I was thinking about the “disappointing” iPhone 4S launch yesterday while reading tweets on my iPhone. Then the news. President Obama said it, “there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.”
He is my hero, as he is to many others on this planet. So much has been said about him in last few hours. Much more is going to be said in years to come. I will only quote himself in this post.
Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?
- A comment he made in persuading John Sculley to become Apple’s CEO, as quoted in Odyssey : Pepsi to Apple : A Journey of Adventure, Ideas, and the Future (1987) by John Sculley and John A. Byrne“The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.” [Apple Confidential: The Real Story of Apple Computer Inc., May 1999]
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. Because 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. … stay hungry, stay foolish.
– Stanford commencement speech 2005“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. 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. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”
– Stanford commencement speech 2005“Picasso had a saying: ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal.’ We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas…I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, artists, zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”
– 1994
Q: There’s a lot of symbolism to your return. Is that going to be enough to reinvigorate the company with a sense of magic?
“You’re missing it. This is not a one-man show. What’s reinvigorating this company is two things: One, there’s a lot of really talented people in this company who listened to the world tell them they were losers for a couple of years, and some of them were on the verge of starting to believe it themselves. But they’re not losers. What they didn’t have was a good set of coaches, a good plan. A good senior management team. But they have that now.” [BusinessWeek, May 25, 1998]
