Here are some quotes from the late co-founder of Apple.
I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis . . . intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work.
I say Microsoft and Google have a lot in common. Microsoft never had the humanities and the liberal arts in their DNA. It was a pure technology company. And they just didn't get it. Even when they saw the map, they couldn't even copy it well. How dumb do you have to be to not see it--once you see it, you know. But Google is the same way. They just don't get it.
If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will.
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.
Life can be much broader 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, and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Um, once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.
Picasso had a saying--'good artists copy, great artists steal'--we have always been shameless . . . stealing great ideas.
Some people say, "Give the customers want they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page."
Sometimes life hits 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. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.
Stay hungry, stay foolish.
The journey is the reward.
When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life--and your life is just to live inside your 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.
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.
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. I'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life I'll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I'm not there, but I'll always come back. . . . 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.
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.
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.
You're born alone, you're going to die alone. And what exactly is it do you have to lose. There's nothing.
The last quote is three paragraphs.
"I sort of look at us as two of the luckiest guys (Steve Jobs and Bill Gates) on the planet cause we found what we loved to do. And we were at the right place at the right time. We gotten to go to work every day with super bright people for 30 years, and do what we love doing. It's hard to be happier than that. Your family and that. What more can you ask for? So, I don't think about legacy that much. I just think about being able to get up every day and go in and hang around these great people and hopefully create something that other people will love as much as we do. And if we can do that, that's great.
"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 gonna give up. And that's what happens to most people actually. If you really look at the ones that ended up being successful *in air quotes* in the eyes of society, and the ones that didn't, oftentimes, it's the ones that are successful loved what they did so they can persevere when it got really tough, and the ones that didn't love it quit cause they're sane. Right? Who want to put up with this stuff if you don't love it. So, it's a lot of hard work. And it's a lot of worrying constantly. And if you don't love it, you're going to fail. So you gotta love it. You got to have passion. And I think that's the high order albeit.
"The second thing is you got be a really good talent scout. No matter how smart you are you need a team of great people. And you got to figure out how to size people up fairly quickly, make decisions without knowing people too well, and hire them, and see how you do and refine your intuition and be able to help build an organization that can eventually just build itself cause you need great people around you."
