iQuote: Inspiring Legacy from Steve

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?

And we've all chosen to do this with our lifes.

So it better be damn good. 

It better be worth it.

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 other's opinion 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.

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.

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. 

Don't lose faith. 

I’m convinced that the only things that kept me going was that I loved what I did. 

You’ve got to find what you love.

"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."


"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."

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.

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.


"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 ever 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."

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.

But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

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.


"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 often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there."

"One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are."

"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."


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. 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.

"I would trade all my technology for an afternoon with Socrates."

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. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.


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.