Steve Jobs Quotes On Entrepreneurship, Work & Life

Steve Jobs (Steven Paul Jobs) was born (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) in San Francisco, California, U.S. He was a popular inventor, industrial designer, American entrepreneur. Jobs and Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1976 and are credited as pioneers of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Their Apple II product, sold 2 million units worldwide which grew the company quickly. Jobs invited John Sculley, a more experienced CEO in 1985 to head the company. But Apple asked Jobs to leave from his own company, after years of power struggle. Jobs went on to start new companies NeXT and Pixar. After Apple bought Pixar Jobs returned to Apple as a head of business. In 1997 with the “Think different” advertising campaign, Jobs planned to develop products which we see around: the iMac, iTunes and iTunes Store, Apple Store, iPod, iPhone, App Store, and the iPad. In 2003, Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor and while fighting with the disease he died on October 5, 2011. Even after Jobs’ death, his inspirational words and his work still remind us what a great entrepreneur and visionary he was. Hope these gold mine of Steve Jobs quotes motivate you to follow your passion.

Inspirational Steve Jobs Quotes

“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.”
“I’ve got to tell you, the Internet is a place you go when you want to turn your brain on, and television is a place you go when you want to turn your brain off. I’m not at all convinced that the twain will meet.”
“There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”
“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”
“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. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.” , Steve Jobs quotes about success
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: ‘If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.’ It made an impression on me, and since then, 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.”
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.”
“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.”
“When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and…to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.”Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” , Steve Jobs quotes about life
“If today was the last day of my life would I want to do what I’m about to do today?”
“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, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” , Steve Jobs quotes your time is limited
“Remembering 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’s no reason not to follow your heart.”
“I want to put a ding in the universe.”
“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 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.”
“If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.”
“My self-identity does not revolve around being a businessman, though I recognize that is what I do. I think of myself more as a person who builds neat things. I like building neat things. I like making tools that are useful to people. I like working with very bright people. I like interacting in the world of ideas, though somehow those ideas have to be tied to some physical reality. One of the things I like the most is dropping a new idea on a bunch of incredibly smart and talented people and then letting them work it out themselves. I like all of that very, very much.”
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world.” ,Steve Jobs quotes build your life
“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.”
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”
“I’m the only person I know who’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year…it’s very character building.”
“Things don’t have to change the world to be important.”
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet 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.”
“Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.”
“Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.”
“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
“But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.”
“You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down.”
“A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.” , Steve Jobs quotes about products
“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”
“I don’t really care about being right, I just care about success. You’ll find a lot of people that will tell you I had a very strong opinion, and they presented evidence to the contrary and five minutes later I changed my mind. I don’t mind being wrong, and I’ll admit that I’m wrong a lot. It doesn’t really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing.”
“My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.”
“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.”
“Don’t let the noise of other’s’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”
“The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.”
“So when a good idea comes, you know, part of my job is to move it around, just see what different people think, get people talking about it, argue with people about it, get ideas moving among that group of 100 people, get different people together to explore different aspects of it quietly, and, you know – just explore things.”
“What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”
“Quality is much better than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.”
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” , Steve Jobs quotes creativity innovation
“Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”
“What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think ‘outside the box,’ people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference, and not just to get a job done.”
“I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.”
“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 the 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 once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
“My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.”
“Think Different.”
“Marketing is about values. It’s a complicated and noisy world, and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us.”
“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.”
“Management is about persuading people to do things they do not want to do, while leadership is about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could.” , Steve Jobs quotes on leadership

“You can’t look at the competition and say you’re going to do it better. You have to look at the competition and say you’re going to do it differently.”
“Innovation is the only way to win.”
“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.”
“The greatest thing is when you do put your heart and soul into something over an extended period of time, and it is worth it.”
“If you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up.”
“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.” , Steve Jobs quotes on innovation
“To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of discipline.”
“It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do. We just want to make great products.”
“Do not try to do everything. Do one thing well.”
“Believe that things will work out… follow your intuition and curiosity… trust your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path… You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future… 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… Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
“Your customers don’t care about you. They don’t care about your product or service. They care about themselves, their dreams, their goals. Now, they will care much more if you help them reach their goals, and to do that, you must understand their goals, as well as their needs and deepest desires.”
“It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple.”
“Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.” , Steve Jobs quotes about technology
“Innovation is usually the result of connections of past experiences. But if you have the same experiences as everyone else, you are unlikely to look in a different direction.”
“Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.”
“Everything is based on a simple rule: Quality is the best business plan, period.” ,Steve Jobs quotes business success
“Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity – not a threat.”
“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.”
“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… The ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
“Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.”
“My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other, and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: Great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.” ,Steve Jobs quotes on teamwork
“The most powerful person in the world is the story teller.
The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda
of an entire generation that is to come.”
“We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and everyone should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.”
“When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don’t really understand the complexity of the problem. Then you get into the problem, and you see that it’s really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That’s sort of the middle, and that’s where most people stop… But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem – and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works.”
“To go forward you have to leave something behind.”
“Strategy is figuring out what not to do.”
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. 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.” , Steve Jobs quotes about connecting the dots
“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.”
“Bottom line is, I didn’t return to Apple to make a fortune. I’ve been very lucky in my life and already have one. When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn’t going to let it ruin my life. There’s no way you could ever spend it all, and I don’t view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.”
“Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.”
“Don’t just live a life; build one.”
“Most people do not ever pick up the phone. They never ask, and that is what separates the people that do things from the people that just dream about them. You have to act, and you have to be willing to fail. You have to be willing to crash and burn, because if you are afraid of failing, you will not get very far.”
“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.”
“Life is about creating and living experiences that are worth sharing.”
“The best way to create value in the 21st century is to connect Creativity with Technology.”

“I think the artistry is in having an insight into what one sees around them. Generally putting things together in a way no one else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who don’t have that insight.”
“If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution.”
“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.” , Steve Jobs quotes love what you do
“I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.”
“Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think.”
“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.”
“Start small, think big. Don’t worry about too many things at once. Take a handful of simple things to begin with, and then progress to more complex ones.”

More Steve Jobs Quotes
“If you keep your eye on the profit, you’re going to skimp on the product. But if you focus on making really great products, then the profits will follow.”
“A brand is simply trust.”
“It’s not the consumers’ job to figure out what they want.”
“Manage the top line: your strategy, your people, and your products, and the bottom line will follow.”
“In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.”
“Do your best at every job. Don’t sleep! Success generates more success so be hungry for it. Hire good people with a passion for excellence.” , Steve Jobs quotes on success
“Music companies are not technology companies any more than technology companies are music companies. They’re really different from each other.”

“You have to be burning with “an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right.”
“Believe things will work out. How was I ever to know that the girl who broke my heart in university would lead to my soul mate? How was I to know that the ‘dream job’ I was rejected from out of college would lead me to a year of entrepreneurship and adventure in Spain? How was I to know that taking a miserable job back in the states would be just the push I needed to vow to never do something I wasn’t passionate about again? Everything works out. I mean everything. As long as you believe it will. When you do, you will find the silver lining. That will take you to the next level.”
“You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
“Older people sit down and ask, ‘What is it?’ but the boy asks, ‘What can I do with it?’”
“I was worth about over a million dollars when I was 23 and over ten million dollars when I was 24, and over a hundred million dollars when I was 25 and… it wasn’t that important – because I never did it for the money.” ,Steve Jobs quotes about money
You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” , Steve Jobs quotes customer service
“Find people who are competent and really bright, but more importantly, people who care exactly about the same things you care about.”
“Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.”
“The greatest artists like Dylan, Picasso and Newton risked failure. And if we want to be great, we’ve got to risk it too.”
“Pursue your dreams and see the opportunities in life’s setbacks.”
“You cannot mandate productivity, you must provide the tools to let people become their best.”
“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 18-hour day job, seven days a week for a while. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive.”
“Learn continually – there’s always “one more thing” to learn!”
“You are all over the map, figure out the top 5 things you want to focus on and get rid of the rest.”
“We hire people who want to make the best things in the world.”
“I was lucky — I found what I love to do early in life.” , Steve Jobs quotes on love
“Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.”
“When you’re young, you look at television and think, there’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.” ,Steve Jobs quotes about business
“Follow your heart, but check it with your head.”
“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to to , We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” , Steve Jobs quotes on hiring
“You‘ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.”
“Be ready to catch the ball when it is thrown by life.”
“A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”
“Shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.”
“Began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.”
“I think this is the start of something really big. Sometimes that first step is the hardest one, and we’ve just taken it.”
“It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”
“I hate it when people call themselves ‘entrepreneurs’ when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell of go public, so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business.” , Steve Jobs quotes on work
“The journey is the reward.”
“Great engineers are a huge multiplier.”

Interesting facts about Steve Jobs:-

He was majority shareholder of Pixar; a member of The Walt Disney Company’s board of directors; and the founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT, Apple
His biological parents (Abdulfattah Jandali and Joanne Schieble) put Steve for adoption after his birth in San Francisco
In 1972 before dropping out Jobs went to Reed College and later decided to travel India in 1974 to seek enlightenment & he also studied Zen Buddhism
In 1985 Apple asked Jobs to leave his own company and later with few of his members he founded NeXT
His another company Pixar, produced the first fully computer-animated film, Toy Story
In 1997, Apple merged with NeXT resulting in return of Steve Jobs to Apple Inc.
Wozniak was 18 and Jobs was just 13 when Jobs and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak met in high school
The governor of California, Jerry Brown declared Steve Jobs Day, on Sunday, October 16, 2011
During his struggling days and learning he slept on his friends’ dorm room floors, returned Coke bottles for money, and survived off free meals from the local Hare Krishna temple
There was a third founder of Apple, Ronald Wayne (designed Apple’s first logo). Wayne sold his 10 percent stake just two weeks after partnering with Jobs and Wozniak for only $800
While at Apple, Jobs annual salary was at $1
Either primary inventor or co-inventor Jobs holds 346 United States patents(most of the patents being for design)