Steven Paul Jobs was an American business magnate and investor. He was the chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), and co-founder of Apple Inc.; chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; a member of The Walt Disney Company’s board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar; and the founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT. Jobs is widely recognized as a pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Jobs and Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1976 to sell Wozniak’s Apple I personal computer.
Some of the best quotes from Steve Jobs are listed below.
- “All I ask is that today, you do the best work of your life.” – Steve Jobs
- “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
- “Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products… We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence, we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear about what our goals are.” – Steve Jobs
- “Be a yardstick of quality, some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” – Steve Jobs
- “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.” – Steve Jobs
- “But good PR educates people. That’s all it is. You can’t con people in this business. The products speak for themselves.” – Steve Jobs
- “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like, design is how it works.” – Steve Jobs
- “Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.” – Steve Jobs
- “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?” – Steve Jobs
- “Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.” – Steve Jobs
- “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.” – Steve Jobs
- “Everything is important – that success is in the details.” – Steve Jobs
- “For the past 33 years, 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
- “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
- “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
- “I think the world’s a better place because Bill realized that his goal isn’t to be the richest guy in the cemetery, right?” – Steve Jobs
- “I thought deeply about this. I ended up concluding that the worst thing that could possibly happen as we get big and as we get a little more influence in the world is if we change our core values and start letting it slide, I can’t do that. I’d rather quit.” – Steve Jobs
- “I want to put a ding in the universe.” – Steve Jobs
- “I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life.” – Steve Jobs
- “I was worth over $1 million when I was 23, and over $10 million when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.” – Steve Jobs
- “I’m as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things.” – Steve Jobs
- “I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.” – Steve Jobs
- “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.” – Steve Jobs
- “I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year… It’s very character-building.” – Steve Jobs
- “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
- “I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do.” – Steve Jobs
- “If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.” – Steve Jobs
- “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
- “If you keep your eye on the profit, you’re going to skimp on the product. But if you focus on making really great products, then the profits will follow.” – Steve Jobs
- “If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.” – Steve Jobs
- “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” – Steve Jobs
- “It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.” – Steve Jobs
- “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
- “Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.” – Steve Jobs
- “My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.” – Steve Jobs
- “My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to make them better.” – Steve Jobs
- “My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that’s what I try to do.” – Steve Jobs
- “My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each other’s’ negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts.” – Steve Jobs
- “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.” – Steve Jobs
- “Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.” – Steve Jobs
- “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
- “Simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.” – Steve Jobs
- “Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.” – Steve Jobs
- “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.” – Steve Jobs
- “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
- “The greatest thing is when you do put your heart and soul into something over an extended period of time, and it is worth it.” – Steve Jobs
- “The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people – as remarkable as the telephone.” – Steve Jobs
- “The web is not going to change the world, certainly not in the next 10 years. It’s going to augment the world. And once you’re in this Web-augmented space, you’re going to see that democratization takes place.” – Steve Jobs
- “Things don’t have to change the world to be important.” – Steve Jobs
- “This revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy.” – Steve Jobs
- “We at Apple had forgotten who we were. One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.” – Steve Jobs
- “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.” – Steve Jobs
- “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? So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life.” – Steve Jobs
- “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.” – Steve Jobs
- “What we’re doing here will send a giant ripple through the universe.” – Steve Jobs
- “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
- “When you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out. If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.” – Steve Jobs
- “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. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” – Steve Jobs
- “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.” – Steve Jobs
- “You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.” – Steve Jobs
- “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
- “You know who the best managers are? They’re the great individual contributors, who never ever want to be a manager, but decide they have to be manager because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as them.” – Steve Jobs
- “You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.” – Steve Jobs
- “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” – Steve Jobs
- “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
