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

“I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next.”

Steve Jobs

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

“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 <br class="br">2000s

“Rolling Stone: It's been 10 years since the Macintosh was introduced. When you look around at the technological landscape today, what's most surprising to you?
Jobs: 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 [the company's legendary Palo Alto Research Center] and with Doug Engelbart at SRI [a future-oriented think tank at Stanford] 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

1990s

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

Steve Jobs

“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.”

Steve Jobs

2000s, Address at Stanford University (2005)

“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.”

Steve Jobs

As quoted in "The Seed of Apple's Innovation" in BusinessWeek (12 October 2004)
2000s

“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.”

Steve Jobs

1980s, Playboy interview (1985)

“People think it's this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!'”

Steve Jobs

That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. <br class="br">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 <br class="br">2000s