Steve Jobs quotes - page 4
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 been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Steve Jobs
My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people.
Steve Jobs
Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you're not going to survive. You're going to give it up. So you've got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you're passionate about otherwise you're not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that's half the battle right there.
Steve Jobs
So Mac OS X is cross-platform by design, right from the very beginning. So Mac OS X is singing on Intel processors, and I'd just like to show you right now. As a matter of fact... this system I've been using here... Let go have a look... [reveals that the system he had been using for the presentation was running Mac OS X 10.4.1 on a machine using a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 processor] So.. we've been running on an Intel machine all morning.
Steve Jobs
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. 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.
Steve Jobs
When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.
That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: 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.
Steve Jobs
Human minds settle into fixed ways of looking at the world. That's always been true and it's probably always going to be true and I think... I've always felt that death is the greatest invention of life. I'm sure that life evolved without death at first, and found that without death life didn't work very well. Because it didn't make room for the young, who didn't know how the world was fifty years ago, who didn't know how the world was twenty years ago. Who saw it as it is today without any preconceptions, and saw and dreamed how it could be based on that. Who were not satisfied based on the accomplishments of the last thirty years, but who were dissatisfied because the current state didn't live up to their ideals. Without death there would be very little progress.
Steve Jobs
Look at the design of a lot of consumer products - they're really complicated surfaces. We tried to make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.
Steve Jobs
I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn [the art of decorative or hand lettering]. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the 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 any hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 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. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would never have multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.
Steve Jobs