Do What You Love To Do and Make a Difference

• You've got to find what you love. 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.

• 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 other's 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.

• I was worth over $1,000,000 when I was 23, and over $10,000,000 when I was 24, and over $100,000,000 when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.

• It turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life,

• Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?

• 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.

• Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?

• I want to put a ding in the universe.

• I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.

• Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.

Do Your Best

• We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life.

• I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.

• Get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.

• Learn continually – there's always "one more thing" to learn!

Customer Care

• Our DNA is as a consumer company – for that individual customer who’s voting thumbs up or thumbs down. That’s who we think about. And we think that our job is to take responsibility for the complete user experience. And if it’s not up to par, it’s our fault, plain and simply.

• People don’t want to just buy personal computers anymore. They want to know what they can do with them, and we’re going to show people exactly that.

Innovation

• Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.

• We’re gambling on our vision, and we’d rather do that than make ‘me-too’ products.

• Creativity is just connecting things.

• Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity – not a threat.

• I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do.

• Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.

• To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.

• My experience has been that creating a compelling new technology is so much harder than you think it will be that you're almost dead when you get to the other shore.

• There's an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.' And we've always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very very beginning. And we always will.

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

New Product Development

• 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.

• 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.

• Some people say you have to be a little crazy to buy a Mac. Well, in that craziness we see genius and that’s who we make tools for.

• Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

• In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

Idea Management

• There’s a phrase in Buddhism, ‘Beginner’s mind.’ It’s wonderful to have a beginner’s mind.

• So when a good idea comes, you know, part of my job is to move it around, just see what different people think, get people talking about it, argue with people about it, get ideas moving among that group of 100 people, get different people together to explore different aspects of it quietly, and, you know – just explore things.

• People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.

• I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do... Our leadership 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....it’s only by saying 'no' that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

Synergistic Organization and Inspired Team

• I have one of the best jobs in the world. I get to hang out with some of the most talented, committed people around, and together we get to play in this sandbox and build these cool products. Apple is an incredibly collaborative company. You know how many committees we have at Apple? Zero. We're structured like a start-up. We're the biggest start-up on the planet. And we all meet once a week to discuss our business,

• Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, and poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.

• The only thing that works is management by values. Find people who are competent and really bright, but more importantly, people who care exactly about the same things you care about.

• The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay.

• 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... We just want to make great products.

• My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better.

• The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay.

• When I hire somebody really senior, competence is the ante. They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, Are they going to fall in love with Apple? Because if they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself. They’ll want to do what’s best for Apple, not what’s best for them, what’s best for Steve, or anybody else.

Quality

• Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.

• Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.