Innovator Quotes

The thing that drives me and my colleagues at both Apple and Pixar is that you see something very compelling to you, and you don't quite know how to get to it, but you know, sometimes intuitively, it's within your grasp. And it's worth putting in years of your life to make it come into existence.

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.

Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn.

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.

You should never go to a meeting or make a telephone call without a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve.

But it's a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light - that it's going to change everything. Things don't have to change the world to be important.

We all have a short period of time on this earth-We probably only have the opportunity to do a few things really great and do them well. None of us has any idea how long we're going to be here nor do I, but my feeling is I've got to accomplish a lot of these things while I'm young.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.

Listen to me. We're here to make a dent in the universe. Otherwise why even be here?

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.

Make it like a sunflower.

You're missing it. This is not a one-man show. What's reinvigorating this company is two things: One, there's a lot of really talented people in this company who listened to the world tell them they were losers for a couple of years, and some of them were on the verge of starting to believe it themselves. But they're not losers. What they didn't have was a good set of coaches, a good plan. A good senior management team. But they have that now.

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact — everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.

Do not try to do everything. Do one thing well.

One: demonstrations always crash. And two: the probability of them crashing goes up exponentially with the number of people watching.

It's rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing. Of course, there are some people who are innately curious, forever little kids in their awe of life, but they're rare.

We're cautious. We'd rather exceed expectations than miss but I think it's going to be a continued difficult economy. Apple is trying a different way to navigate out of this, we're trying to innovate.

I know you have 1000 great ideas for things that iTunes could do. And we have 1000 more. But innovation is not about saying "yes" to everything. It's about saying "no" to all but the most crucial features.

There are sneakers that cost more than an iPod.

You cannot mandate productivity, you must provide the tools to let people become their best.

Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.

The web is just going to be one more of those major change factors that businesses face every decade.

You know, Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company - which is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of.

There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.

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

Our approach is to think of companies not as businesses but as collections of people. We [Apple]want to qualitatively change the way people work. We don't just want to help them do word processing faster or add numbers faster. We want to change the way they can communicate with one another. We're seeing less paper flying around and more quality of communication.

I think the world's a better place because Bill realized that his goal isn't to be the richest guy in the cemetery, right?

I don't think of my life as a career. I do stuff. I respond to stuff. That's not a career - it's a life!

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

Focus and simplicity...once you get there, you can move mountains.

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me.

The most powerful person in the world is the story teller.The storyteller sets the vision, values and agendaof an entire generation that is to come.

I know from my own education that if I hadn't encountered two or three individuals that spent extra time with me, I'm sure I would have been in jail.

You've got to find what you love.

I don't really care about being right, I just care about success.

I'm not worried about the country's long-term future. This country is insanely great. What I'm worried about is that we don't talk enough about solutions.

If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

Bottom line is, I didn't return to Apple to make a fortune. I've been very lucky in my life and already have one. When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn't going to let it ruin my life. There's no way you could ever spend it all, and I don't view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.

Let them know precisely what you are going to do with their data

I admire Mark Zuckerberg... for not selling out, for wanting to make a company. I admire that a lot.

It's like when IBM drove a lot of innovation out of the computer industry before the microprocessor came along. Eventually, Microsoft will crumble because of complacency, and maybe some new things will grow. But until that happens, until there's some fundamental technology shift, it's just over.

My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.

Fear of failure falls away in the face of death.

You go to your TV to turn your brain off. You go to the computer when you want to turn your brain on.

Marketing is about values. It's a complicated and noisy world, and we're not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us.

The were good times, there were hard times, but there were never bad times

The problem is I'm older now, I'm 40 years old, and this stuff doesn't change the world. It really doesn't.

The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay.

You know, you keep on innovating, you keep on making better stuff. And if you always want the latest and greatest, then you have to buy a new iPod at least once a year.

You need to have a collaborative hiring process.

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.

The journey is the reward

As Regis Mckenna once said, the best marketing is education

If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don't have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.

A lot of time, people don't do great things becoz' great things really aren't expected of them.

The tragedy is that Dell didn't win it - we lost it.

The lunatics have taken over the asylum and we can do anything we want.

If you don't have a passion, you'll give up.

We hire people who want to make the best things in the world.