Steve Jobs

Let's go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday.

I don't want to fail, of course. But even though I didn't know how bad things really were, I still had a lot to think about before I said yes. I had to consider the implications for Pixar, for my family, for my reputation. I decided that I didn't really care, because this is what I want to do. If I try my best and fail, well, I've tried my best.

Jobs also used the meetings to enforce focus. At Robert Friedland's farm, his job had been to prune the apple trees so that they would stay strong, and that became a metaphor for his pruning at Apple. Instead of encouraging each group to let product lines proliferate based on marketing considerations, or permitting a thousand ideas to bloom, Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time. " There is no one better at turning off the noise that is going on around him," Cook said. " That allows him to focus on a few things and say no to many things. Few people are really good at that.

I think the world__ a better place because Bill realized that his goal isn__ to be the richest guy in the cemetery, right?

God gave us the senses to let us feel the love in everyone__ heart, not the illusions brought about by wealth.

Remembering that I__l be dead soon is the most important tool I__e 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.

You__e got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. 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__ found it yet, keep looking. Don__ settle. As with all matters of the heart, you__l know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don__ settle_Your time is limited, so don__ waste it living someone else__ life. Don__ be trapped by dogma _ which is living with the results of other people__ thinking. Don__ 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.

Great things in business are never done by one person.They are done by a team of people

Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face to face meetings. " There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat,"he said."Thats crazy, Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say ' Wow, and soon your cooking up all sorts of ideas." So he had the Pixar building planned to promote encounters and unplanned collaborations. " If a building doesn't encourage that, you'll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that's sparked by serendipity,"he said.

He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

Sculley found Jobs as memorable as his machine. " He seemed more a showman than a businessman. Every move seemed calculated, as if it was rehearsed, to create an occasion of the moment.

I've never believed that they're separate. Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist and a great scientist. Michelangelo knew a tremendous amount about how to cut stone at the quarry. The finest dozen computer scientists I know are all musicians. Some are better than others, but they all consider that an important part of their life. I don't believe that the best people in any of these fields see themselves as one branch of a forked tree. I just don't see that.People bring these things together a lot. Dr. Land at Polaroid said, "I want Polaroid to stand at the intersection of art and science," and I've never forgotten that. I think that that's possible, and I think a lot of people have tried.

Walter Issacson biographer of Steve Jobs:I remember sitting in his backyard in his garden, one day, and he started talking about God. He [Jobs] said, _ Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don__. I think it__ 50/50, maybe. But ever since I__e had cancer, I__e been thinking about it more, and I find myself believing a bit more, maybe it__ because I want to believe in an afterlife, that when you die, it doesn__ just all disappear. The wisdom you__e accumulated, somehow it lives on.__hen he paused for a second and said, __ea, but sometimes, I think it__ just like an On-Off switch. Click. And you__e gone._ And then he paused again and said, _ And that__ why I don__ like putting On-Off switches on Apple devices.__oy to the WORLD! There IS an after-life!

Nevertheless, by dint of his personality and controlling instincts, Jobs was soon playing a stronger role. He spewed out a stream of ideas - some reasonable, others wacky - about what Pixar's hardware and software could become. And on his occasional visits to the PIxar offices, he was an inspiring presence. "I grew up a Southern Baptist, and we had revival meetings with mesmerizing but corrupt preachers," recounted Alvy Ray Smith. "Steve's got it: the power of the tongue and the web of words that catches people up. We were aware of this when we had board meetings, so we developed signals - nose scratching or ear tugs - for when someone had been caught up in Steve's distortion field and he needed to be tugged back to reality.

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

Jobs had begun to drop acid by then, and he turned Brennan on to it as well, in a wheat field just outside Sunnyvale. "It was great," he recalled. "I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the whole field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat.

Simply handing over your iPod to a friend, your blind date, or the total stranger sitting next to you on the plane opens you up like a book." (Steven Levy)

The Only Way to Do Great Work is To Love What You Do