Steve Jobs quotes: here’s a list of the most remarkable quotes from the late Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs.
“Our goal is to make the best devices in the world, not to be the biggest.”
“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. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
“I want to put a ding in the universe.”
“My job is not to 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.”
“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”
“Throughout my years in business, I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: ‘Oh, that’s just the way things are done around here.’ Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.”
“When I got started I was 20 or 21, and my role models were the semiconductor guys like Robert Noyce and Andy Grove of Intel, and of course Bill Hewlett and David Packard. They were out not so much to make money as to change the world and to build companies that could keep growing and changing. They both left incredible legacies.”
“My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.”
“The rewarding thing isn’t merely to start a company or to take it public. It’s like when you’re a parent. Although the birth experience is a miracle, what’s truly rewarding is living with your child and helping him grow up.”
“I used to say that Apple should be the Sony of this business, but in reality, I think Apple should be the Apple of this business.”
“Recruiting is hard. It’s just finding the needles in the haystack. We do it ourselves and spend a lot of time at it. I’ve participated in the hiring of maybe 5,000-plus people in my life. So I take it very seriously.”
“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
“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.”
“The reason I went back to Apple is that I feel like the world would be a better place with Apple in it than not. And it’s hard to imagine the world without Apple now.”
“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.”
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
“I get asked a lot why Apple’s customers are so loyal. It’s not because they belong to the Church of Mac! That’s ridiculous. It’s because when you buy our products, and three months later you get stuck on something, you quickly figure out how to get past it. And you think, ‘Wow, someone over there at Apple actually thought of this.’ And then three months later you try to do something you hadn’t tried before, and it works, and you think, ‘Hey, they thought of that, too.’ And then six months later it happens again. There’s almost no product in the world that you have that experience with, but you have it with a Mac.”
“We’re just enthusiastic about what we do.”
“I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was 23 and the way I handled that.”
“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 go to your TV when you want to turn your brain off. You go to your computer when you want to turn your brain on. Those are not the same.”
“That was one of the things that came out most clearly from this whole experience with cancer. I realized that I love my life. I really do. I’ve got the greatest family in the world, and I’ve got my work. And that’s pretty much all I do. I don’t socialize much or go to conferences. I love my family, and I love running Apple, and I love Pixar. And I get to do that. I’m very lucky.”
“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.”
“Things happen fairly slowly, you know. They do. These waves of technology, you can see them way before they happen, and you just have to choose wisely which ones you’re going to surf. If you choose unwisely, then you can waste a lot of energy, but if you choose wisely it actually unfolds fairly slowly. It takes years. One of our biggest insights (years ago) was that we didn’t want to get into any business where we didn’t own or control the primary technology because you’ll get your head handed to you.”
“I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful is pure perseverance.”
“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 see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
“I’m an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals.”
“We tend to focus much more. 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 many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have.”
“Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.”
“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.”
“But I think the things you most regret in life are the things you didn’t do. What you really regret was never asking that girl to dance. In business, if I knew earlier what I know now, I’d have probably done some things a lot better than I did, but I also would’ve probably done some other things a lot worse. But so what? It’s more important to be engaged in the present.”
If I were you, I’d read Bill Gates quotes next.
