This past week Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple stepping out of his role as the chief designer. Everyone wonders how his genius will be replaced. It was not his genius it was in large part his reliance on intuition. Below you will find some of my favorite quotes by and about Steve Jobs. Feel free to add yours.
Trip Chowdry, a director at Global Equity Research, said, “Success in the consumer space is not dictated by getting your product 80 percent right, 90 percent right, or 97 percent right,” he said. “The success is defined by the last 2 percent of the product, and I don’t think there’s any other individual on the planet who has the kind of intuition Steve Jobs has to make sure they get the last 2 percent right.”
“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.” [Steve Jobs The Wall Street Journal, May 25, 1993]
“The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.” [Apple Confidential: The Real Story of Apple Computer Inc., May 1999]
In a speech last year at Auburn University, Tim Cook, the new CEO of Apple, urged the audience of young graduates to trust their intuition over logic or plans. He said it made no sense for him to take a job at Apple in 1998 when the company seemed to be fading. “But no more than five minutes into my interview with Steve, I wanted to throw caution and logic to the wind.”
In a commencement speech to students at Stanford University in 2005, Steve Jobs advised, “Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later.”
“Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinion drowned your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
He created everything from personal computers to the iPod, iPhone, iPad and more. Over the course of his career, Steve Jobs has patented more than 300 groundbreaking products that have made our lives easier and revolutionized the way we interact in the world.
“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.” Steve Jobs
“Again, 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. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. 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 people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
I would like to add that it takes great courage to follow your intuition. The difference is success.
Best wishes on your success, Kay
Intuition in Life & Success 