

Overnight success stories take a long time.

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.

When we hire someone, even if they are going to be in marketing, I will have them talk to the design folks and the engineers.

It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple.

We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

In most cases, strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin. A strength in one situation is a weakness in another, yet often the person can't switch gears. It's a very subtle thing to talk about strengths and weaknesses because almost always they're the same thing.

I have enough to last for the rest of my life.

Your time on this earth is limited, don’t live someone else's life, live by your vision.

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.

Some mistakes will be made along the way. That's good. Because some decisions are being made along the way. We'll find the mistakes. We'll fix them.

My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other 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.

You‘ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology - not the other way around.

Every good product I've ever seen is because a group of people cared deeply about making something wonderful that they and their friends wanted. They wanted to use it themselves.

If you keep your eye on the profit, you’re going to skimp on the product. But if you focus on making really great products, then the profits will follow.

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.

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.

Your customers dream of a happier and better life. Don't move products. Instead, enrich lives.

You are all over the map, figure out the top 5 things you want to focus on and get rid of the rest.

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.

the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.

The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work

This is what customers pay us for - to sweat all these details so it's easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We're supposed to be really good at this. That doesn't mean we don't listen to customers, but it's hard for them to tell you what they want when they've never seen anything remotely like it.

Strategy is figuring out what not to do.

Focus and simplicity...once you get there, you can move mountains.

Details matter, it's worth waiting to get it right.

Life can be much broader. You can embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.

We don't have a good language to talk about this kind of thing. In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer... But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation.

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.

When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don't really understand the complexity of the problem. Then you get into the problem, and you see that it's really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That's sort of the middle, and that's where most people stop... But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem - and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works.

The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it.

I think it's brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television - but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

Your customers don't care about you. They don't care about your product or service. They care about themselves, their dreams, their goals. Now, they will care much more if you help them reach their goals, and to do that, you must understand their goals, as well as their needs and deepest desires.

For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don't have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.

The most important decisions you make are not the things you do, but the things you decide not to do.

When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life. Have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is everything around that you call life was made up by people who were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.

Learn continually - there's always "one more thing" to learn!

You go to your TV to turn your brain off. You go to the computer when you want to turn your brain on.

Innovation is the only way to win.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because 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.

We think that computers are the most remarkable tools that humankind has ever come up with, and we think that people are basically tool users. So if we can just get lots of computers to lots of people, it will make some qualitative difference to the world.

Do not try to do everything. Do one thing well.

To go forward you have to leave something behind

In your life you only get to do so many things and right now we've chosen to do this, so let's make it great.

This is a very noisy world, so we have to be very clear what we want them to know about us

If we don’t cannibalize ourselves, someone else will.

There are times when you run a marathon and you wonder, Why am I doing this? But you take a drink of water, and around the next bend, you get your wind back, remember the finish line, and keep going.

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.

Life is about creating and living experiences that are worth sharing.

A brand is simply trust.

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 ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back.

Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.

Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don't have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don't have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh.

If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution.

I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics. Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that's what I wanted to do.

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.

Great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people.

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.

It's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.

Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.

Management is about persuading people to do things they do not want to do, while leadership is about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could.

Don't just live a life; build one.

Kick-start your brain. New ideas come from watching something, talking to people, experimenting, asking questions and getting out of the office!

The journey is the reward

The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television - but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future... 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... Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

It's not a faith in technology. It's faith in people.

You can't look at the competition and say you're going to do it better. You have to look at the competition and say you're going to do it differently.

If it could save a person's life, could you find a way to save ten seconds off the boot time? If there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year.

It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.

Manage the top line: your strategy, your people, and your products, and the bottom line will follow.

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.