The late, legendary Steve Jobs built Apple into a fanatically followed and admired company. Some incomparable gems from the great man:
* I was worth about over a million dollars when I was 23 and over 10 million dollars when I was 24, and over a hundred million dollars when I was 25 and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.
* Stay hungry….stay foolish.
* Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?
* My job is to not 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.
* Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is better than two doubles.
* 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.
* My favourite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is 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 others’ 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.
* In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.
* 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.
* 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.
* You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.
* 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.
* Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
* I think we’re having fun. I think our customers really like our products. And we’re always trying to do better.
*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 want to put a ding in the universe.
* Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently – they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.
* I’m the only person I know that has lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year….It’s very character-building.
Visual Courtesy:http://www.flickr.com/photos/marthinshl/
