There’s nothing better that coincides with the word ‘visionary’ than Steve Jobs. A man with a great mind, Steve Jobs was probably the most hardworking businessperson who could foresee the future of technology. Jobs co-founded Apple Computer in 1976 and was always behind Bill Gates’ Microsoft before he shepherded the most innovative products of 21st century- the iMac, iPod, iPhone, just to name a few gems.
Jobs was always a quick, live-for-the-moment type, and was never short of ideas. Often compared to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs reinvented his career and devoted time to his business in the last 12 years of his life to rank Apple as the wealthiest business with a net worth of $700 billion, creating more than half as much wealth for his shareholders when compared to that of Microsoft’s.
Jobs was a college dropout who never boasted about that fact, and never paid homage to his audience saying that they were lucky to be part of an elite institution. He told stories about “connecting the dots” of life and that’s what made him special.
A self-described “hopeless romantic”, Steve Jobs believed that he was here to make a difference and even after getting fired from his own company in 1985, in 1996, he returned triumphant to harvest the ideas that he sowed with Apple.
Here’s a roundup of 15 thought-provoking quotes by Steve Jobs that can motivate you to work toward success.
1. “My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.”
2. “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?'”
3. “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.”
4. “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”
5. “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently – they’re not fond of rules. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do.”
6. “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? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.”
7. “Technology is nothing. 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.”
8. “My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.”
9. “Let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.”
10. “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”
11. “What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”
12. “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.”
13. “Life is about creating and living experiences that are worth sharing.”
14. “You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me.”
15. “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
Featured photo credit: Steve Jobs speaking at WWDC07 via farm2.staticflickr.com
