Walter isaacson quotes

What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.

I think Leonardo da Vinci teaches us the value of both being focused on things that fascinate us but also, at times, being distracted and deciding to pursue some shiny new idea that you happen to stumble upon. Balancing intense focus with being interested in a whole lot of different things is something that we have to do in the Internet age.

And if you don't have your ears open, you're not going to be able to figure out what you should be doing.

Good telling of human stories is the best way to keep the Internet and World Wide Web from becoming a waste vastland.

Vision w/o execution is just hallucination. You need the right combination of visionary + team that can execute

Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time. “There is no one better at turning off the noise that is going on around him,” Cook said. “That allows him to focus on a few things and say no to many things. Few people are really good at that.

...never let a passion for the perfect take precedence over pragmatism.

It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan ...[Showing the misery of Afghanistan ran the risk of] promoting enemy propaganda...we must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian shields and how the Taliban have harboured the terrorists responsible for killing close up to 5,000 innocent people.

I think when money starts to corrupt journalism, it undermines the journalism, and it undermines the credibility of the product, and you end up not succeeding.

Sometimes, to relieve stress, he would soak his feet in the toilet, a practice that was not as soothing for his collegues.

It's about doing something larger than yourself. It's about serving this world, helping others.

for Steve, less is always more, simpler is always better. Therefore, if you can build a glass box with fewer elements, it’s better, it’s simpler, and it’s at the forefront of technology. That’s where Steve likes to be, in both his products and his stores.

I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company.

We're all swimming in this digital revolution that we live in.

Asked about the fact that Apple's iTunes software for Windows computers was extremely popular, Jobs joked, 'It's like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.

You should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last. Excerpt From: Walter, Isaacson. “Steve Jobs.” Simon & Schuster, 2011-10-23T21:00:00+00:00. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you're not busy being born, you're busy dying.

Mainly, the reason people who didn't succeed had trouble because they had trouble forming teams. They didn't know how to collaborate.

Jobs has within him sort of this conflict, but he doesn't quite see it as a conflict between being hippie-ish and anti-materialistic but wanting to sell things like Wozniak's board. Wanting to create a business.

Terrorism is a horrible thing that is the great threat to civilization on our planet.

Leonardo da Vinci had such a playful curiosity. If you read his notebooks, you'll see he's curious about what the tongue of a woodpecker looks like, but also why the sky is blue, or how an emotion forms on somebody's lips. He understood the beauty of everything. I've admired Leonardo my whole life, both as a kid who loved engineering - he was one of the coolest engineers in history - and then as a college student, when I travelled to see his notebooks and paintings.

Let's crowd source, curate, and add royalties to books

If you want to be a great American, you have got to understand Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, how the American Revolution happened. I think if you want to be a good citizen of the digital age, it helps to feel comfortable with both the people and the ways of thinking that created the digital revolution.

if you can't keep him interested, that's your fault.

I was on one of my fruitarian diets" Steve Jobs recalled "I had just comeback from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge of the word 'computer', plus it would get us a head of Atari in the phone book. He told Wozniak if a better name did not hit them by the next afternoon, they would just stick with apple and they did. 1 Apr 1976

I think one problem we've had is that people who are smart and creative and innovative as engineers went into financial engineering.

Jobs did not know that Sculley had told Eisenstat he wanted to quit, but by then it didn't matter. Overnight, he had changed his mind and decided to stay. Despite the blowup the day before, he was still eager for Jobs to like him. So he agreed to meet the next afternoon.

The childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created for their new son was, in many ways, a stereotype of the late 1950s. When Steve was two they adopted a girl they named Patty, and three years later they moved to a tract house in the suburbs.

Smart people are a dime a dozen. What matters is the ability to think different... to think out of the box.

So that’s our approach. Very simple, and we’re really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. The way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.” Apple’s design mantra would remain the one featured on its first brochure: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

On Startups: "I hate it when people call themselves "entrepreneurs" when what they're really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on.

But the point is to get a whole new generation of people and people in general more re-engaged in news, and this has happened a lot since September 11th of course.

For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God's existence.

You and I love understanding American Revolution, but let's also understand the digital revolution, because that makes us more comfortable with our technology.

Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?

Leonardo da Vinci was comfortable being illegitimate, gay, a misfit, a heretic. But he also respected other people. He didn't get into disputations. He was a genius but he had a certain humility. In his notebooks you see lists of people he wanted to grill about things like how the water diversions in Milan work; he was always interested in learning from other people.

Leonardo da Vinci was lucky to be born the same year that Johannes Gutenberg opened his printing shop. As a young person, he could get information about whatever struck his curiosity. The Internet is to our age what Gutenberg's press was to his, so he would have loved being alive today.

I think right now we need to look back at the founding values of our country. Rise above partisanship, be less bitter when it comes to important matters that have to be solved.

I think that's exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in those days. Let's do a startup in our parents' garage and try to create a business.

When you write biographies, whether it's about Ben Franklin or Einstein, you discover something amazing: They are human.

I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company. The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating." Steve Jobs

You know, one of these things that happened in the '60s and '70s was this confluence of, sort of, a counter-culture with computer culture.

The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently,” he said. "The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.

He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe," Joanna Hoffman said. "It's a common trait in people who are charismatic and know how to manipulate people. Knowing that he can crush you makes you feel weakened and eager for his approval, so then he can elevate you and put you on a pedestal and own you.

One of the great pressures we're facing in journalism now is it's a lot cheaper to hire thumb suckers and pundits and have talk shows on the air than actually have bureaus and reporters

Innovation requires articulation.

Most of the collaborations of technology were done by teams...Collaboration is key to creativity

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.

The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.

I wonder now how tough you have to be to get big things done.

I visited Jobs for the last time in his Palo Alto, Calif., home. He had moved to a downstairs bedroom because he was too weak to go up and down stairs. He was curled up in some pain, but his mind was still sharp and his humor vibrant

I think that we shouldn't be fixated all the time on the ups and downs of the weekly ratings, of the quarter-hour ratings.

Ed Woolard, his mentor on the Apple board, pressed Jobs for more than two years to drop the interim in front of his CEO title. Not only was Jobs refusing to commit himself, but he was baffling everyone by taking only $1 a year in pay and no stock options. I make 50 cents for showing up, he liked to joke, and the other 50 cents is based on performance.

I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.

Physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky action at a distance.

Without Steve Jobs, you would have well-designed computers, probably open and not integrated, but they wouldn't have sex appeal, they wouldn't have romance.

If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle things - that's when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It's a discipline; you have to practice it.

We have to compete in a universe of 200 networks, so we have to carve out our own niche, and to me, that niche is just basic shoe-leather journalism with some good journalists at the helm you can trust as presenters.

When there are multiple versions of a story, you really have three ways to go. You can pick the most sensational version. You can try to balance things in your gut to get to what you think is the honest truth. Or you can err on the side of kindness.

I think America is really well-positioned, because we do train people to be creative and sometimes resist authority, which helps in being an innovator. I think you're going to see for the next phase of the revolution all sorts of wonderful ways of connecting art and literature and journalism into new forms of digital expression.

I've asked Jobs why he didn't get an operation then and he said, 'I didn't want my body to be opened... I didn't want to be violated in that way.'

By the end of his career, he [Steve Jobs] has proven that he can do the impossible, and he has gathered probably the most loyal team of eight players of any business in America.

The best and most innovative products don't always win...(it's an) aesthetic flaw in how the universe worked

Steve has a reality distortion field.” When Hertzfeld looked puzzled, Tribble elaborated. “In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.

I think it's very important to have a sense of balance in covering the war, but you don't have to be morally neutral about terrorism.

Throughout his life, Albert Einstein would retain the intuition and the awe of a child. He never lost his sense of wonder at the magic of nature's phenomena-magnetic fields, gravity, inertia, acceleration, light beams-which grown-ups find so commonplace. He retained the ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted, and to marvel when he could smell an underlying unity. "People like you and me never grow old," he wrote a friend later in life. "We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.

What Einstein was able to do was - to use a cliche - think out of the box.

I hope that some day scientists can be considered heroes again, instead of Paris Hilton.

Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change.

He had the attitude that he could do anything, and therefore so can you. He put his life in my hands. So that made me do something I didn't think I could do.... If you trust him, you can do things. If he's decided that something should happen, then he's just going to make it happen. (Elizabeth Holmes)

i had no idea what i wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.

One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness. Such men make this cosmos and its construction the pivot of their emotional life, in order to find the peace and security which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

If you truly have a passion for what you do, you will care even about the parts unseen.

More generally, I made an effort to leave out things that weren't relevant to the main narrative themes of the book, namely that there were two sides to Steve Jobs: the romantic, poetic, countercultural rebel on one side, and the serious businessperson on the other.

I think it is valuable and should be valued by its consumers. Charging for content forces discipline on journalists: they must produce things that people actually value.

People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.

I don't think there was enough skepticism because I think most of us kind of believed that Saddam Hussein was building biological, chemical, and perhaps even, nuclear weapons.

Politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity.

Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.

Just being the seeker, somebody whose open to spiritual enlightenment, is in itself the important thing and it's the reward for being a seeker in this world.

A popular feel for scientific endeavors should, if possible, be restored given the needs of the twenty-first century. This does not mean that every literature major should take a watered-down physics course or that a corporate lawyer should stay abreast of quantum mechanics. Rather, it means that an appreciation for the methods of science is a useful asset for a responsible citizenry. What science teaches us, very significantly, is the correlation between factual evidence and general theories, something well illustrated in Einstein's life.

If you act like you can do something, then it will work.

On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, "Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?

A theme of digital success is keeping it simple.

Leonardo da Vinci did not take received wisdom - whether from ancient classical thinkers or medieval scholars or from the Bible - without questioning it. And this was the beginning of the scientific method. This is another lesson for our time: that when we have evidence that contradicts a certain belief, we should be willing to change it. I think this made Leonardo, in some ways, a person who better understood the beauty of God's creation than a person who just takes all received wisdom from the Bible on faith.

I think it's really good that you have great competition among news networks, and for that matter all the networks in general. It's bringing more and more people in to watching the news.

Not playing by the rules, not seeing things conventionally, that's the heart of who he [ Steve Jobs] is, and he does it in small ways of everyday rebellion just almost to assert who he is, like not putting a license plate on his car.

I used to be an angry man myself. I’m a recovering assaholic so I could recognize that in Steve. (quoting Jean-Louis Gassée)

I've always had an abundance of material about the subjects of my biographies.

We relate to Leonardo da Vinci because his genius was just being passionately curious about everything. He wanted to know everything he could know about our universe, including how we fit into it. We can't all have a superhuman intellect like Albert Einstein's, but we can be super-curious. And we can also quit smashing curiosity out of the hands our children.

I think that genius comes not just from having great mental processing power. It comes from being able to, as Steve Jobs' ad said, think different.

Simply handing over your iPod to a friend, your blind date, or the total stranger sitting next to you on the plane opens you up like a book." (Steven Levy)

I am a fruitarian and I will only eat leaves picked by virgins in the moonlight - Steve Jobs

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. The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently. (Steve Jobs)

Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.

In the age of the internet when everybody's a pundit, we're still gonna need somebody there to go talk to the colonels, to be on the ground in Baghdad and stuff and that's very expensive.

I think when you're looking for people to interview, you want to make it fair and honest. You're not just bringing people on so you can beat them up or, you know, make fools out of them or something

I think that Benjamin Franklin felt very strongly in foreign policy in this world, that you needed to at least show some humility, especially when you were strong.

Most innovation comes from people working together, collaborating in teams.

The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music.

One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.

There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that's the truth

I think that notion of being a seeker, somebody who never felt totally fulfilled, but was always passionate about the search, that comes from the background, probably.

I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t. It’s the great mystery. (Steve Jobs)

The Mona Lisa, to me, is the greatest emotional painting ever done. The way the smile flickers makes it a work of both art and science, because Leonardo understood optics, and the muscles of the lips, and how light strikes the eye - all of it goes into making the Mona Lisa's smile so mysterious and elusive.

I actually think Bill Gates is conventionally smarter, even though it's a dumb word, but mental processing power - I've watched him use four different screens, process information, get to the right answer, boom boom boom.