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Steve Jobs's ideas on Success, collected in one place with clear source context.
"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
"Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected."
"I'm convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance."
Source: Interview: Smithsonian Institution Oral History Project, 1995
"For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."
Source: Interview: Smithsonian Institution Oral History Interview (1995)
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates."
"My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other's kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts."
"Picasso had a saying -- 'good artists copy; great artists steal' -- and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."
"Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles."
"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."
"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."
"Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations."
"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."
"The doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker and doer in one person."
"Things don’t have to change the world to be important."
"We don't get a chance to do that many things, and everyone should be really excellent. Because this is our life."
"We hire people who want to make the best things in the world."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something."
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