Many of
Steve Jobs most inspiring and quotable line come from his famous 2005.
commencement speech at Stanford. when he told assembled graduates, "Your
time is limited so don't waste it living someone else's life But The late apple
co-founder. who died a year ago Friday, had many other colorful and insightful
things to say here are 30 of his better quotes.culled from "I,Steve, Steve
jobs in his Own Words."
How Steve
Jobs', legacy has changed
1
"What a computer is to me is the mos remarkable tool that we have
ever come up with it's the equivalent of a
bicycle for our minds." (film
"Memory & Imagination."1990)
2.
"I end up not buying a lot of things, because I find them
ridiculous." (The Independent,2005)
3. "I think death is the most wonderful
invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are
obsolete." (Playboy,
1985)
4. "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 the things we haven't done as the things I have done.
Innovation is saying no to 1,000
things." (Apple Worldwide Developers' Conference, 1997)
5. "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." (CNNMoney/Fortune, 1993)
6. "My job is not to be easy on people.
My job is to make them better." (CNNMoney/Fortune,
2008)
7. "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." (Playboy, 1985)
8. "Innovation distinguishes between a
leader and a follower." ("The Innovation Secrets of Steve
Jobs," 2001)
9. "My model for business is the Beatles.
They were four guys who kept each other's 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." ("60 Minutes," 2003)
10. "I would trade all my technology for an
afternoon with Socrates." (Newsweek, 2001)
11. “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions
drown out your own inner voice.”
12. “Have the courage to follow your heart and
intuition. They somehow already know what you truly
want to become. Everything else is
secondary.”
13. “Sometimes life's going to 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.”
14. “The heaviness of being successful was
replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again.”
15. “Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?”
16. “Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal”
17. “Este es un homenaje a los locos. A los
inadaptados. A los rebeldes. A los alborotadores. A
las fichas redondas en los huecos
cuadrados. A los que ven las cosas de forma diferente. A
ellos no les gustan las reglas, y no
sienten ningún respeto por el statu quo. Puedes citarlos,
discrepar de ellos, glorificarlos o
vilipendiarlos. Casi lo único que no puedes hacer es
ignorarlos. Porque ellos cambian las
cosas. Son los que hacen avanzar al género humano. Y
aunque algunos los vean como a locos,
nosotros vemos su genio. Porque las personas que
están lo suficientemente locas como para
pensar que pueden cambiar el mundo... son quienes
lo cambian”
18. “Algunas personas proponen: «Dales a los
clientes lo que quieren». Pero esa no es mi postura.
Nuestro trabajo consiste en averiguar qué
van a querer antes de que lo sepan. Creo que fue
Henry Ford quien dijo una vez: «Si les
hubiera preguntado a mis clientes qué querían, me
habrían contestado: “¡Un caballo más
rápido!”». La gente no sabe lo que quiere hasta que se lo
enseñas. Por eso nunca me he basado en las
investigaciones de mercado. Nuestra tarea
estriba en leer las páginas que todavía no
se han escrito.”
19. “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.”
20. “Finally Jobs proposed Apple Computer. “I was
on one of my fruitarian diets,” he explained. “I
had just come back from the apple farm.
It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple
took the edge off the word ‘computer.’
Plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book”
21. “When you're doing something for yourself, or
your best friend or family, you're not going to
cheese out. If you don't love
something, you're not going to go the extra mile, work the extra
weekend, challenge the status quo as
much.”
22. “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.”
23. “I've read something that Bill Gates said
about six months ago. He said, ‘I worked really, really
hard in my 20s.’ And I know what he
means, because I worked really, really hard in my 20s
too. Literally, you know, 7 days a
week, a lot of hours every day. And it actually is a wonderful
thing to do, because you can get a lot done. But you can't do it
forever, and you don't want to
do it forever, and you have to come up
with ways of figuring out what the most important things
are and working with other people even
more.”
24. “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 it. 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 interesting.”
25. “I was worth about over a million dollars
when I was 23 and over ten 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.”
26. “At Apple, people are putting in 18-hour
days. We attract a different type of person—a person
who doesn’t want to wait five or ten
years to have someone take a giant risk on him or her.
Someone who really wants to get in a
little over his head and make a little dent in the universe.
We are aware that we are doing something
significant. We’re here at the beginning of it and
we’re able to shape how it goes. Everyone
here has the sense that right now is one of those
moments when we are influencing the
future.”
27. The Macintosh was sort of like this wonderful
romance in your life that you once had — and that
produced about 10 million children. In a
way it will never be over in your life. You'll still smell
that romance every morning when you get
up. And when you open the window, the cool air will
hit your face, and you'll smell that
romance in the air. And you'll see your children around, and
you feel good about it. And nothing will
ever make you feel bad about it.”
28. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful
chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of
plywood on the back...
29. Remembering that you are going to die is the
best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you
have something to lose...
30. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
