“In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.”

1. He was proud that his father never adopted a servile attitude or slick style that may have made him a better salesman.

2. It was the brighter side of what would become known as his reality distortion field. “If you trust him, you can do things,” Holmes said. “If he’s decided that something should happen, then he’s just going to make it happen.”

3. I taught him that if you act like you can do something, then it will work. I told him, ‘Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.’”

4. He emphasized that 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.”

5. “In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.”

6. if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”

7. In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.

8. One of the engineers told Atkinson that there was no way to build such a mouse commercially. After Atkinson complained to Jobs over dinner, he arrived at the office the next day to discover that Jobs had fired the engineer. When his replacement met Atkinson, his first words were, “I can build the mouse.”

9. I never worried about money. I grew up in a middle-class family, so I never thought I would starve. And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay engineer, so I always knew I could get by. I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life even when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful, because I didn’t have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when I also didn’t have to worry about money. I watched people at Apple who made a lot of money and felt they had to live differently. Some of them bought a Rolls-Royce and various houses, each with a house manager and then someone to manage the house managers. Their wives got plastic surgery and turned into these bizarre people. This was not how I wanted to live. It’s crazy. I made a promise to myself that I’m not going to let this money ruin my life.

10. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic. At the root of the reality distortion was Jobs’s belief that the rules didn’t apply to him.

11. Another key aspect of Jobs’s worldview was his binary way of categorizing things. People were either “enlightened” or “an asshole.” Their work was either “the best” or “totally shitty.” Bill Atkinson,

12. When the design was finally locked in, Jobs called the Macintosh team together for a ceremony. “Real artists sign their work,” he said. So he got out a sheet of drafting paper and a Sharpie pen and had all of them sign their names. The signatures were engraved inside each Macintosh. No one would ever see them, but the members of the team knew that their signatures were inside, just as they knew that the circuit board was laid out as elegantly as possible. Jobs called them each up by name, one at a time. Burrell Smith went first. Jobs waited until last, after all forty-five of the others. He found a place right in the center of the sheet and signed his name in lowercase letters with a grand flair. Then he toasted them with champagne. “With moments like this, he got us seeing our work as art,” said Atkinson.

13. “As every day passes, the work fifty people are doing here is going to send a giant ripple through the universe,”

14. The decision made him feel that he was losing control of his product and company, and this was as dangerous as making a tiger feel cornered.

15. “I’m good at when people are emotional, I’m kind of less emotional.”

16. “There’s an old Hindu saying that goes, ‘In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.’

17. If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.

18. Jobs said. “He took me under his wing.”

19. Rand declared that he did not create different options for clients. “I will solve your problem, and you will pay me,” he told Jobs. “You can use what I produce, or not, but I will not do options, and either way you will pay me.”

20. Kona Village in Hawaii. Ahwahnee Lodge in Yosemite National

21. “Anyone who spent more than a half hour with Amelio would realize that he couldn’t do anything but self-destruct,” he later said.

22. Jobs had aimed for the simplicity that comes from conquering complexities, not ignoring them. “

23. Jobs said, “they came up with thirty-eight reasons they couldn’t do it. And I said, ‘No, no, we’re doing this.’ And they said, ‘Well, why?’ And I said, ‘Because I’m the CEO, and I think it can be done.’ And so they kind of grudgingly did it.”

24. His goal was to be vigilant against “the bozo explosion” that leads to a company’s being larded with second-rate talent:

25. The Mac team was an attempt to build a whole team like that, A players.

26. My role model was J. Robert Oppenheimer. I read about the type of people he sought for the atom bomb project. I wasn’t nearly as good as he was, but that’s what I aspired to do.

27. The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first, but also that it knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind.

28. He once told me, ‘If you need slides, it shows you don’t know what you’re talking about.’”

29. It is so pure and quiet. Bold and conspicuous and yet so inconspicuous as well.

30. Gates played with the scroll wheel and pushed every button combination, while his eyes stared fixedly at the screen. “It looks like a great product,” he finally said. Then he paused and looked puzzled. “It’s only for Macintosh?” he asked.

31. ” Nobody is eager for a lecture, but everybody loves a story.

32. Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. 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.

33. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

34. He was calm and decisive when in command, but he didn’t seek any notice or acclaim for himself.

35. Instead of encouraging each group to let product lines proliferate based on marketing considerations, or permitting a thousand ideas to bloom, 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.”

36. and he admitted that at times he had not been as appreciative of her as she deserved.

37. We didn’t know much about each other twenty years ago. We were guided by our intuition; you swept me off my feet. It was snowing when we got married at the Ahwahnee. Years passed, kids came, good times, hard times, but never bad times. Our love and respect has endured and grown. We’ve been through so much together and here we are right back where we started 20 years ago—older, wiser—with wrinkles on our faces and hearts. We now know many of life’s joys, sufferings, secrets and wonders and we’re still here together. My feet have never returned to the ground.

38. He attributed his ability to focus and his love of simplicity to his Zen training. It honed his appreciation for intuition, showed him how to filter out anything that was distracting or unnecessary, and nurtured in him an aesthetic based on minimalism.

39. Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change.

40. He fell silent for a very long time. “But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like an on-off switch,” he said. “Click! And you’re gone.” Then he paused again and smiled slightly. “Maybe that’s why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.”

41. looking at that every day?” he shouted. “It’s not just a little thing, it’s something we have to do right.”

42. The Pepsi Generation campaign, he said, sold not a product but a lifestyle and an optimistic outlook.

43. including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Ella Fitzgerald, and the Windham Hill jazz artists.

44. as they sat around the table that morning. “We probably only have the opportunity to do a few things really great and do them well.

45. Gates said. “It works better that way if you’re willing to think you’re going to have reasonable market share.”

46. Looking back, Jobs said that, had he known more, he would have focused on animation sooner and not worried about pushing the company’s hardware or software applications. On the other hand, had he known the hardware and software would never be profitable, he would not have taken over Pixar. “Life kind of snookered me into doing that, and perhaps it was for the better.”

47. “He believed that great harvests came from arid sources, pleasure from restraint,” she noted. “He knew the equations that most people didn’t know: Things led to their opposites.”

48. He had neither Ellison’s conspicuous consumption needs nor Gates’s philanthropic impulses nor the competitive urge to see how high on the Forbes list he could get. Instead his ego needs and personal drives led him to seek fulfillment by creating a legacy that would awe people.

49. thought to myself, I either tell him the truth, that Gil is a bozo, or I lie by omission. He’s on the board of Apple, I have a duty to tell him what I think; on the other hand, if I tell him, he will tell Gil, in which case Gil will never listen to me again, and he’ll fuck the people I brought into Apple. All of this took place in my head in less than thirty seconds. I finally decided that I owed this guy the truth. I cared deeply about Apple. So I just let him have it. I said this guy is the worst CEO I’ve ever seen, I think if you needed a license to be a CEO he wouldn’t get one. When I hung up the phone, I thought, I probably just did a really stupid thing.

50. and asked, “Yeah, but what about the hole?” From then on, Ellison and Jobs joked about the parable of the ship. “When Larry relayed this story to me, we were in this sushi place, and I literally fell off my chair laughing,” Jobs recalled. “He was just such a buffoon, and he took himself so seriously. He insisted that everyone call him Dr. Amelio. That’s always a warning sign.”

51. He got through to Williams’s wife, who would not let him talk to the actor because she knew how persuasive he could be.

52. “If something isn’t right, you can’t just ignore it and say you’ll fix it later,” he said. “That’s what other companies do.”

53. Hard Day’s Night, Abbey Road, Help!, Let It Be, Magical Mystery Tour, Meet the Beatles! and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

54. And I was also afraid that he wouldn’t be really smart anymore, that he’d be a caricature of himself, like happens to a lot of people.

55. Jobs teared up and told him, “You playing is the best argument I’ve ever heard for the existence of God, because I don’t really believe a human alone can

56. By that time Jobs had been struck by cancer, and he made Ma promise to play at his funeral.

57. “Apple’s response to the iPhone 4 problem didn’t follow the public relations playbook, because Jobs decided to rewrite the playbook,” Adams wrote. “If you want to know what genius looks like, study Jobs’ words.”