Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, Calif., and raised in Los Altos, the Apple Computer Company visionary was adopted by his father Paul Jobs, and mother, Clara Jobs.
As the son of a Coast Guard mechanic, Steve Jobs showed an early interest in electronics and gadgetry. While in high school, he boldly called Hewlett-Packard co-founder and president William Hewlett to ask for parts for a school project.
Impressed by Jobs, Hewlett not only gave him the parts but also offered him a summer internship at Hewlett-Packard.
It was there that Jobs met and befriended Steve Wozniak, a young engineer five years his senior with a penchant for tinkering.
Together, they designed and sold the “blue box,” which manipulated telephone networks for free long-distance calls.
After graduating from high school, Jobs enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Ore. but dropped out after one semester. He had become fascinated by Eastern spiritualism and took a part-time job designing video games for Atari to finance a trip to India to study Eastern culture and religion.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.
Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
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.
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.
I want to put a ding in the universe.
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.
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share.
Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.
Things don’t have to change the world to be important.
We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.
I believe life is an intelligent thing: that things aren’t random.
If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative… you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.
I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was 23 and the way I handled that.
It’s not the tools that you have faith in – tools are just tools. They work, or they don’t work. It’s people you have faith in or not.
Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.
Our goal is to make the best devices in the world, not to be the biggest.
Older people sit down and ask, ‘What is it?’ but the boy asks, ‘What can I do with it?’.
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.
My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.
One of my mantras focus and simplicity. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.
Stay hungry, stay foolish.
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.
Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn.
If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.
It’s not a faith in technology. It’s faith in people.
Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.
We’re just enthusiastic about what we do.
You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.
The system is that there is no system. That doesn’t mean we don’t have process.
We hire people who want to make the best things in the world.
I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do.
It’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.
It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.
I think money is a wonderful thing because it enables you to do things. It enables you to invest in ideas that don’t have a short-term payback.
Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians.
We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.
To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.
I’m very excited about having the Internet in my den.
It’s hard to tell with these Internet startups if they’re really interested in building companies or if they’re just interested in the money.
If you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up.
And no, we don’t know where it will lead. We just know there’s something much bigger than any of us here.
You don’t have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car.
If we’d given customers what they said they wanted, we’d have built a computer they’d have been happy with a year after we spoke to them – not something they’d want now.
