Steve Jobs Quotes - 32 quotes

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Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs (1955-2011) was a visionary entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc. He was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs and grew up in Cupertino, California, which later became known as Silicon Valley. Jobs attended Reed College in Oreg... show more

quote icon Walt Mossberg: And are people willing to tell you that you are wrong? Steve Jobs: Uh, yeah. Walt Mossberg: I mean other than snarky journalists. I mean people that work for you? Steve Jobs: Oh Yeah! No we have wonderful arguments. Walt Mossberg: And do you win them all? Steve Jobs: Oh no. I wish I did. See you can't. 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 be run by ideas. Not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win. Otherwise good people don't stay.

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quote icon My Biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college. This was the start in my life. And 17 years later, I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford. And all of my working class parents savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months I couldn't see the value in in it.

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quote icon 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. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.

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quote icon And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition, turned out to be priceless later on.

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quote icon Reed college at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on ever drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. 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. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.

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quote icon It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple type faces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

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quote icon Again, 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.

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quote icon You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road, will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well worn path, and that will make all the difference.

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quote icon I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

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quote icon 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.

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quote icon I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.

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quote icon Sometimes life's gonna 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. You've got to find what you love.

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quote icon 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, and don't settle.

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quote icon As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.

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quote icon When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right". It made an impression on me. And since then, for the past 33 years, 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 be no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

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quote icon 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. Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment of failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

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quote icon Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

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quote icon 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 as 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.

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quote icon Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited. So don't waste it living someone else's life.

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quote icon Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

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quote icon Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

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quote icon Don't let the noise of others opinions drown out your own inner voice.

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quote icon And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

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quote icon To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.

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quote icon Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

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quote icon “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.”

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

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quote icon 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 other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

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quote icon 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)

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quote icon 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. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path.

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quote icon I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

Missing Reference

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quote icon 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.

Missing Reference

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