Steve Jobs: Quotes about thinking

Steve Jobs was American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.. Explore interesting quotes on thinking.

Steve Jobs: 300 quotes80 likes

“Think different and then again.”

“Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50-50 maybe.”

Quoted by his biographer, Walter Isaacson http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/steve-jobs-in-the-end-he-didnt-like-the-off-switch/61586?tag=nl.e589 <br class="br">2010s <br class="br">Context: Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50-50 maybe. But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. I kind of – maybe it’s ’cause I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated. Somehow it lives on, but sometimes I think it’s just like an on-off switch. Click and you’re gone. And that’s why I don’t like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.

“Woz and I very much liked Bob Dylan's poetry, and we spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of that stuff.”

interview in Playboy magazine (February 1985 http://www.playboy.co.uk/article/16311/playboy-interview-steven-jobs)  <br class="br">1980s <br class="br">Context: Woz and I very much liked Bob Dylan's poetry, and we spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of that stuff. This was California. You could get LSD fresh made from Stanford. You could sleep on the beach at night with your girlfriend. California has a sense of experimentation and a sense of openness—openness to new possibilities.

“When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down.”

Interview in WIRED magazine (February 1996)
1990s
Context: When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.

“We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.”

Interview in Macworld magazine (February 2004)
2000s

“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. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About 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 people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Apple Inc. "Think different" advertising company.
2000s

“Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you're not going to survive. You're going to give it up. So you've got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you're passionate about otherwise you're not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that's half the battle right there.”

The Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program Oral History Interview http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/sj1.html, Advice for Future Entrepreneurs (20 April 1995) <br class="br">1990s <br class="br">Context: I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don't blame them. Its really tough and it consumes your life. If you've got a family and you're in the early days of a company, I can't imagine how one could do it. I'm sure its been done but its rough. Its pretty much an eighteen hour day job, seven days a week for awhile. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you're not going to survive. You're going to give it up. So you've got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you're passionate about otherwise you're not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that's half the battle right there.

“We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.”

As quoted in "The Seed of Apple's Innovation" in BusinessWeek (12 October 2004)
2000-04
Context: The system is that there is no system. That doesn't mean we don't have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that's not what it's about. Process makes you more efficient.
But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we've been thinking about a problem. It's ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.
And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

“I think Pixar has the opportunity to be the next Disney — not replace Disney — but be the next Disney.”

As quoted in BusinessWeek (23 November 1998)
1990s

“Nobody has tried to swallow us since I've been here. I think they are afraid how we would taste.”

At the annual Apple shareholder meeting (22 April 1998)
1990s

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

Triumph of the Nerds (1996)
1990s

“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, Playboy interview http://reprints.longform.org/playboy-interview-steve-jobs, Feb 1985 <br class="br">1980s

“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 as quoted in "Creating Jobs" in The New York Times (12 January 1997) http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F04EED71139F931A25752C0A961958260&sec=technology&spon=&pagewanted=all <br class="br">1990s

“Because I'm the CEO, and I think it can be done.”

On why he chose to override engineers who thought the iMac wasn't feasible, as quoted in TIME magazine (24 October 2005)
2000s

“They're babes in the woods. I think I can help turn Alvy and Ed into businessmen.”

On Pixar co-founders Alvy Ray Smith and Edwin Catmull, as quoted in TIME magazine (1 September 1986)
1980s

“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.”

2000s, Address at Stanford University (2005)

“It is hard to think that a $2 billion company with 4,300-plus people couldn't compete with six people in blue jeans.”

On Apple's lawsuit against him, following his resignation to form NeXT, as quoted in Newsweek (30 September 1985)
1980s

“Jobs: Computers are actually pretty simple. We’re sitting here on a bench in this cafe [for this part of the Interview]. Let’s assume that you understood only the most rudimentary of directions and you asked how to find the rest room. I would have to describe it to you in very specific and precise instructions. I might say, “Scoot sideways two meters off the bench. Stand erect. Lift left foot. Bend left knee until it is horizontal. Extend left foot and shift weight 300 centimeters forward …” and on and on. If you could interpret all those instructions 100 times faster than any other person in this cafe, you would appear to be a magician: You could run over and grab a milk shake and bring it back and set it on the table and snap your fingers, and I’d think you made the milk shake appear, because it was so fast relative to my perception. That’s exactly what a computer does. It takes these very, very simple-minded instructions—”Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number”—but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.”

1980s