Leading Blog: I, Steve: Jobs in His Own Words

Posted: 06 Nov 2011 03:09 PM PST

George Beahm has compiled a collection of Steve Jobs quotes in I, Steve. Organized by topic, this is a great (and sourced) collection. Here are a few:

• I would trade all my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.

• My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to make them better.

• People judge you by your performance, so focus on the outcome. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.

• People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that are there. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

•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 whatever you were and throw them away.

• 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 in to what you're doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.

• Things don't have to change the world to be important.

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