Consulting the Archives...
Generating fresh insights specifically for this topic.
This may take a moment.
Generating fresh insights specifically for this topic.
This may take a moment.
Explore the most valuable thinking from Steve Jobs, curated for ambitious professionals who demand clarity, execution, and strategic depth. This archive brings together their essential quotes with full source context, allowing you to trace each idea back to its origin. Steve Jobs's perspective offers practical frameworks you can apply immediately to decision-making, personal growth, and long-term strategy. Whether you're building a business, leading a team, or pursuing mastery in your field, these quotes distill complex wisdom into memorable, actionable insights. Use this collection as a reference library whenever you need Steve Jobs's lens on ambition, resilience, or high performance.
Quote profile
In 1997, Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy. Steve Jobs, who'd been fired from the company he founded twelve years earlier, returned as interim CEO. What happened next redefined consumer technology forever. Jobs didn't save Apple through better computers—he saved it by killing almost every product the company made. The iMac. iPod. iPhone. iPad. Each device emerged from Jobs's obsessive belief that technology should be an art form, not an engineering problem. He combined calligraphy classes from his Reed College dropout days with Zen Buddhist aesthetics and ruthless product focus to create machines that felt like they'd been designed by a single person with a singular vision—because they had been. Jobs screamed at engineers about pixel alignment. He fired people in elevators. He told customers what they wanted before they knew it themselves. The man who gave us 'one more thing' keynotes and black turtlenecks also gave us the template for how modern tech companies operate: obsess over detail, control the entire experience, and never ask permission to be revolutionary. His Stanford commencement speech about connecting the dots and staying hungry became the secular sermon for a generation that saw entrepreneurship as self-actualization.
Featured highlights
"It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions."
"If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away."
"Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do."
"You cannot look at the competition and say you're going to do it better. You have to look at the competition and say you're going to do it differently."
"Picasso had a saying -- 'good artists copy; great artists steal' -- and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."
"For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."
"Management is about persuading people to do things they do not want to do, while leadership is about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could."
"Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice."
"Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion."
"We're just enthusiastic about what we do."
"If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don't have to be pushed. The vision pulls you."
"True focus is not merely about choosing one path, but rather the discipline to reject a hundred other good ideas that might lead you astray."
"I don't care about being right. I care about success and doing the right thing."
"Details matter, it's worth waiting to get it right."
"You’ve got to find what you love."
"It's not a faith in technology. It's faith in people."
"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."
"I have had a happy life... I love my family."
"If you don't love it, you're going to fail."
"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."
"Great things in business are never done by one person. They're done by a team of people."
"Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith."
"The only way to do great work is to be obsessed with what you do."
"Things don’t have to change the world to be important."
"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."
"Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them."
"I want to put a ding in the universe."
"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
"I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates."
"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."
"You need to have a lot of passion for what you're doing because it's so hard. If you don't, any rational person would give up."
"Hire the best people and get out of their way."
"Stay hungry, stay foolish."
"Innovation 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."
"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."
Steve Jobs's ideas continue to shape how people think about ambition, resilience, and clarity.
Select a quote to apply today and revisit the rest when you need a reset.
Search More
Jump to another topic, author, or pillar without leaving the archive.
"Come back any time you need Steve Jobs's perspective."