Steve Jobs: Making

“It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

Steve Jobs

Sense , Making love , People

“Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”

Steve Jobs

2005-09, Address at Stanford University (2005)
Context: Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because 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.

Life , Help , Dead

“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”

Steve Jobs

Quoted in Steve Jobs, the Journey Is the Reward (1988) by Jeffrey S. Young ISBN 155802378X
1980s

Business

“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.”

Steve Jobs

2005-09, Address at Stanford University (2005)
Context: 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.

Life , Death , Way , Change

“This is the largest WWDC ever so thank you very much for making this a record event for us.”

Steve Jobs

2005-09, WWDC 2006
Context: We’ve got a great week plan for you. You know, this year we’ve got 42 hundred registered attendees. This is the largest WWDC ever so thank you very much for making this a record event for us.

“If, for some reason, we make some big mistake and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter a computer Dark Ages for about twenty years.”

Steve Jobs

On the early rivalry between Macintosh and "IBM-compatible" computers based on Microsoft's DOS, as quoted in Steve Jobs: The Journey is the Reward (1987) by Jeffrey S. Young, p. 235
1980s

Age , Feeling , Personality

“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

2000s, Address at Stanford University (2005)

Life , Confidence , Future , Heart

“The subscription model of buying music is bankrupt. I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model and it might not be successful.”

Steve Jobs

As quoted in "Steve Jobs: The Rolling Stone Interview" in Rolling Stone (3 December 2003)
2000s

Music , Thinking , Success

“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

Computer World interview with Daniel Morrow (April 1995)
1990s

Life , Death , World , Dreams

“You know, you keep on innovating, you keep on making better stuff. And if you always want the latest and greatest, then you have to buy a new iPod at least once a year.”

Steve Jobs

"Jobs: Iconoclast and salesman" by Brian Williams, at MSNBC http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12974884/ (25 May 2006)
2000s

“Jobs: Let me compare it with IBM. How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. 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 ever 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.
Playboy: Are you saying that the people who made the PCjr don’t have that kind of pride in the product?
Jobs: If they did, they wouldn’t have turned out the PCjr.”

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs, Playboy interview http://reprints.longform.org/playboy-interview-steve-jobs, Feb 1985
1980s

People , Beauty , Way , Thinking

“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.”

Steve Jobs

Triumph of the Nerds (1996)
1990s

Problem , Success , Parting

“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

On the design of the iPod, as quoted in Newsweek (14 October 2006)
2000s

People , Problem , Time

“Why would I ever want to run Disney? Wouldn't it make more sense just to sell them Pixar and retire?”

Steve Jobs

As quoted in Fortune (23 February 2004)
2000s

Sense

“John Sculley ruined Apple and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple which were corrupt and corrupted some of the top people who were there, drove out some of the ones who were not corruptible, and brought in more corrupt ones and paid themselves collectively tens of millions of dollars and cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place — which was making great computers for people to use.”

Steve Jobs

"Statement in The Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program oral history" (20 April 1995) http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/sj1.html
1990s

People , Wealth

“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

2000s, Address at Stanford University (2005)

Life , Beauty , Hope , Art

“I make 50 cents for showing up … and the other 50 cents is based on my performance.”

Steve Jobs

On his famous $1 annual salary, at the annual Apple shareholder meeting in 2007, as quoted in "Jobs: 'I make fifty cents just for showing up'" in AppleInsider (10 May 2007) http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/05/10/jobs_i_make_fifty_cents_just_for_showing_up.html
2000s

“People think it's this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Steve Jobs

As quoted in The Guts of a New Machine (30 November 2003) https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/the-guts-of-a-new-machine.html
2000s

People , Feeling , Thinking , Box

“We're gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make "me too" products. Let some other companies do that. For us, it's always the next dream.”

Steve Jobs

Interview about the release of the Macintosh (24 January 1984) - (online video) http://pulsar.esm.psu.edu/Faculty/Gray/graphics/movies/sj84.mov
1980s

Dreams

“It'll make your jaw drop.”

Steve Jobs

On the first NeXT Computer, as quoted in The New York Times (8 November 1989)
1980s