Steve jobs line of money and work

STEVE JOBS WORDS ON LEARNING, EDUCATION, MEDITATION Well, I was thrown out of school a few times.

I think all of us need to be on guard against arrogance which knocks at the door whenever you’re successful.

Invest time in yourself to have great experiences that are going to enrich you.

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.

Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

The key thing to remember about me is that I’m still a student. I’m still in boot camp. If anyone is reading any of my thoughts, I’d keep that in mind.

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.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country… I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.

We wanted to more richly experience why were we were alive, not just make a better life, and so people went in search of things. The great thing that came from that time was to realize that there was definitely more to life than the materialism of the late 50’s and early sixties. We were going in search of something deeper.

Between my sophomore and junior years, I got stoned for the first time; I discovered Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, and all that classic stuff. I read Moby Dick and went back as a junior taking creative-writing classes.

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.

Human minds settle into fixed ways of looking at the world and that’s always been true and it’s probably always going to be true.

There’s a phrase in Buddhism, ‘Beginner’s mind’. It’s wonderful to have a beginner’s mind.

I’m completely stunned. I’m 19 years old, in a foreign country, up in the Himalayas, and here is this bizarre Indian baba who has just dragged me away from the rest of the crowd, shaving my head atop this mountain peak. I’m still not sure why he did 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.

I used to think that technology could help education. I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.

The most important thing is a person. A person who incites and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can. Click to tweet

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.

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.

School was pretty hard for me at the beginning.

My mother taught me how to read before I got to school and so when I got there I really just wanted to do two things. I wanted to read books because I loved reading books and I wanted to go outside and chase butterflies. You know, do the things that five-year-olds like to do. I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.

Obviously, one of the great challenges of an education is to teach us how to think. What we’re finding is that computers are actually going to affect the quality of thinking as more and more of our children have these tools available to them.

I know from my own education that if I hadn’t encountered two or three individuals that spent extra time with me, I’m sure I would have been in jail.

When you’re young, a little bit of course correction goes a long way. I think it takes pretty talented people to do that.

More education quotes

did you know that Steve also practiced meditation?

Here’s what he had to say about it:

If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things – that’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before.

STEVE JOBS WORDS ON SIMPLICITY

I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.

Just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.

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 a very simple life. I have my family and I have Apple and Pixar. And I don’t do much else.

My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. Click to tweet

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 cafés and eat tomato-and-mozzarella salad.

I end up not buying a lot of things, because I find them ridiculous.

The way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.

Look at the design of a lot of consumer products – they’re really complicated surfaces. We tried to make something much more holistic and simple.

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there.

We believe that customers are smart and want objects which are well thought through.

What I found when I got here was a zillion and one products. It was amazing. And I started to ask people, now why would I recommend a 3400 over a 4400? When should somebody jump up to a 6500, but not a 7300? And after three weeks, I couldn’t figure this out. If I couldn’t figure this out… how could our customers figure this out?

Apple is a $30 billion company, yet we’ve got less than 30 major products. I don’t know if that’s ever been done before. Certainly the great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products. We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.

We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

5 powerful quotes on simplicity:

People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results. Albert Einstein

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. William James

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Clutter and confusion are failures of design, not attributes of information. Edward Tuft

It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential. Bruce Lee

More simplicity quotes

STEVE JOBS QUOTATIONS ON QUALITY

Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.

We had a fundamental belief that doing it right the first time was going to be easier than having to go back and fix it. And I cannot say strongly enough that the repercussions of that attitude are staggering. I’ve seen them again and again throughout my business life.

We’re not going to be the first to this party, but we’re going to be the best.

There’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to ship. Click to tweet

Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.

The Lisa people wanted to do something great. And the Mac people want to do something insanely great. The difference shows.

If they are working in an environment where excellence is expected, then they will do excellent work without anything but self-motivation. I’m talking about an environment in which excellence is noticed and respected and is in the culture. If you have that, you don’t have to tell people to do excellent work. They understand it from their surroundings.

I have to tell you there’s some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to ship, that we wouldn’t be proud to recommend to our family and friends. And we can’t do it, we just can’t ship junk.

We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the 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.

PART 5. AND ONE MORE THING… STEVE JOBS QUOTES ON MICROSOFT AND BILL GATE

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste.

They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.

The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music.

I am saddened, not by Microsoft success, I have no problem with their success, they’ve earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products.

Their products have no spirit of enlightenment about them, they are very pedestrian. The sad part is that customers don’t have a lot of that spirit either, but the way that we’re going to ratchet up our species is to take the best and to spread it around everybody so that everybody grows up with better things and starts to understand the subtlety of these better things.

I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.

Their products have no spirit to them. Click to tweet

Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus’ success in the spreadsheet – basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost.

With our technology, with objects, literally three people in a garage can blow away what 200 people at Microsoft can do.

Our friends up north spend over five billion dollars on research and development and all they seem to do is copy Google and Apple.

STEVE JOBS’ LAST WORDS Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.

PART 6. CONCLUSION steve jobs quotes we need to be true to who we are and remember whats really important to us wisdom quotes

There’s lots of ways to be as a person. And some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there. And you never meet the people, you never shake their hands, you never hear their story or tell yours, but somehow, in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something is transmitted there. And it’s a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation. So we need to be true to who we are, and remember what’s really important to us. Steve Jobs Click to tweet

Did I forget any great quotes by Steve? What is YOUR favorite quote? Please let me know in the comment section below.