Walter Isaacson - Steve Jobs (2011)

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I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company. The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating." Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson
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.

Walter Isaacson
For Steve, less is always more, simpler is always better. Therefore, if you can build a glass box with fewer elements, it's better, it's simpler, and it's at the forefront of technology. That's where Steve likes to be, in both his products and his stores.

Walter Isaacson
Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.

Walter Isaacson
People who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint.

Walter Isaacson
There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that's the truth.

Walter Isaacson
He had the attitude that he could do anything, and therefore so can you. He put his life in my hands. So that made me do something I didn't think I could do.... If you trust him, you can do things. If he's decided that something should happen, then he's just going to make it happen. (Elizabeth Holmes)

Walter Isaacson
You should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.

Walter Isaacson
The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently, he said. "The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.

Walter Isaacson
Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.

Walter Isaacson
The Macintosh lacked a fan, another example of Jobs's dogmatic stubbornness. Fans, he felt, detracted from the calm of a computer. This caused many component failures and earned the Macintosh the nickname "the beige toaster,"which did not enhance its popularity.

Walter Isaacson
So that's our approach. Very simple, and we're really shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. The way we're running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let's make it simple. Really simple. Apple's design mantra would remain the one featured on its first brochure: Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Walter Isaacson
One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.

Walter Isaacson
I visited Jobs for the last time in his Palo Alto, Calif., home. He had moved to a downstairs bedroom because he was too weak to go up and down stairs. He was curled up in some pain, but his mind was still sharp and his humor vibrant.

Walter Isaacson
The childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created for their new son was, in many ways, a stereotype of the late 1950s. When Steve was two they adopted a girl they named Patty, and three years later they moved to a tract house in the suburbs.

Walter Isaacson
Ed Woolard, his mentor on the Apple board, pressed Jobs for more than two years to drop the interim in front of his CEO title. Not only was Jobs refusing to commit himself, but he was baffling everyone by taking only $1 a year in pay and no stock options. I make 50 cents for showing up, he liked to joke, and the other 50 cents is based on performance.

Walter Isaacson
Jobs did not know that Sculley had told Eisenstat he wanted to quit, but by then it didn't matter. Overnight, he had changed his mind and decided to stay. Despite the blowup the day before, he was still eager for Jobs to like him. So he agreed to meet the next afternoon.

Walter Isaacson
Sometimes, to relieve stress, he would soak his feet in the toilet, a practice that was not as soothing for his colleagues.

Walter Isaacson
Asked about the fact that Apple's iTunes software for Windows computers was extremely popular, Jobs joked, 'It's like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.

Walter Isaacson
He had the uncanny capacity to know exactly what your weak point is, know what will make you feel small, to make you cringe," Joanna Hoffman said. "It's a common trait in people who are charismatic and know how to manipulate people. Knowing that he can crush you makes you feel weakened and eager for his approval, so then he can elevate you and put you on a pedestal and own you.

Walter Isaacson
Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time. "There is no one better at turning off the noise that is going on around him,"Cook said. "That allows him to focus on a few things and say no to many things. Few people are really good at that."

Walter Isaacson
Steve has a reality distortion field. When Hertzfeld looked puzzled, Tribble elaborated. In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he's not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.

Walter Isaacson
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.

Walter Isaacson
In two days he saw Rupert Murdoch, his son James, and the management of their Wall Street Journal; Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and the top executives at the New York Times; and executives at Time, Fortune, and other Time Inc. magazines. "I would love to help quality journalism,"he later said. "We can't depend on bloggers for our news."

Walter Isaacson
The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.

Walter Isaacson
What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they're dragging you down. They're turning you into Microsoft. They're causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.

Walter Isaacson
Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

Walter Isaacson
Never let a passion for the perfect take precedence over pragmatism.

Walter Isaacson
I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don't. It's the great mystery. (Steve Jobs)

Walter Isaacson
Simply handing over your iPod to a friend, your blind date, or the total stranger sitting next to you on the plane opens you up like a book." (Steven Levy)

Walter Isaacson