My Top 40 Steve Jobs Quotes That Will Elevate Your Mindset
Steven Paul Jobs was an American business magnate and investor. He was the chairman, chief executive officer, and co-founder of Apple Inc.; chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar (source – Wikipedia)
Here is my selection of his quotes I considered my top 40 best.
1. The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
2. For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. I’m as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things.
6. 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.
7. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
8. You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
9. That’s been one of my mantras—focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.
10. Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful…that’s what matters to me.
11. I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.
12. My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.
13. Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow know what you truly want to become.
14. Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.
15. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
16. I want to put a ding in the universe.
17. Let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.
18. I do not adopt softness towards others because I want to make them better.
19. The doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker and doer in one person.
20. Once you discover one simple fact, and that is everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you.
21. I always advise people – Don’t wait! Do something when you are young, when you have nothing to lose, and keep that in mind.
22. Don’t take it all too seriously. If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.
23. I don’t care about being right. I care about success and doing the right thing.
24. One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.
25. People judge you on your performance, so focus on the outcome. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
26. Now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you, ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish.
27. If today were the last of your life, would you do what you were going to do today?
28. In the broadest context, the goal is to seek enlightenment – however you define it.
29. If you want it, you can fly, you just have to trust you a lot.
30. 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.
31. 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.
32. 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.
33. 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.
34. If you don’t love it, you’re going to fail.
35. 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.
36. 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.
37. I have been trained to think in units of time that are measured in several years. With what I’ve chosen to do with my life, you know, even a small thing takes a few years. To do anything of magnitude takes at least five years, more likely seven or eight. Rightfully or wrongfully, that’s how I think.
38. If you are willing to work hard and ask lots of questions, you can learn business pretty fast.
39. If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.
40. Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?
