323 Steve Jobs Quotes: Largest Library With Amazing Collections

STEVE JOBS QUOTES VIDEO

BEST STEVE JOBS QUOTES

The doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker and doer in one person. Steve Jobs

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

Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right. Steve Jobs

In the broadest context, the goal is to seek enlightenment – however you define it. Steve Jobs

I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. Steve Jobs

The products suck! There’s no sex in them anymore! Steve Jobs

You have to believe that the dots will somehow connect in your future. Steve Jobs

“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.” ― Steve Jobs

“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.” ― Steve Jobs

I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out ok.

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

Let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.

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. Steve Jobs

Once you discover one simple fact, and that is everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you.

I do not adopt softness towards others because I want to make them better.

We he had everything to gain. And we figured even if we crash and burn, and lose everything, the experience will have been worth ten times the cost.

You can build your own things that other people can use. And once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

I always advise people – Don’t wait! Do something when you are young, when you have nothing to lose, and keep that in mind.

I don’t care about being right. I care about success and doing the right thing.

That’s why we started Apple, we said you know, we have absolutely nothing to lose. I was 20 years old at the time, Woz was 24-25, so we have nothing to lose. We have no families, no children, no houses. Woz had an old car. I had a Volkswagen van, I mean, all we were going to lose is our cars and the shirts off our back.

On the blue box: That was what we learned: was that us, too, we didn’t know much. We could build a little thing that could control a giant thing and that was an incredible lesson.

That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity.

We are very careful about what features we add because we can’t take them away.

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

People judge you on your performance, so focus on the outcome. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.

You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

Don’t take it all too seriously. 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.

Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart.

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

FAMOUS STEVE JOBS QUOTES

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.

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

Now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you, ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish’.

It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.

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.

STEVE JOBS QUOTES ABOUT HIS SCHOOL DAYS

One of the saints in my life is this woman named Imogene Hill, who was a fourth-grade teacher who taught this advanced class. She got hip to my whole situation in about a month and kindled a passion in me for learning things. I learned more that year than I think I learned in any year in school.

I was pretty bored in school, and I turned into a little terror. You should have seen us in third grade. We basically destroyed our teacher. We would let snakes loose in the classroom and explode bombs.

School was pretty hard for me at the beginning.

My mother taught me how to read before I got to school and so when I got there I really just wanted to do two things. I wanted to read books because I loved reading books and I wanted to go outside and chase butterflies. You know, do the things that five-year-olds like to do. I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.

Obviously, one of the great challenges of an education is to teach us how to think. What we’re finding is that computers are actually going to affect the quality of thinking as more and more of our children have these tools available to them.

STEVE JOBS QUOTES ON LOVE

We were really working fourteen-to-eighteen-hour days, seven days a week. For like, two years, three years. That was our life. But we loved it, we were young, and we could do it.

If you don’t love it, you’re going to fail. Steve Jobs

“Sometimes life’s going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.” – Steve Jobs

I’ve been rejected, but I was still in love.

I was lucky, I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20.

People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you’re doing and it’s totally true. And the reason is because it’s so hard that if you don’t, any rational person would give up. It’s really hard. And you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don’t love it, if you’re not having fun doing it, you don’t really love it, you’re going to give up.

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STEVE JOBS QUOTES ON BUSINESS

I’m a tool builder. That’s how I think of myself. I want to build really good tools that I know in my gut and my heart will be valuable. And then, whatever happens, is… you can’t really predict exactly what will happen, but you can feel the direction that we’re going. And that’s about as close as you can get. Then you just stand back and get out of the way, and these things take on a life of their own.

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.

Fortunately, my training has been in doing things that take a long time. You know? I was at Apple 10 years. I would have preferred to be there the rest of my life. So I’m a long-term kind of person.

I’m a long-term kind of person.

If you are willing to work hard and ask lots of questions, you can learn business pretty fast.

I remember many late nights coming out of the Mac building when I would have the most incredibly powerful feelings about my life.

On starting Apple with Steve Wozniak: We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a 2 billion company with over 4000 employees.

STEVE JOBS QUOTES ON STARTUPS

We used to dream about this stuff. Now we get to build it. It’s pretty great.

The smallest company in the world can look as large as the largest company on the web.

I think this is the start of something really big. Sometimes that first step is the hardest one, and we’ve just taken it.

“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.”
― Steve Jobs

Another priority was to make Apple more entrepreneurial and startup-like. So we immediately reorganized, drastically narrowed the product line, and changed compensation for senior managers so they get a lot of stock but no cash bonuses. The upshot is that the place feels more like a young company.

But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light – that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have to change the world to be important.

One of the keys to Apple is Apple’s an incredibly collaborative company. You know how many committees we have at Apple? Zero. We have no committees. We are organized like a start-up. One person’s in charge of iPhone OS software, one person’s in charge of Mac hardware, one person’s in charge of iPhone hardware engineering, another person’s in charge of worldwide marketing, another person’s in charge of operations. We are organized like a startup. We are the biggest startup on the planet.

We are aware that we are doing something significant. We’re here at the beginning of it and we’re able to shape how it goes.

Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.

Most of the time, we’re taking things. Neither you nor I made the clothes we wear; we don’t make the food or grow the foods we eat; we use a language that was developed by other people; we use another society’s mathematics. Very rarely do we get a chance to put something back into that pool. I think we have that opportunity now.

No, we don’t know where it will lead. We just know there’s something much bigger than any of us here.

We’re trying to use the swiftness and creativity in a younger-style company, and yet bring to bear the tremendous resources of a company the size of Apple to do large projects that you could never handle at a startup.

It’s hard to tell with these Internet startups if they’re really interested in building companies or if they’re just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: If they don’t really want to build a company, they won’t luck into it. That’s because it’s so hard that if you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up.

STEVE JOBS SAYINGS ON TEAMWORK

The best ideas have to win.

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.

We have wonderful arguments. […] If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to, you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise, good people don’t stay.

When you work with somebody that close and you go through experiences like the ones we went through, there’s a bond in life. Whatever hassles you have, there is a bond. And even though he may not be your best friend as time goes on, there’s still something that transcends even friendship, in a way.

I contribute ideas, sure. Why would I be there if I didn’t?

STEVE JOBS SAYINGS ON VISION

We are gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make ‘me-too’ products. For us, it’s always the next dream.

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

When we create stuff, we do it because we listen to customers, get their inputs and also throw in what we’d like to see, too. We cook up new products. You never really know if people will love them as much as you do.

There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very, very beginning.

When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, ‘Get it away!’ and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.

The hard part of what we’re up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can’t tell them. A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, ‘What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?’ he wouldn’t have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn’t know that people would use the telephone to call up and find out what movies were playing that night or to order some groceries or call a relative on the other side of the globe.

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. That’s what we get paid to do.

Neither of us had any idea that this would go anywhere. Woz is motivated by figuring things out. He concentrated more on the engineering and proceeded to do one of his most brilliant pieces of work, which was the disk drive, another key engineering feat that made the Apple II a possibility. I was trying to build the company, trying to find out what a company was. I don’t think it would have happened without Woz and I don’t think it would have happened without me.

Even a great brand needs investment and caring if it’s going to retain its relevance and vitality and the Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect in this area in the last few years, and we need to bring it back. The way to do that is not to talk about speed and fees, it’s not to talk about bits and mega-hertz, it’s not to talk about why we are better than Windows.

The best example of all and one of the greatest jobs of marketing that the universe has ever seen, is Nike. Remember, Nike sells a commodity. They sell shoes. And yet, when you think of Nike, you feel something different than a shoe company. In their ads, as you know, they don’t ever talk about the product. They don’t ever tell you about their air soles.

What does Nike do in their advertising? They honor great athletes, and they honor great athletics. That’s who they are, that’s what they are about.

More important than building a product, we are in the process of architecting a company that will hopefully be much more incredible, the total will be much more incredible than the sum of its parts.

STEVE JOBS QUOTES ON AMBITION

“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” ― Steve Jobs

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

My dream is that every person in the world will have their own Apple computer. To do that, we’ve got to be a great marketing company.

I’ll tell you what our goal is: our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world and to make products we are proud to sell and recommend to our family and friends, and, we want to do that at the lowest price we can.

None of the really bright people I knew in college went into politics. They all sensed that, in terms of making a change in the world, politics wasn’t the place to be in the late Sixties and Seventies. All of them are in business now, which is funny, because they were the same people who trekked off to India or who tried in one way or another to find some sort of truth about life.

Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world.

We have a major opportunity to influence where Apple is going. As every day passes, the work fifty people are doing here is going to send a giant ripple through the universe. I am really impressed with the quality of our ripple. I know I might be a little hard to get on with, but this is the most fun I’ve had in my life. I’m having a blast.

We attract a different kind of person – a person who doesn’t want to wait five or ten years to have someone take a giant risk on him or her. Someone who really wants to get a little over his head and make a little dent in the universe.

STEVE JOBS QUOTES ON MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP

My job is to say when something sucks rather than sugarcoat it.

What I’m best at doing is finding a group of talented people and making things with them.

What I do all day, is meet with teams of people, and work on ideas, and solve problems, to make new products, to make new marketing programs, whatever it is.

The greatest people are self-managing – they don’t need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they’ll go figure out how to do it. What they need is a common vision. And that’s what leadership is: [h]aving a vision; being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it; and getting a consensus on a common vision.

Somebody once told me, “Manage the top line, and the bottom line will follow.” What’s the top line? It’s things like, why are we doing this in the first place? What’s our strategy? What are customers saying? How responsive are we? Do we have the best products and the best people? Those are the kind of questions you have to focus on.

Don’t get hung up on who owns the idea. Pick the best one, and let’s go.

We’ve got 25,000 people at Apple. About 10,000 of them are in the stores. And my job is to work with sort of the top 100 people, that’s what I do. That doesn’t mean they’re all vice presidents. Some of them are just key individual contributors.

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.

Companies, as they grow to become multi-billion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or a passion about the products.

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STEVE JOBS QUOTES ON HIRING

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.

I want to see what people are like under pressure.

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.

We hire people who want to make the best things in the world. You’d be surprised how hard people work over around here. They work nights and weekends, sometimes not seeing their families for a while. Sometimes people work through Christmas to make sure the tooling is just right at some factory in some corner of the world so our product comes out the best it can be. People care so much, and it shows.

They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, are they going to fall in love with Apple?

All we are is our ideas or people. That’s what keeps us going to work in the morning, to hang around these great bright people. I’ve always thought that recruiting is the heart and soul of what we do.

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.

Recruiting is hard. It’s just finding the needles in the haystack.

We do it ourselves and we spend a lot of time at it. I’ve participated in the hiring of maybe 5,000+ people in my life. So I take it very seriously.

You can’t know enough in a one-hour interview. So, in the end, it’s ultimately based on your gut. How do I feel about this person? What are they like when they’re challenged? Why are they here? I ask everybody that: ‘Why are you here?’ The answers themselves are not what you’re looking for. It’s the meta-data.

My number one job here at Apple is to make sure that the top 100 people are A+ players. And everything else will take care of itself.

It’s painful when you have some people who are not the best people in the world and you have to get rid of them; but I found my job has sometimes exactly been that – to get rid of some people who didn’t measure up and I’ve always tried to do it in a humane way. But nonetheless it has to be done and it is never fun.

Many times in an interview I will purposely upset someone: I’ll criticize their prior work. I’ll do my homework, find out what they worked on, and say, “God, that really turned out to be a bomb. That really turned out to be a bozo product. Why did you work on that?…”.

I want to see if they just fold or if they have firm conviction, belief, and pride in what they did.

STEVE JOBS QUOTES ON MONEY

Well, they’re just yardsticks, you know.

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.

I think money is a wonderful thing because it enables you to do things, it enables you to invest in ideas that don’t have a short-term payback and things like that.

It’s very interesting, I was worth about over a million dollars when I was 23 and over 10 million when I was 24 and over a hundred million when I was 25 and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.

But especially at that point in my life it was not the most important thing, the most important thing was the company, the people, the products we were making, what we were going to enable people to do with these products so I didn’t think about it a great deal, and I never sold any stock, just really believe that the company would do very well over the long term.

Bottom line is, I didn’t return to Apple to make a fortune. I’ve been very lucky in my life and already have one.

When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn’t going to let it ruin my life. There’s no way you could ever spend it all, and I don’t view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.

I’m not going to let it ruin my life. Isn’t it kind of funny? You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me in the past ten years.

It makes me feel old, sometimes, when I speak at a campus and I find that what students are most in awe of is the fact that I’m a millionaire.

I still don’t understand it. It’s a large responsibility to have more than you can spend in your lifetime, and I feel I have to spend it. If you die, you certainly don’t want to leave a large amount to your children. It will just ruin their lives. And if you die without kids, it will all go to the Government. Almost everyone would think that he could invest the money back into humanity in a much more astute way than the Government could. The challenges are to figure out how to live with it and to reinvest it back into the world, which means either giving it away or using it to express your concerns or values.

It was giant! We did about $200,000 when our business was in the garage, in 1976. In 1977, about $7,000,000 in business. I mean, it was phenomenal! And in 1978, we did $17,000,000. In 1979, we did $47,000,000. That’s when we all really sensed that this was just going through the rafters. In 1980, we did $117,000,000. In 1981, we did $335,000,000. In 1982, we did $583,000,000. In 1983, we did $985,000,000, I think. This year, it will be a billion and a half.

Well, they’re just yardsticks, you know. The neatest thing was, by 1979, I was able to walk into classrooms that had 15 Apple computers and see the kids using them. And those are the kinds of things that are really the milestones.

None of those people care about the money. I mean, a lot of them made a lot of money, but they don’t really care. Their lifestyles haven’t particularly changed. It was the chance to actually try something, to fail, to succeed, to grow.

STEVE JOBS WORDS ON APPLE

One of the things that made Apple great was that, in the early days, it was built from the heart.

And boy, have we patented it. (First announcement of the iPhone, Macworld 2006)

The roots of Apple were to build computers for people, not for corporations. The world doesn’t need another Dell or Compaq.

You know, everybody has a cell phone, but I don’t know one person who likes their cell phone. I want to make a phone that people love.

What if Apple didn’t exist? Think about it. Time wouldn’t get published next week. Some 70% of the newspaper in the U.S. wouldn’t publish tomorrow morning. Some 60% of the kids wouldn’t have computers; 64% of the teachers wouldn’t have computers. More than half the Websites created on Macs wouldn’t exist. So there’s something worth saving here. See?

What are the great brands? Levi’s, Coke, Disney, Nike. Most people would put Apple in that category. You could spend billions of dollars building a brand not as good as Apple. Yet Apple hasn’t been doing anything with this incredible asset.

What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think ‘outside the box’, people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.

Apple’s the only company left in this industry that designs the whole widget. Hardware, software, developer relations, marketing.

Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. It’s very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your career. Apple’s been very fortunate in that it’s introduced a few of these.

What we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way smarter than any mobile device has ever been, and super-easy to use. This is what iPhone is. OK? So, we’re going to reinvent the phone.

I had this idea of being able to get rid of the keyboard, type on a multi-touch glass display, and I asked our folks, “Could we come up with a multi-touch display?

We designed iMac to deliver the things consumers care about most: the excitement of the Internet and the simplicity of the Mac.

It’s not about charisma and personality, it’s about results and products and those very bedrock things that are why people at Apple and outside of Apple are getting more excited about the company and what Apple stands for and what its potential is to contribute to the industry.

Talking about the iPod Nano: We’re in uncharted territory. We’ve never sold this many of anything before.

STEVE JOBS QUOTES ON INNOVATION

I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes.

It’s very easy to take credit for the thinking. The doing is more concrete. But somebody, it’s very easy to say “Oh, I thought of these three years ago”. But usually when you dig a little deeper, you find that the people that really did it were also the people that really worked through the hard intellectual problems as well.

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.

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.

Leonardo [da Vinci] was the artist but he also mixed all his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist. He knew about pigments, knew about human anatomy. And combining all of those skills together, the art and the science, the thinking and the doing, was what resulted in the exceptional result.

When companies get bigger they try to replicate their success. But they assume their magic came from process.

The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers.

Actually, making an insanely great product has a lot to do with the process of making the product, how you learn things and adopt new ideas and throw out old ideas.

People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of electrochemical computers. 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. It’s a rare person who etches grooves that are other than a specific way of looking at things, a specific way of questioning things.

You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn’t. He had to move on, and when he did, by going electric in 1965, he alienated a lot of people. His 1966 Europe tour was his greatest.

The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do – keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you are not busy being born, you’re busy dying.

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

I don’t think that my role in life is to run big organizations and do incremental improvements.

I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.

The people who go to see our movies are trusting us with something very important – their time and their imagination. So in order to respect that trust, we have to keep changing; we have to challenge ourselves and try to surprise our audiences with something new every time.

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.

It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.

You can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big thing is. There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse’.

My philosophy is that everything starts with a great product. So, you know, I obviously believed in listening to customers, but customers can’t tell you about the next breakthrough that’s going to happen next year that’s going the change the whole industry. So you have to listen very carefully. But then you have to go and sort of stow away – you have to go hide away with people that really understand the technology, but also really care about the customers, and dream up this next breakthrough.

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

STEVE JOBS WORDS ON CREATIVITY

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. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

I don’t think that most of the really best people that I’ve worked with worked with computers for the sake of working with computers. They worked with computers because they are the medium that is best capable of transmitting some feeling that you have, that you want to share with other people.

What I do see is a small group of people who are artists and care more about their art than they do about almost anything else. It’s more important than finding a girlfriend, it’s more important… than cooking a meal, it’s more important than joining the Marines, it’s more important than whatever.

Look at the way artists work. They’re not typically the most ‘balanced’ people in the world. Now, yes, we have a few workaholics here who are trying to escape other things, of course. But the majority of people out here have made very conscious decisions; they really have.

One of my role models is Bob Dylan. As I grew up, I learned the lyrics to all his songs and watched him never stand still. If you look at the artists, if they get really good, it always occurs to them at some point that they can do this one thing for the rest of their lives, and they can be really successful to the outside world but not really be successful to themselves. That’s the moment that an artist really decides who he or she is. If they keep on risking failure, they’re still artists.

It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing. Of course, there are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they’re rare.

As you are growing and changing, the more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you that it thinks you are, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to go, “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 QUOTES ON LEARNING

Well, I was thrown out of school a few times.

I think all of us need to be on guard against arrogance which knocks at the door whenever you’re successful.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

The key thing to remember about me is that I’m still a student. I’m still in boot camp. If anyone is reading any of my thoughts, I’d keep that in mind.

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.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country… I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.

We wanted to more richly experience why were we were alive, not just make a better life, and so people went in search of things. The great thing that came from that time was to realize that there was definitely more to life than the materialism of the late 50’s and early sixties. We were going in search of something deeper.

Between my sophomore and junior years, I got stoned for the first time; I discovered Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, and all that classic stuff. I read Moby Dick and went back as a junior taking creative-writing classes.

You could get LSD fresh made from Stanford. You could sleep on the beach at night with your girlfriend. California has a sense of experimentation and a sense of openness – openness to new possibilities.

Human minds settle into fixed ways of looking at the world and that’s always been true and it’s probably always going to be true.

There’s a phrase in Buddhism, ‘Beginner’s mind’. It’s wonderful to have a beginner’s mind.

I’m completely stunned. I’m 19 years old, in a foreign country, up in the Himalayas, and here is this bizarre Indian baba who has just dragged me away from the rest of the crowd, shaving my head atop this mountain peak. I’m still not sure why he did it.

I bought an apartment in New York, but it’s because I love that city. I’m trying to educate myself, being from a small town in California, not having grown up with the sophistication and culture of a large city. I consider it part of my education.

I used to think that technology could help education. I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.

The most important thing is a person. A person who incites and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can.

I know from my own education that if I hadn’t encountered two or three individuals that spent extra time with me, I’m sure I would have been in jail.

When you’re young, a little bit of course correction goes a long way. I think it takes pretty talented people to do that.

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.

STEVE JOBS QUOTES ON DEATH

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” ― Steve Jobs

“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.” ― Steve Jobs

“If you live each day as it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right” ― Steve Jobs

“I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” ― Steve Jobs

“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.

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.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.” ― Steve Jobs

STEVE JOBS QUOTES ON TIME

“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 other’s opinions drown out 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.” ― Steve Jobs

The most precious thing that we all have with us is time.

I have been trained to think in units of time that are measured in several years. With what I’ve chosen to do with my life, you know, even a small thing takes a few years. To do anything of magnitude takes at least five years, more likely seven or eight. Rightfully or wrongfully, that’s how I think.

Invest time in yourself to have great experiences that are going to enrich you.