Walter Isaacson’s Biography on the late founder of Apple is a great book based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues.
The Steve Jobs biography contains lots of insights, lessons learned from building the world’s most valuable company, the roller coaster life of an entrepreneur, quotable quotes on building a company that is built to last. Apple creates insanely great products based on Steve Job’s vision and obsession on simplicity.
Simplicity that is the ultimate of sophistication
Here are some quotable quotes from Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Isaacson.
Bill Gates reaction to Jobs assertion that Microsoft was reaping apple off:
- Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.
Team Building
- You have to be ruthless if you want to build a team of A players. “It’s too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C players,” he recalled. “The Macintosh experience taught me that A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can’t indulge B players.
For most things in life, the range between best and average is 30% or so. The best airplane flight, the best meal, they may be 30% better than your average one. A players like to work with A players, they just didn’t like working with C players.
Habits and Aging – Invitation for Jobs 30th Birthday
- There’s an old Hindu saying that goes, ‘In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.’ Come help me celebrate mine.
Know your Worth – Paul Rand on Designing Options for the Next Logo
- When Jobs asked for a number of options to consider, Rand declared that he did not create different options for clients. “I will solve your problem, and you will pay me,” he told Jobs. “You can use what I produce, or not, but I will not do options, and either way you will pay me.
I will solve your problem, and you will pay me. You can use what I produce, or not, but I will not do options, and either way you will pay me.
Helmut Sonnenfeldt once said of Henry Kissinger
“He lies not because it’s in his interest, he lies because it’s in his nature
The Think Different Ad Campaign – Remember who your heroes are:
- We at Apple had forgotten who we were. One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are. That was the genesis of that campaign.
Here’s to the crazy ones.”
“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. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About 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 people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
Lessons Learned from Hp (Internship at 12)
At age twelve, when he got a summer job at Hewlett-Packard, he learned that a properly run company could spawn innovation far more than any single creative individual. “I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company.”
A properly run company could spawn innovation far more than any single creative individual.
On Focus
- Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.
On Powerpoint
- People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.
If you need slides, it shows you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Jonathan Ive (Former Chief Design Officer (CDO) at Apple)on Simplicity
- Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.
On Design
- In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.
You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.
Stuck at 30
- When he was turning thirty, Jobs had used a metaphor about record albums. He was musing about why folks over thirty develop rigid thought patterns and tend to be less innovative. “People get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.”
“People get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them.”
On Idea Generation
- The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.
All the Best in your quest to get Better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.
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