~ The Biography Of Steve Jobs ~

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Quotes
Steve used to start his employee retreats by his famous "Sayings from Chairman Jobs" — he was a great person to quote indeed

Apple Quotes

I'm not a 62-year-old statesman that's traveled around the world all his life. So I'm sure that there was a situation when I was 25 that if I could go back, knowing what I know now, I could have handled much better. And I'm sure I'll be able to say the same thing when I'm 35 about the situation in 1985. I can be very intense in my convictions. And I don't know; all in all, I kind of like myself and I'm not that anxious to change.

Source: Newsweek, Sep. 29 1985

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Quotes
Steve used to start his employee retreats by his famous "Sayings from Chairman Jobs" — he was a great person to quote indeed

Apple Quotes

You know, my philosophy is—it's always been very simple. And it has its flaws, which I'll go into. My philosophy is that everything starts with a great product. So, you know, I obviously believed in listening to customers, but customers can't tell you about the next breakthrough that's going to happen next year that's going to change the whole industry. So you have to listen very carefully. But then you have to go and sort of stow away—you have to go hide away with people that really understand the technology, but also really care about the customers, and dream up this next breakthrough. And that's my perspective, that everything starts with a great product. And that has its flaws. I have certainly been accused of not listening to the customers enough. And I think there is probably a certain amount of that that's valid.

Source: Newsweek, Sep. 29 1985

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Quotes
Steve used to start his employee retreats by his famous "Sayings from Chairman Jobs" — he was a great person to quote indeed

Apple Quotes

I had hoped that my life would take on the quality of an interesting tapestry where I would have weaved in and out of Apple: I would have been there a period of time, and maybe I would have gone off and done something else to contribute, but connected with Apple, and then maybe come back and stay for a lengthy time period and then go off and do something else. But it's just not going to work out that way. So I had 10 of the best years of my life, you know. And I don't regret much of anything.

Source: Newsweek, Sep. 29 1985

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Quotes
Steve used to start his employee retreats by his famous "Sayings from Chairman Jobs" — he was a great person to quote indeed

Apple Quotes

At Apple, people are putting in 18-hour days. We attract a different type of person—a person who doesn’t want to wait five or ten years to have someone take a giant risk on him or her. Someone who really wants to get in a little over his head and make a little dent in the universe. We are aware that we are doing something significant. We’re here at the beginning of it and we’re able to shape how it goes. Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.

Source: Playboy, Feb. 1985

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Quotes
Steve used to start his employee retreats by his famous "Sayings from Chairman Jobs" — he was a great person to quote indeed

Apple Quotes

Some people are saying that we ought to put an IBM PC on every desk in America to improve productivity. It won’t work. The special incantations you have to learn this time are ‘slash q-zs’ and things like that. The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel—one that reads like a mystery to most people. They’re not going to learn slash q-z any more than they’re going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.

Source: Playboy, Feb. 1985

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Quotes
Steve used to start his employee retreats by his famous "Sayings from Chairman Jobs" — he was a great person to quote indeed

Apple Quotes

I saw a video tape that we weren’t supposed to see. It was prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. By watching the tape, we discovered that, at least as of a few years ago, every tactical nuclear weapon in Europe manned by U.S. personnel was targeted by an Apple II computer. Now, we didn’t sell computers to the military; they went out and bought them at a dealer’s, I guess. But it didn’t make us feel good to know that our computers were being used to target nuclear weapons in Europe. The only bright side of it was that at least they weren’t [Radio Shack] TRS-80s! Thank God for that.

Source: Playboy, Feb. 1985

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Quotes
Steve used to start his employee retreats by his famous "Sayings from Chairman Jobs" — he was a great person to quote indeed

Apple Quotes

How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through. PLAYBOY: Are you saying that the people who made the PCjr don’t have that kind of pride in the product? JOBS: If they did, they wouldn’t have turned out the PCjr.

Source: Playboy, Feb. 1985

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Quotes
Steve used to start his employee retreats by his famous "Sayings from Chairman Jobs" — he was a great person to quote indeed

Apple Quotes

(Does it take insane people to make insanely great things?) Actually, making an insanely great product has a lot to do with the process of making the product, how you learn things and adopt new ideas and throw out old ideas. But, yeah, the people who made Mac are sort of on the edge.

Source: Playboy, Feb. 1985

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Quotes
Steve used to start his employee retreats by his famous "Sayings from Chairman Jobs" — he was a great person to quote indeed

Apple Quotes

My father was a machinist, and he was a sort of genius with his hands. He can fix anything and make it work and take any mechanical thing apart and get it back together. That was my first glimpse of it. I started to gravitate more toward electronics, and he used to get me things I could take apart and put back together.

Source: Playboy, Feb. 1985

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Quotes
Steve used to start his employee retreats by his famous "Sayings from Chairman Jobs" — he was a great person to quote indeed

Apple Quotes

My mother taught me to read before I went to school, so I was pretty bored in school, and I turned into a little terror. You should have seen us in third grade. We basically destroyed our teacher. We would let snakes loose in the classroom and explode bombs. Things changed in the fourth grade, though. One of the saints in my life is this woman named Imogene Hill, who was a fourth-grade teacher who taught this advanced class. She got hip to my whole situation in about a month and kindled a passion in me for learning things. I learned more that year than I think I learned in any year in school.

Source: Playboy, Feb. 1985

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Quotes
Steve used to start his employee retreats by his famous "Sayings from Chairman Jobs" — he was a great person to quote indeed

Apple Quotes

Woz and I are different in most ways, but there are some ways in which we’re the same, and we’re very close in those ways. We’re sort of like two planets in their own orbits that every so often intersect. It wasn’t just computers, either. Woz and I very much liked Bob Dylan’s poetry, and we spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of that stuff. This was California. You could get LSD fresh made from Stanford. You could sleep on the beach at night with your girlfriend. California has a sense of experimentation and a sense of openness—openness to new possibilities. Besides Dylan, I was interested in Eastern mysticism, which hit the shores at about the same time. When I went to college at Reed, in Oregon, there was a constant flow of people stopping by, from Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert to Gary Snyder. There was a constant flow of intellectual questioning about the truth of life. That was a time when every college student in this country read Be Here Now and Diet for a Small Planet.

Source: Playboy, Feb. 1985

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Quotes
Steve used to start his employee retreats by his famous "Sayings from Chairman Jobs" — he was a great person to quote indeed

Apple Quotes

I used to think about selling 1,000,000 computers a year, but it was just a thought. When it actually happens, it’s a totally different thing. So it was, ‘Holy shit, it’s actually coming true!’ But what’s hard to explain is that this does not feel like overnight. Next year will be my tenth year. I had never done anything longer than a year in my life. Six months, for me, was a long time when we started Apple. So this has been my life since I’ve been sort of a free-willed adult. Each year has been so robust with problems and successes and learning experiences and human experiences that a year is a lifetime at Apple. So this has been ten lifetimes.

Source: Playboy, Feb. 1985

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Quotes
Steve used to start his employee retreats by his famous "Sayings from Chairman Jobs" — he was a great person to quote indeed

Apple Quotes

(on whether he tried to find his biological parents) I think it’s quite a natural curiosity for adopted people to want to understand where certain traits come from. But I’m mostly an environmentalist. I think the way you are raised and your values and most of your world view come from the experiences you had as you grew up. But some things aren’t accounted for that way. I think it’s quite natural to have a curiosity about it.

Source: Playboy, Feb. 1985

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Quotes
Steve used to start his employee retreats by his famous "Sayings from Chairman Jobs" — he was a great person to quote indeed

Apple Quotes

Well, my favorite things in life are books, sushi and…. My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time. As it is, I pay a price by not having much of a personal life. I don’t have the time to pursue love affairs or to tour small towns in Italy and sit in cafes and eat tomato-and-mozzarella salad. Occasionally, I spend a little money to save myself a hassle, which means time. And that’s the extent of it. I bought an apartment in New York, but it’s because I love that city. I’m trying to educate myself, being from a small town in California, not having grown up with the sophistication and culture of a large city. I consider it part of my education. You know, there are many people at Apple who can buy everything that they could ever possibly want and still have most of their money unspent. I hate talking about this as a problem; people are going to read this and think, Yeah, well, give me your problem. They’re going to think I’m an arrogant little asshole.

Source: Playboy, Feb. 1985

[MysteRy]

Sayings

Quotes
Steve used to start his employee retreats by his famous "Sayings from Chairman Jobs" — he was a great person to quote indeed

Apple Quotes

Companies, as they grow to become multibillion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or a passion about the products. The creative people, who are the ones who care passionately, have to persuade five layers of management to do what they know is the right thing to do.

Source: Playboy, Feb. 1985