Steve Jobs in his own words: 20 of his best quotes – Page 2 of 2 – StartupSmart
On entrepreneurship
“The problem with the internet start-up craze isn’t that too many people are starting companies; it’s that too many people aren’t sticking with it.”
“That’s somewhat understandable, because there are many moments that are filled with despair and agony, when you have to fire people and cancel things and deal with very difficult situations.”
“That’s when you find out who you are and what your values are.”
“So when these people sell out, even though they get fabulously rich, they’re gypping themselves out of one of the potentially most rewarding experiences of their unfolding lives.”
“Without it, they may never know their values or how to keep their newfound wealth in perspective.”
Fortune, 2000.
“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.”
CNN, 2008.
“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.”
“But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
BusinessWeek, 1998.
On customers
“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!’ There’s almost no product in the world that you have that experience with, but you have it with a Mac.”
“And you have it with an iPod.”
Bloomberg Businessweek, 2004.
“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.”
BusinessWeek, 1998.
On rivals
“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.”
“I am saddened, not by Microsoft’s success — I have no problem with their success.”
“They’ve earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products.”
Triumph of the Nerds, 1996.
“Apple’s the only company left in this industry that designs the whole widget.”
“Hardware, software, developer relations, marketing. It turns out that that, in my opinion, is Apple’s greatest strategic advantage. We didn’t have a plan, so it looked like this was a tremendous deficit.”
“But with a plan, it’s Apple’s core strategic advantage, if you believe that there’s still room for innovation in this industry, which I do, because Apple can innovate faster than anyone else.”
Time, 1999.
“I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.”
On Bill Gates, The New York Times, 1997.
On life
“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. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”
Stanford commencement speech, 2005.
On his legacy
“If Apple becomes a place where computers are a commodity item, where the romance is gone, and where people forget that computers are the most incredible invention that an has ever invented, I’ll feel I have lost Apple.”
“But if I’m a million miles away, and all those people still feel those things… then I will feel that my genes are still there.”
Newsweek, 1985.
On the end
“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 is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. 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 is quite true.”
“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.”
Stanford commencement speech, 2005.