What America Needs Is More Jobs… Steve Jobs

I regard Steve Jobs as one of the top five entrepreneurs and visionaries of the last 50 years. If you haven’t seen the Stanford University commencement he gave you have to take the time to watch this, it is legendary.

I constantly find myself saying, “My favorite Steve Jobs quote is…” But really, these quotes are all my favorites. Here’s to you, Steve!

“Leaders are fascinated by the future. You are a leader if, and only if, you are restless for change, impatient for progress, and deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. As a leader you are never satisfied with the present, because in your head you can see a better future, and the friction between what is and what could be burns you, stirs you, propels you forward.”

“Make a dent in the universe.”

“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 touch 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 awhile. Unless you’ve got a lot of passion for 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 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.” 

“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.”

“If you pursue ideas with the goal of getting rich, you may have a small chance of succeeding. More likely, you’ll give up when the inevitable hurdles arise.”

“Breakthrough innovation—the kind that moves society forward—will be much, much harder to achieve. Innovation occurs when someone is obsessively passionate about a particular subject, whether it’s building computers that delight consumers, creating technologies that reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels, developing life-saving medicines, cultivating an exceptionally engaging workplace, or any number of other ventures that improve the human condition. The people who obsess over these ideas cannot imagine doing anything else. Thinking about the subject consumes them, energizes them, and ultimately inspires them to create breakthrough companies, products and services.”

“There is a terrible moment when failure is staring you in the face. And actually, if you persevere a bit longer you’ll start to climb out of it.”

“The only way to come up with something new—something world changing—is to think outside of the constraints everyone else has. You have to think outside of the artificial limits everyone else has already set.”

“Transformational breakthroughs are rarely the result of focus groups.”

“You've gotta start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.”