Walter Isaacson Quotes

The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don't really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you're doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.

"Most people have a regulator between their mind and mouth that modulates their brutish sentiments and spikiest impulses. Not Jobs. He made a point of being brutally honest. " My job is to say when something sucks rather than sugar coat it, : he said. This made him charismatic and inspiring, yet also,, to use the technical term, an asshole at times.

The main thing in our design is that we have to make things intuitively obvious.

"One of Job's business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. " If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will," he said. So even though an Iphone might cannibalize sales of an IPod, or an IPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him."

I never worried about money. I grew up in a middle-class family, so I never thought I would starve. And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay engineer, so I always knew I could get by. I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life even when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful, because I didn’t have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when I also didn’t “have to worry about money.
I watched people at Apple who made a lot of money and felt they had to live differently. Some of them bought a Rolls-Royce and various houses, each with a house manager and then someone to manage the house managers. Their wives got plastic surgery and turned into these bizarre people. This was not how I wanted to live. It’s crazy. I made a promise to myself that I’m not going to let this money ruin my life.

"I was on one of my fruitarian diets" Steve Jobs recalled "I had just comeback from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge of the word 'computer', plus it would get us a head of Atari in the phone book. He told Wozniak if a better name did not hit them by the next afternoon, they would just stick with apple and they did. 1 Apr 1976 "

When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him.

I believe that the most important mission of the state is to protect the individual and to make it possible for him to develop into a creative personality,

Algunas personas proponen: «Dales a los clientes lo que quieren». Pero esa no es mi postura. Nuestro trabajo consiste en averiguar qué van a querer antes de que lo sepan. Creo que fue Henry Ford quien dijo una vez: «Si les hubiera preguntado a mis clientes qué querían, me habrían contestado: “¡Un caballo más rápido!”». La gente no sabe lo que quiere hasta que se lo enseñas. Por eso nunca me he basado en las investigaciones de mercado. Nuestra tarea estriba en leer las páginas que todavía no se han escrito.

The family adopted a motto: “Live dangerously — carefully.

i had no idea what i wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.

Knowledge, he realized, “was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue.

Talent hits a target that no one else can hit,” wrote the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. “Genius hits a target no one else can see.

Even when he was barely conscious, his strong personality came through. At one point the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was sedated. Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. He ordered them to bring five different options and he would pick the one he liked.

Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion.