Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

One of the things I’ve always felt,” Steve told me, “is that if you’re going to be creative, it’s like jumping up in the air; you want to make damn sure the ground is going to be there when you get back.

I don’t really care, this is what I want to do. And if I try my best and fail, well, I tried my best.

If you look at true artists, if they get really good at something, it occurs to them that they can do this for the rest of their lives, and they can be really successful at it to the outside world, but not really successful to themselves. That’s the moment that an artist really decides who he or she is. If they keep on risking failure they’re still artists. Dylan and Picasso were always risking failure.

Good Design is:   1.  innovative   2.  what makes a product useful   3.  aesthetic   4.  what makes a product understandable   5.  unobtrusive   6.  honest   7.  long-lasting   8.  thorough down to the last detail   9.  environmentally friendly 10.  as little design as possible

The sun will set and the sun will rise, and it will shine upon us tomorrow in our grief and our gratitude, and we will continue to live with purpose, memory, passion, and love.

He, better than anyone, understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.

Having a grand, bold goal was useless if you didn’t have the ability to tell a compelling story about how you’d get there.

It’s not about how fast you do something, it’s about doing your level best.

Do you have the humility to continually grow, to learn from your failures and get back up? Are you utterly relentless for your cause, ferocious for your cause? Can you channel your intensity and intelligence and energy and talents and gifts and ideas outward into something that is bigger and more impactful than you are? That’s what great leadership is about.

You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

Collins, echoing Ed Catmull, “What separates people is the return on luck, what you do with it when you get it. What matters is how you play the hand you’re dealt.” He continues, “You don’t leave the game, until it’s not your choice. Steve Jobs had great luck at arriving at the birth of an industry. Then he had bad luck in getting booted out. But Steve played whatever hand he was dealt to the best of his ability. Sometimes you create the hand, by giving yourself challenges that will make you stronger, where you don’t even know what’s next. That’s the beauty of the story. Steve’s almost like the Tom Hanks character in Castaway—just keep breathing because you don’t know what the tide will bring in tomorrow.

There are three things you need to be considered a truly great company, Collins continues, switching gears to Apple. Number one, you have to deliver superior financial results. Number two, you have to make a distinctive impact, to the point where if you didn't exist you couldn't be easily replaced. Number three, the company must have lasting endurance, beyond multiple generations of technology, markets, and cycles, and it must demonstrate the ability to do this beyond a single leader. Apple has numbers one and two. Steve was racing the clock [to help it get number three]. Whether it has lasting endurance is the final check, something we won't know for some time. There are lots of good people there, and maybe they'll get it.

Steve’s life wasn’t a movie. It was inspiring, confounding, and unabashedly human, to the very end.

In November, just over four months after shipping its first iPhone, Apple revealed that it would make available a software development kit for anyone who wanted to develop apps. “That’s when we knew Steve had finally come to see the light,” Gassée says. “Suddenly, that was all anyone was talking about in the Valley and in the VC community. Hundreds of little guys signed up, and the race was on. Then they announced the App Store. And then they released the iPhone 3G [the second version, which shipped in July 2008, and had better wireless and a faster microprocessor]. It was only then that the iPhone was truly finished, that it had all its basics, all its organs. It needed to grow, to muscle up, but it was complete as a child is complete.

If you look closely at how he spent his time,” says Tim Cook, “you’ll see that he hardly ever traveled and he did none of the conferences and get-togethers that so many CEOs attend. He wanted to be home for dinner.

Above all, saying no became a crucial way of keeping everyone, including himself, focused on what really mattered.

Steve embraced the marketing adage that every single moment a consumer encounters a brand—whether as a buyer, a user, a store visitor, a passerby seeing a billboard, or someone simply watching an ad on TV—is an experience that adds either credits or debits to the brand’s “account” in his imagination.

In the ever-shifting computer world of the late 1980s, building breathless anticipation for his Next Big Thing was crucial to attracting potential customers and investors, and Steve would need plenty of the latter, given that NeXT would take nearly five years to produce a working computer.

The sheer simplicity of the quadrant strategy had laid the foundation for an organization that would say no again and again—until it said yes, at which point it would attack the new project with fierce determination.

What separates people is the return on luck, what you do with it when you get it.

He directed Katie Cotton, his communications chief at Apple, to adopt a policy in which Steve made himself available only to a few print outlets, including Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, and the New York Times. Whenever he had a product to hawk, he and Cotton would decide which of this handful of trusted outlets would get the story. And Steve would tell it, alone.

Apple employees had never had much respect for Microsoft’s ability to create anything but ungainly, confusing, and half-baked technologies for consumers. The animus went back decades. Even though Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint were instrumental in the early success of the Mac, Microsoft’s unforgivable sin, from the vantage point of Cupertino, was its derivative creation of Windows. Steve was being expedient when he offered to abandon Apple’s long-standing lawsuit against Microsoft to seal the deal with Gates upon his return in 1997. But folks at Apple still considered Windows a rip-off of Apple’s ideas, pure and simple.

some members burned out so completely that they were never able to work in the high-tech industry again.

Having a grand, bold goal was useless if you didn’t have the ability to tell a compelling story about how you’d get there. That seemed obvious.