11 Best
Lines Steve Jobs Used in an Interview
The Apple co-founder's insights will make you question
everything.
For anyone seeking inspiration,
motivation, or perspective, you just can't do better than Steve Jobs. Though he
died relatively young and built both his fame and his fortune from making
consumer electronics, Jobs casts a very long shadow. That's in part because of
the iconic products he made and the way he lived his life always on his own
terms. But it's also because of the brilliant and profound things he said about
life, work, and what's truly important. Much of what he said is an invitation
to rethink everything about your life, your work, and the products or services
your company sells.
Jobs was a
renowned speaker who gave legendary presentations but some of his most deeply insightful words were
said during the many interviews he granted throughout his newsworthy life.
Here's a collection of some of his most
profound comments:
1. I'm convinced that about half of what separates the
successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.
Anyone who's ever built a company from scratch
knows just how true this is. Jobs went on to talk about how hard it is to get a
company going, how much of your life it takes over, and for those people who
give up, he added, "I don't blame them."
2. 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.
Market
research is a great way to refine an idea, figure out what will work in the
marketplace, and find problems your products can solve. But Jobs was absolutely
right that it's little help if you're creating something truly innovative. Everyone wanted an iPhone when they first appeared, but no one could
have described what they wanted before seeing one.
3. I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with
Socrates.
Maybe you wouldn't pick Socrates. Maybe it
would be da Vinci, or Babe Ruth--or Jobs himself. The point is about a
value system that puts people, especially the most creative, insightful
people, ahead of everything else. That's a philosophy every leader
should consider.
4. I'm the only person I know that's lost a quarter of a billion
dollars in one year... It's very character-building.
Jobs was never shy about discussing his
failures and disappointments in public. And of course he had some spectacular
public failures, including being ousted as leader of the company he founded by
the CEO he himself had recruited.
It's a
fantastic reminder for all of us, and it's not just Jobs. The most successful
entrepreneurs in history have also had some of the most spectacular failures. Keep that in mind next time one of your projects or deals crashes and
burns.
5. It's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the
things that are really important.
Jobs was
famously obsessed with simplicity and focus, not only in Apple products
themselves, but also in the company's product line. In a painful but necessary
move shortly after returning from his exile as Apple CEO, he cut 70 percent of
the product line (and 3,000 jobs) in order to focus the company on a small
number of products and making them insanely great. And he was right. Never
underestimate the power of saying no to
everything that isn't essential.
6. You always have to keep pushing to innovate.
Whether you're an artist or an
entrepreneur, trying to repeat your past successes is the road to nowhere, Jobs
knew. He cited Bob Dylan and the Beatles as examples of artists who moved on
from their first styles and kept experimenting and innovating--even when it
alienated their existing fans. "That's what I've always tried to do--keep
moving," he added. "Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you are not busy
being born, you're busy dying."
7. Creativity is just connecting things.
Jobs saw more quickly that most people do the
basic truth that what we think of as innovation is often a matter of combining
existing elements in ways no one else has thought of yet. The invention of cell
phones simply combined the existing technologies of telephony and radio
waves. Smartphones combined those technologies with the Internet.
"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," Jobs continued. "It seemed obvious to them
after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had
and synthesize new things." There's a lesson here for us all to always
be alert to the way products and processes we already have can be combined
in unexpected ways to create new products, processes, or technologies.
8. 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.
This is classic Jobs arrogance, but it's also
true. So many of the things we believe are hard-and-fast rules are or should be
open for discussion, questioning, or re-imagining in exactly the way Jobs
questioned and re-imagined industries from computing to animation to music
to mobile phones. So while I'd discourage you from parking in handicapped
spaces if you aren't disabled (as Jobs infamously made a habit of doing), it is
smart to question the rules and dictums you encounter if they don't make sense
to you. Then ask yourself what Jobs would have done about them.
9. 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?
This is the
kind of Jobs quote that puts everything into perspective, at least for me. More
than anyone I've ever known of, he kept the big picture--and his own
mortality--constantly in mind. He constantly asked himself if he would spend
the last day of his life doing what he was doing, a useful exercise we should all try from time to time.
He went on to say, "We could be sitting in
a monastery somewhere in Japan. We could be out sailing. Some of the [executive
team] could be playing golf. They could be running other companies. And we've
all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be
worth it. And we think it is." If you can't say the same for whatever
you're doing, it may be time to consider a change.
10. My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them
better.
Whether you agree with it or not, Jobs was very
clear about his management philosophy: Hire the absolute best people and then
push them to do better work than they themselves think is possible. He was
infamously tough on Apple employees in ways that might not work in today's
tighter job market. But he firmly believed that, with a team of A players, the
best favor you could do them was to be honest when something wasn't working.
And it's tough to argue with his results.
11. I told our company that we were just going to invest our
way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people, that we'd
taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first
place... And we were going to keep funding.
Faced with the economic downturn in 2008, Jobs
reminded an interviewer that Apple had been through a similar crisis with the
dot-com crash of 2000, when a strategy of staying the course had seen them
through. It was a great example of a leader keeping his head in the midst of
widespread uncertainty.
"In fact, we were going to up our
R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn
was over," he said. "And that's exactly what we did. And it worked.
And that's exactly what we'll do this time." Needless to say, it worked
the second time as well.
BY MINDA ZETLIN
http://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/11-steve-jobs-quotes-about-work-and-life-that-will-make-you-question-everything.html?cid=em01016week49a
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