Steve Jobs Inspirational Quotes:

1. The number of people I get to interact with in this company is probably about 50 on a regular basis. Maybe 100. And one of the things that I’ve always felt is that most things in life, if you get something twice as good as average you’re doing phenomenally well. Usually the best is about 30% better than average. Two to one’s a big delta. But what became really clear to me in my work life was that, for instance, [Steve] Wozniak was 25 to 50 times better than average. And I found that there were these incredibly great people at doing certain things, and you couldn’t replace one of these people with 50 average people. They could just do stuff that no number of average people could do. [...]. And so I have spent my work life trying to find and recruit and retain and work with these kind of people. My #1 job here at Apple is to make sure that the top 100 people are A+ players. And everything else will take care of itself.
2. -Steve Jobs.
3. I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.-Steve Jobs, 1994
4. Apple is the most creative of the PC companies; Pixar is the most technologically advanced entertainment company. Apple releases new products every few months, and top execs make 10 major decisions a day. But the Holy Grail for Pixar is releasing one product, a movie-a-year, and as CEO I might make three really critical decisions a year, and they are very hard to change.-Steve Jobs, 2003
5. Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal.
6. -Steve Jobs
7. 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.-Steve Jobs, 2005
8. I know what it’s like to have your private life painted in the worst possible light in front of a lot of people. I’ve learned what it’s like for everyone you meet after that to sort of have preconceptions about you… It’s been a character-building experience.-Steve Jobs, 1984
9. Funny enough, 20 years after we started Apple, there was nobody building computers for people again. You know? They were trying to sell consumers last year’s corporate computers. We said, ‘Well, these are our roots. This is why we’re here. The world doesn’t need another Dell or Compaq. They need an Apple.’-Steve Jobs, 1999
10. The Internet is nothing new. It has been happening for 10 years. Finally, now, the wave is cresting on the general computer user. And I love it. I think the den is far more interesting than the living room. Putting the Internet into people’s houses is going to be really what the information superhighway is all about, not digital convergence in the set-top box. All that’s going to do is put the video rental stores out of business and save me a trip to rent my movie. I’m not very excited about that. I’m not excited about home shopping. I’m very excited about having the Internet in my den.-Steve Jobs, 1994
11. I’m convinced that to give away a dollar effectively is harder than to make a dollar.-Steve Jobs, 1985
12. Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.-Steve Jobs, 1998
13. 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.-Steve Jobs, 1998
14. (Does it take insane people to make insanely great things?) Actually, making an insanely great product has a lot to do with the process of making the product, how you learn things and adopt new ideas and throw out old ideas. But, yeah, the people who made Mac are sort of on the edge.-Steve Jobs, 1985
15. People say sometimes, ‘You work in the fastest-moving industry in the world.’ I don’t feel that way. I think I work in one of the slowest. It seems to take forever to get anything done. All of the graphical-user interface stuff that we did with the Macintosh was pioneered at Xerox PARC and with Doug Engelbart at SRI in the mid-’70s. And here we are, just about the mid-’90s, and it’s kind of commonplace now. But it’s about a 10-to-20-year lag. That’s a long time.-Steve Jobs, 1994
16. There are lots of examples where not the best product wins. Windows would be one of those, but there are examples where the best product wins. And the iPod is a great example of that.-Steve Jobs, 2004
17. Stay Hungry,Stay Foolish-Steve Jobs At Stanford Commencement,2005
18. The reason I went back to Apple is that I feel like the world would be a better place with Apple in it than not. And it’s hard to imagine the world without Apple now.-Steve Jobs, 2000
19. And there is one more thing…-Steve Jobs
20. In my opinion the way to make your machines unique is with unique software.-Steve Jobs, 1991
21. I think right now it’s a battle for the mindshare of developers and for the mindshare of customers, and right now iPhone and Android are winning that battle.-Steve Jobs
22. I focus on manufacturing because I care about it.-Steve Jobs, 1991
23. Pointing is a metaphor we all know. We’ve done a lot of studies and tests on that, and it’s much faster to do all kinds of functions, such as cutting and pasting, with a mouse, so it’s not only easier to use but more efficient.-Steve Jobs
24. 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
25. We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one 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.-Steve Jobs
26. 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.-Steve Jobs
27. Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other opinions drown 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.-Steve Jobs,2005
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29. Quality is much better than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.-Steve Jobs
30. Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
31. -Steve Jobs
32. Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.-Steve Jobs
33. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.-Steve Jobs
34. Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.-Steve Jobs
35. 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.-Steve Jobs
36. Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.-Steve Jobs
37. What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.-Steve Jobs
38. 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.-Steve Jobs
39. It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.-Steve Jobs
40. You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. 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. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.-Steve Jobs
41. 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.-Steve Jobs
42. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.-Steve Jobs
43. 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.-Steve Jobs.

Sources: www.allaboutstevejobs.com