11 Insights from Steve Jobs

By Rajesh Setty on Thu 22 Jan 2009, 7:21 AM – 12 Comments

This is a collection of insights from legendary Steve Jobs (collected from all over the web – his writings, interviews etc.)

#1.  I was worth about over a million dollars when I was 23 and over 10 million dollars when I was 24, and over a hundred million dollars when I was 25 and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.

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

#3.  My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.

#4.  I mean, some people say, ‘Oh, God, if (Jobs) got run over by a bus, Apple would be in trouble.’ And, you know, I think it wouldn’t be a party, but there are really capable people at Apple. My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that’s what I try to do.

#5.  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.

#6. We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one 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.

#7. 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.

#8. 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.

#9. …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. 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.

#10. 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.

#11. I didn’t see it then, but 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.

Have a great morning there.

Related Articles:

• Three stories from Steve Jobs – What’s your story?
• Steve Jobs unveiling iPhone at MacWorld 2007 – Quick lessons from the keynote
• Free Conference call with Steve Farber – Monday Aug 14, 2006
• 4/19 ONLY: Steve’s special offer to promote his new book – Radical Edge

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