Words of Wisdom: Steve Jobs

On new possibilities:

One might sometimes say in despair no, but I think yes. And the reason is because human minds settle into fixed ways of looking at the world and that’s always been true and it’s probably always going to be true. I’ve always felt that death is the greatest invention of life. I’m sure that life evolved without death at first and found that without death, life didn’t work very well because it didn’t make room for the young. It didn’t know how the world was fifty years ago. It didn’t know how the world was twenty years ago. It saw it as it is today, without any preconceptions, and dreamed how it could be based on that. We’re not satisfied based on the accomplishment of the last thirty years. We’re dissatisfied because the current state didn’t live up to their ideals. Without death there would be very little progress.

One of the things that happens in organizations as well as with people is that they settle into ways of looking at the world and become satisfied with things and the world changes and keeps evolving and new potential arises but these people who are settled in don’t see it. That’s what gives start-up companies their greatest advantage. The sedentary point of view is that of most large companies. In addition to that, large companies do not usually have efficient communication paths from the people closest to some of these changes at the bottom of the company to the top of the company which are the people making the big decisions.

There may be people at lower levels of the company that see these changes coming, but by the time the word ripples up to the highest levels where they can do something about it, it sometimes takes ten years. Even in the case where part of the company does the right thing at the lower levels, usually the upper levels screw it up somehow. I mean IBM and the personal computer business is a good example of that. I think as long as humans don’t solve this human nature trait of sort of settling into a world view, after a while there will always be opportunity for young companies (and) young people to innovate. As it should be.

On entrepreneurship:

A lot of people come to me and say “I want to be an entrepreneur”. And I go “Oh that’s great, what’s your idea?”And they say, “I don’t have one yet.” And I say, “I think you should go get a job as a busboy or something until you find something you’re really passionate about because it’s a lot of work.” 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 its been done but it’s rough. It’s pretty much an eighteen-hour day job, seven days a week for awhile. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up. So you’ve got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about. otherwise you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that’s half the battle right there.

On his ultimate goal:

“Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world and to make products we are proud to sell and would recommend to our family and friends. And we want to do that at the lowest prices we can. But I have to tell you that there is some stuff in our industry that we wouldn’t be proud to ship, that we wouldn’t be proud to recommend to our family and friends. And we can’t do it. We just can’t ship junk. So there are thresholds that we can’t cross because of who we are. But we want to make the best personal computers in the industry. And there is a very significant slice of the industry that wants that too. What you’ll find is that our products are not premium priced. Go out and price our competitors products and add the products you have to add to make them useful and you’ll find in some cases they are more expensive than our products. The difference is we don’t offer stripped down lousy products.

On love and loss:

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

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