Most Astonished Part of Steve jobs

And you can change it, you can influence it. Click to tweet

In the broadest context, the goal is to seek enlightenment – however you define it.

If you want it, you can fly, you just have to trust you a lot.

When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader than that.

The only thing you have in your life is time. If you invest that time in yourself to have great experiences that are going to enrich you, then you can’t possibly lose.

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 – there were about ten books.

On being fired from Apple and called back 12 years later: What a circle of life. You know? Life is just always mysterious and surprising, and you never know what’s around the next corner.

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…

So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life. We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. We could be out sailing. Some of the executive team could be playing golf. They could be running other companies. And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it. And we think it is.

In business, if I knew earlier what I know now, I’d have probably done some things a lot better than I did, but I also would’ve probably done some other things a lot worse. But so what? It’s more important to be engaged in the present.

I think the things you most regret in life are things you didn’t do. What you really regret was never asking that girl to dance.

I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.

Death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent, it clears out the old to make way for the new.

I’ve always felt that death is the greatest invention of life. I’m sure that life evolved without death at first and found that without death, life didn’t work very well because it didn’t make room for the young.

Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. Click to tweet

Without death, there would be very little progress.

I’ve been rejected, but I was still in love.

If you don’t love it, you’re going to fail. Click to tweet

I was lucky, I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20.

People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you’re doing and it’s totally true. And the reason is because it’s so hard that if you don’t, any rational person would give up. It’s really hard. And you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don’t love it, if you’re not having fun doing it, you don’t really love it, you’re going to give up.

If you really look at the ones that ended up, you know, being “successful” in the eyes of society and the ones that didn’t, oftentimes, it’s the ones who were successful and loved what they did so they could persevere, you know, when it got really tough. And the ones that didn’t love it quit because they’re sane, right? Who would want to put up with this stuff if you don’t love it?

So it’s a lot of hard work and it’s a lot of worrying constantly and if you don’t love it, you’re going to fail. So you’ve got to love it and you’ve got to have passion and I think that’s the high-order bit.

That was one of the things that came out most clearly from this whole experience [with cancer]. I realized that I love my life. I really do. I’ve got the greatest family in the world, and I’ve got my work. And that’s pretty much all I do. I don’t socialize much or go to conferences. I love my family, and I love running Apple, and I love Pixar. And I get to do that. I’m very lucky.

You get your wind back, remember the finish line, and keep going. Click to tweet

At Apple, people are putting in 18-hour days.

I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don’t blame them. It’s really tough and it consumes your life.

If you’ve got a family and you’re in the early days of a company, I can’t imagine how one could do it. I’m sure it’s been done but it’s rough. It’s pretty much an eighteen hour day job, seven days a week for awhile. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up.

You’ve got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about, otherwise you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that’s half the battle right there.

I’ve read something that Bill Gates said about six months ago. He said, ‘I worked really, really hard in my 20s.’ And I know what he means because I worked really, really hard in my 20s too. Literally, you know, 7 days a week, a lot of hours every day. And it actually is a wonderful thing to do, because you can get a lot done. But you can’t do it forever, and you don’t want to do it forever, and you have to come up with ways of figuring out what the most important things are and working with other people even more.

I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end.

On the MacIntosh: When we finally presented it at the shareholders’ meeting, everyone in the auditorium gave it a five-minute ovation. What was incredible to me was that I could see the Mac team in the first few rows. It was as though none of us could believe we’d actually finished it. Everyone started crying.

As it was clear that the Sixties were over, it was also clear that a lot of the people who had gone through the Sixties ended up not really accomplishing what they set out to accomplish, and because they had thrown their discipline to the wind, they didn’t have much to fall back on.

Pixar has been a marathon, not a sprint. There are times when you run a marathon and you wonder, why am I doing this? But you take a drink of water, and around the next bend, you get your wind back, remember the finish line, and keep going.

On the MacIntosh: It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn’t be ours anymore.

My wife deserves all the credit for keeping me at it. Click to tweet

On his father: He was a machinist by trade and worked very hard and was kind of a genius with his hands. He had a workbench out in his garage where, when I was about five or six, he sectioned off a little piece of it and said “Steve, this is your workbench now.” And he gave me some of his smaller tools and showed me how to use a hammer and saw and how to build things. It really was very good for me. He spent a lot of time with me… teaching me how to build things, how to take things apart, put things back together.

I can tell you this: I’ve been married for 8 years, and that’s had a really good influence on me. I’ve been very lucky, through random happenstance I just happened to sit next to this wonderful woman who became my wife. And it was a big deal. We have 3 kids, and it’s been a big deal. You see the world differently.

I’ve never been so tired in my life. I’d come home at about ten o’clock at night and flop straight into bed, then haul myself out at six the next morning and take a shower and go to work. My wife deserves all the credit for keeping me at it. She supported me and kept the family together with a husband

Most people don’t get those experiences because they never ask. I’ve never found anybody that didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help.

Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask. And that’s what separates sometimes the people that do things from the people that just dream about them.

As you may know, I was basically fired from Apple when I was 30 and was invited to come back 12 years later so that was difficult when it happened but maybe the best thing that could ever happen to me. […] you just move on, life goes on and you learn from it.

I feel like somebody just punched me in the stomach and knocked all my wind out. I’m only 30 years old and I want to have a chance to continue creating things. I know I’ve got at least one more great computer in me. And Apple is not going to give me a chance to do that.

We’ve done so many hardware products where Jony and I have looked at each other and said, ‘We don’t know how to make it any better than this, we just don’t know how to make it’. But we always do; we realize another way. And then it’s not long after the new thing comes out that we look at the older thing and go, ‘How can we ever have done that?’ Life goes on and you learn from it. Click to tweet