The Insanely Great Thoughts of Steve Jobs
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| Steve Jobs (1955-2011) |
Steve Jobs, the iconic co-founder of Apple, died today. Few people in history have had such profound impact on technology as Steve did. His vision and more importantly, the sheer ability to translate that vision into the reality of insanely great communication devices, has transformed the way the world communicates.
In this space, I have captured a few of the Jobs' profound thoughts on life, technology, and his work.
‘Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to
admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.’
‘Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an
environment where excellence is expected.’
‘My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them
better.’
‘We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to
lick them.’
‘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.’
‘Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is
how it works.’
‘Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.’
‘Recruiting is hard. It’s just finding the needles in the
haystack. You can’t know enough in a one-hour interview. So, in the end, it’s
ultimately based on your gut. How do I feel about this person? What are they
like when they’re challenged? I ask everybody that: ‘Why are you here?’ The
answers themselves are not what you’re looking for. It’s the meta-data.’
‘We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst.
What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through
the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a
tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place – the
last thing we were going to do is lay them off.’
‘I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.’
‘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.’
‘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.’
‘We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and everyone
should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then
you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better
be damn good. It better be worth it.’
‘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.’
‘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.’
‘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 other’s 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.’
‘I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.’
‘Insanely Great!’
