Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a fascinating story of the roller-coaster life and intense personality of Steve Jobs, a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries.
While Steve Jobs said that he wouldn’t interfere with the writing of his biography, he carefully chose Isaacson to write it. Isaacson is the author of biographies about famous figures like Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein or men who changed history. Steve Jobs considered himself of the same caliber of those men and therefore Isaacson was the right choice for him.
Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs is in some ways another Jobs’ carefully crafted product, because Steve Jobs is a book that seems to be narrated through the often discussed “reality distortion field” of Jobs himself.
My Favorite Top 23 Quotes from Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
“One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“If you act like you can do something, then it will work.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“Steve Jobs: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don’t. It’s the great mystery. (Steve Jobs)” ― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“Picasso had a saying – ‘good artists copy, great artists steal’ – and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
I remember sitting in his backyard in his garden, one day, and he started talking about God. He [Jobs] said, “ Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50/50, maybe. But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about it more, and I find myself believing a bit more, maybe it’s because I want to believe in an afterlife, that when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated, somehow it lives on.”Then he paused for a second and said, “Yea, but sometimes, I think it’s just like an On-Off switch. Click. And you’re gone.” And then he paused again and said, “ And that’s why I don’t like putting On-Off switches on Apple devices.”Joy to the WORLD! There IS an after-life!”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Out job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!'” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” ― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” ― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, “Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?” ― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“You should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently,” he said. “The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence.” ― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“Steve Jobs had a tendency to see things in a binary way: “A person was either a hero or a bozo, a product was either amazing or shit”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“The way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.” Apple’s design mantra would remain the one featured on its first brochure: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” ― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“Jobs insisted that Apple focus on just two or three priorities at a time. “There is no one better at turning off the noise that is going on around him,” Cook said. “That allows him to focus on a few things and say no to many things. Few people are really good at that.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“Steve has a reality distortion field.” When Hertzfeld looked puzzled, Tribble elaborated. “In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company. The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating.” Steve Jobs”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“The main thing in our design is that we have to make things intuitively obvious.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
“I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis.”
― Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs
