He’s considered the father of the digital revolution and technological innovation, and apart from that, he was also known as a design perfectionist. In 2010 alone, he had a net worth of $8 billion. There is no single executive or creator in the technology industry who is more creative and inspirational than him and that is a fact. Steve Jobs was the founder of Apple Inc. and with that being said he was a one-in-billion creator. He’s known as one of the most daring and creative CEOs of all time.
Early Life
On February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California, United States, a baby boy named Steve Jobs entered the world. Who could have predicted that this person would cause such a seismic shift in the information technology and media industries? The way Steve Jobs showed the world the new products and gadgets he was working on was truly out of this world, and that’s a big part of why he’s so beloved. Millions of people all over the world adore his creations.
Steve Jobs was brilliant and well-informed, but he was not a scholar. He possessed a high IQ but showed little enthusiasm for formal education. His main hobbies were playing pranks on people via phone and computer, coming up with ground-breaking business concepts, and goofing off with his best friend Steve Wozniak.
Apple Incorporation
Apple Inc., which Jobs founded while still employed elsewhere, is currently valued at more than $742 billion. Over the course of more than three decades, Steve Jobs has revolutionized the computer, music, film, and phone industries. His parents’ inability to provide for him led to a difficult childhood one in which he battled with his sense of self and felt constantly confused and unfulfilled.
How Steve Jobs Launched His Company
Steve Jobs’ philosophy on education is well-known at this point; he has stated publicly that he was only able to learn after leaving college. When Steve Jobs and his friend Wozniak were in their early 20s, they came up with the idea for the Apple Computer. Steve Job’s Volkswagen bus and Wozniak’s beloved scientific calculator were sold to finance the pair’s garage-based startup. Jobs and Wozniak have been given much of credit for democratizing the computer industry by making computers more user-friendly, portable, and affordable.
Wozniak envisioned a line of accessible and lightning-fast personal computers, and Jobs was put in charge of the company’s marketing and management. From the get-go, Apple sold the computers for a whopping $666. The unexpected magnitude of their early success inspired them to develop more powerful machines. In the ’70s, they accomplished what would become the company’s crowning achievement.
Assembled by Apple, Inc., The high-performance computer was an instant success in their home state of California, and its sales helped make Jobs a multimillionaire.
Steve Jobs Motivational Quotes That Will Make You Push Through Life
Let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.
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.
I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.
I don’t care about being right. I care about the success and doing the right thing.
You have to believe that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
The products suck! There’s no sex in them anymore!
For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.
Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.
The doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker and doer in one person.
I do not adopt softness towards others because I want to make them better.
If you don’t love it, you’re going to fail.
You can build your own things that other people can use. And once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
In the broadest context, the goal is to seek enlightenment – however, you define it.
Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing.
The most precious thing that we all have with us is time.
Don’t get hung up on who owns the idea. Pick the best one, and let’s go.
We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. We just want to make great products.
The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers.
I think all of us need to be on guard against arrogance which knocks at the door whenever you’re successful.
The Lisa people wanted to do something great. And the Mac people want to do something insanely great. The difference shows.
Once you discover one simple fact, and that is everything around you that you call life, was made up of people that were no smarter than you.
I always advise people – Don’t wait! Do something when you are young when you have nothing to lose, and keep that in mind.
That’s why we started Apple, we said you know, we have absolutely nothing to lose. I was 20 years old at the time, Woz was 24-25, so we have nothing to lose. We have no families, no children, no houses. Woz had an old car. I had a Volkswagen van, I mean, all we were going to lose is our cars and the shirts off our back.
That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity.
We had everything to gain. And we figured even if we crash and burn, and lose everything, the experience will have been worth ten times the cost.
We are very careful about what features we add because we can’t take them away.
The really great person will keep on going and find the key, underlying principle of the problem, and come up with a beautifully elegant solution that works.
On the blue box: That was what we learned: was that us, too, we didn’t know much. We could build a little thing that could control a giant thing and that was an incredible lesson.
Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart.
Don’t take it all too seriously. If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.
There is a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product.
One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.
People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.
We were really working fourteen-to-eighteen-hour days, seven days a week. For like, two years, three years. That was our life. But we loved it, we were young, and we could do it.
You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.
People judge you on your performance, so focus on the outcome. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
Now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you, ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish’.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.
And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.
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.
Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice.
Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.
If today were the last of your life, would you do what you were going to do today?
I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay.
I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: ‘If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.’ It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘no’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
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. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking and don’t settle.
Almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.
There is no reason not to follow your heart.
And you can change it, you can influence it
When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader.
The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it.
That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it. I think that’s very important and however, you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
If you want it, you can fly, you just have to trust yourself a lot.
The only thing you have in your life is time. If you invest that time in yourself to have great experiences that are going to enrich you, then you can’t possibly lose.
There was a constant flow of intellectual questioning about the truth of life. That was a time when every college student in this country read Be Here Now and Diet for a Small Planet – there were about ten books.
On being fired from Apple and called back 12 years later: What a circle of life. Do you know? Life is just always mysterious and surprising, and you never know what’s around the next corner.
We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and everyone should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know…
So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life. 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.
In business, if I knew earlier what I know now, I’d have probably done some things a lot better than I did, but I also would’ve probably done some other things a lot worse. But so what? It’s more important to be engaged in the present.
I think the things you most regret in life are things you didn’t do. What you really regret was never asking that girl to dance.
I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete.
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.
Death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent, it clears out the old to make way for the new.
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.
Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.
Without death, there would be very little progress.
So it’s a lot of hard work and it’s a lot of worrying constantly and if you don’t love it, you’re going to fail. So you’ve got to love it and you’ve got to have the passion and I think that’s the high-order bit.
I’ve been rejected, but I was still in love.
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.
People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you’re doing and it’s totally true. And the reason is that it’s so hard that if you don’t, any rational person would give up. It’s really hard. And you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don’t love it, if you’re not having fun doing it, you don’t really love it, you’re going to give up.
If you really look at the ones that ended up, you know, being “successful” in the eyes of society and the ones that didn’t, oftentimes, it’s the ones who were successful and loved what they did so they could persevere, you know, when it got really tough. And the ones that didn’t love it quit because they’re sane, right? Who would want to put up with this stuff if you don’t love it?
That was one of the things that came out most clearly from this whole experience [with cancer]. I realized that I love my life. I really do. I’ve got the greatest family in the world, and I’ve got my work. And that’s pretty much all I do. I don’t socialize much or go to conferences. I love my family, and I love running Apple, and I love Pixar. And I get to do that. I’m very lucky.
You get your wind back, remember the finish line, and keep going.
At Apple, people are putting in 18-hour days.
I’m convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from 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 it’s been done but it’s rough. It’s pretty much an eighteen-hour day job, seven days a week for a while. Unless you have a lot of passion for this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up.
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.
I’ve read something that Bill Gates said about six months ago. He said, ‘I worked really, really hard in my 20s.’ And I know what he means because I worked really, really hard in my 20s too. Literally, you know, 7 days a week, a lot of hours every day. And it actually is a wonderful thing to do, because you can get a lot done. But you can’t do it forever, and you don’t want to do it forever, and you have to come up with ways of figuring out what the most important things are and working with other people even more.
I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end.
On the MacIntosh: When we finally presented it at the shareholders’ meeting, everyone in the auditorium gave it a five-minute ovation. What was incredible to me was that I could see the Mac team in the first few rows. It was as though none of us could believe we’d actually finished it. Everyone started crying.
As it was clear that the Sixties were over, it was also clear that a lot of the people who had gone through the Sixties ended up not really accomplishing what they set out to accomplish, and because they had thrown their discipline to the wind, they didn’t have much to fall back on.
Pixar has been a marathon, not a sprint. There are times when you run a marathon and you wonder, why am I doing this? But you take a drink of water, and around the next bend, you get your wind back, remember the finish line, and keep going.
On the MacIntosh: It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn’t be ours anymore.
My wife deserves all the credit for keeping me at it.
On his father: He was a machinist by trade and worked very hard and was kind of a genius with his hands. He had a workbench out in his garage where, when I was about five or six, he sectioned off a little piece of it and said “Steve, this is your workbench now.” And he gave me some of his smaller tools and showed me how to use a hammer and saw and how to build things. It really was very good for me. He spent a lot of time with me… teaching me how to build things, how to take things apart, put things back together.
I can tell you this: I’ve been married for 8 years, and that’s had a really good influence on me. I’ve been very lucky, through random happenstance I just happened to sit next to this wonderful woman who became my wife. And it was a big deal. We have 3 kids, and it’s been a big deal. You see the world differently.
I’ve never been so tired in my life. I’d come home at about ten o’clock at night and flop straight into bed, then haul myself out at six the next morning and take a shower and go to work. My wife deserves all the credit for keeping me at it. She supported me and kept the family together with a husband in absentia.
Most people don’t get those experiences because they never ask. I’ve never found anybody that didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help.
Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask. And that’s what separates sometimes the people that do things from the people that just dream about them.
As you may know, I was basically fired from Apple when I was 30 and was invited to come back 12 years later so that was difficult when it happened but maybe the best thing that could ever happen to me. […] you just move on, life goes on and you learn from it.
If you act like you can do something, then it will work.
I feel like somebody just punched me in the stomach and knocked all my wind out. I’m only 30 years old and I want to have a chance to continue creating things. I know I’ve got at least one more great computer in me. And Apple is not going to give me a chance to do that.
We’ve done so many hardware products where Jony and I have looked at each other and said, ‘We don’t know how to make it any better than this, we just don’t know how to make it’. But we always do; we realize another way. And then it’s not long after the new thing comes out that we look at the older thing and go, ‘How can we ever have done that?’
Life goes on and you learn from it.
Each year has been so robust with problems and successes and learning experiences and human experiences that a year is a lifetime at Apple.
When I was 12 or 13, I wanted to build something and I needed some parts, so I picked up the phone and called Bill Hewlett – he was listed in the Palo Alto phone book. He answered the phone and he was real nice. He chatted with me for, like, 20 minutes. He didn’t know me at all, but he ended up giving me some parts and he got me a job that summer working at Hewlett-Packard on the line, assembling frequency counters. Assembling may be too strong. I was putting in screws. It didn’t matter; I was in heaven.
Valuable Lessons We Learned From Steve Jobs
If you are the boss of your own company or if you are wanting to start one, you can take a page out of Steve Jobs’ playbook. Here are seven takeaways from Steve Jobs’s life that can help you become an entrepreneur.
Don’t Lose Sight of Your Goals
Steve Jobs was notorious for advocating unpopular views on the direction technology should take. Jobs trusted his gut even when others told him it was impossible. Jobs was confident in his ideas and did not let criticism from others deter him from bringing the mouse to the computer or the touch screen to the phone.
Some of your company’s closest personal and professional connections may question the wisdom of trying something new and different. Nonetheless, Steve Jobs exemplifies that trusting one’s gut and following one’s vision can lead to phenomenal success.
Learn From Your Mistakes
Whether it was the Apple Lisa in the ’80s or his time spent away from Apple, Steve Jobs’ company and ideas did not always meet with success. He did, however, come to the realization that setbacks can serve as phenomenal occasions for reflection and improvement in the future. In fact, Jobs found a failure to be freeing because it meant he could begin again without as much pressure or expectation.
When an innovation your company has invested in doesn’t pan out, it can be disheartening. However, after the initial setback, it’s important to take the lessons learned and make a comeback, just like Steve Jobs did.
Solicit Superior Performance
Apple’s products have a reputation for being some of the most user-friendly and well-designed available. And it wasn’t a fluke that this occurred. The people who worked for Steve Jobs understood that he demanded nothing less than the best from them. This sometimes resulted in the cancellation of products after months or even years of development, forcing the team to begin from scratch. The job was notorious for its direct and, at times, scathing criticism. All of this, however, was done with one goal in mind: to improve the quality of the firm’s wares.
Even more so if you are not an aggressive person by nature, setting high standards for your team can be difficult. Yet, the company will benefit if you demand nothing less than excellence from your teams.
Trust Not What Others May Have Thought
Many people don’t know exactly what they want until they see it, an idea that Steve Jobs was famous for espousing. People, for instance, had no idea how much they’d enjoy having access to tens of thousands of songs in a small rectangular box until the iPod came along. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take customer feedback into account, but you can’t rely on them to develop creative solutions on their own.
For businesses that are experimenting with new products or services, this is an invaluable lesson. Sometimes the market or your customers just don’t know what they want. But if you think your product addresses a widespread issue or fills a significant void, you have grounds for optimism about its commercial prospects.
Risk Reasonably
Jobs took a number of significant chances as Apple’s CEO. Apple’s App Store, for example, was only possible after a massive financial commitment to groundbreaking technology. But Jobs didn’t just pick the App Store at random; he had solid evidence suggesting it would be successful.
Steve Jobs Death
Steve Jobs, the creative force behind Apple Inc.’s revolutionary personal computer, music player, and mobile phone products like the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, passed away on October 5, 2011, at the age of 56, due to complications from pancreatic cancer. After enduring a pancreatic tumor removal in 2004 and a liver transplant in 2009, Jobs continued to serve as Apple’s CEO until his resignation on August 24, 2011.
In Palo Alto, California, he passed away six weeks later. Jobs, who died at the age of 56 and is survived by his wife and four children, was worth more than $7 billion. Jobs “was the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certainly to be remembered a century from now,” as proclaimed by Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson. He will go down in history as one of the greats, alongside Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.
Also Read: Famous Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes (Updated 2022)
