Laurene Powell Jobs quotes: billionaire businesswoman and Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell talks education, money, and making your mark.
“To do what you wanna do, to leave a mark – in a way that you think is important and lasting – that’s a life well-lived.”
“I’ve always had this idea that you have to make the most of things.”
“Each of us has that potential, but some of us don’t get the chance to fulfill it. Which means we all have work to do.”
“In the broadest sense, we want to use our knowledge and our network and our relationships to try to effect the greatest amount of good.”
“How about we agree upon what our common American values are, which is: let’s make this a true land of opportunity.”
“That’s why our country is such a beautiful, beautiful experiment: we manifest, we allow freedom if you follow certain rules and if you work really hard. That’s at the root of our cherished values.”
“I started getting more and more active around immigration reform because this was such a waste of lives, such a waste of potential, such a waste for our country not to have the human capital that we developed – geared toward improving our entire society.”
“I much prefer STEAM to STEM. The insertion of the ‘A’ is arts writ large, and when you learn how to think, that means that you actually need to understand how others have thought before you, how have others made sense of the world. That includes poets and writers and philosophers and dancers, and then help people think in all different circumstances and in all different industries, so our focus would be misunderstood if it came across as just about science and engineering.”
“Regardless of zip code, talent and IQ are evenly distributed, so we need to make sure that opportunity is evenly distributed too.”
“Broken institutions are an opportunity rather than a time to go home.”
“High school hasn’t been reinvented in over 100 years. It was designed for early 20th century workforce needs. In the last 100 years, the rest of our world has changed radically, but schools have not. And workforce needs have changed radically. In fact, for the students who are in school today, 65% of them will take jobs that haven’t even been created yet. The innovation and creativity that’s so manifest in the rest of society needs to be turned on our school systems.”
“So what we do is we remove obstacles, we bridge the information gap, we give a lot of scaffolding around academic rigor and social and emotional learning, but students bring to us the willingness to go the extra mile, the determination, and the self-belief, and they do magnificently.”
“Teachers have told us across the country that what’s severely outdated is the teacher at the front of the classroom as the font of knowledge, because as we know, access to knowledge and information is now ubiquitous. So instead, teachers want to help students learn how to think so that they can be lifelong learners.”
“We believe strongly that local communities have the solutions, have the knowledge, have the wisdom, understand what the needs are for all the students that live in the communities, and because education is such a local endeavor, we believe that this has to happen, the change has to happen at the local level in order for it to be sustained and meaningful and relevant.”
“I think of it in a few ways. First, I’m not coming to this work thinking that I have any answers. I do not have the answer to solve the ills that have beset public education. I come to the work as a beneficiary of public education, an education that worked for me 30 years ago that I see is no longer working for young people. And it’s one of the pillars of American society that we cannot compromise on. I come to it with humility and passion and a sense of gratitude that education was my portal to opportunity, and I want to make sure that it is for others.”
“We think that the need is abundant across America. So, of course we are hoping that we get to seed these thoughts of innovation. We have a crowdsourcing and a really beautiful platform that can then reach out to all communities, so everyone can participate and learn from each other.”
“As a parent, you have to be good coach and bad coach, and I think in the college application process, I didn’t want to be bad coach. ‘This is amazing! I’m so proud of you!’ That’s the role I wanted with my kids.”
“Whether someone signs something is not what’s important. It’s what they do and how they do it that matters.”
“You achieve your goals with people, because good ideas come from a lot of places.”
“My relationship with money is that it’s a tool to be self sufficient, but it’s not something that is a part of who I am.”
