We do it ourselves and we spend a lot of time at it. I’ve participated in the hiring of maybe 5,000+ people in my life. So I take it very seriously.

My number one job here at Apple is to make sure that the top 100 people are A+ players. And everything else will take care of itself.

I want to see if they just fold or if they have firm conviction, belief, and pride in what they did.

Well, they’re just yardsticks, you know.

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.

I think money is a wonderful thing because it enables you to do things, it enables you to invest in ideas that don’t have a short-term payback and things like that.

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.

It makes me feel old, sometimes, when I speak at a campus and I find that what students are most in awe of is the fact that I’m a millionaire.

To me, marketing is about values.

You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.

We have no idea how far it’s going to go.

Humans are tool builders. We create things to amplify ourselves. The computer will rank at the top – it’s the most awesome tool ever.

What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.

I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer, should learn a computer language because it teaches you how to think.

My dream is that every person in the world will have their own Apple computer. To do that, we’ve got to be a great marketing company.

I’ll tell you what our goal is: our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world and to make products we are proud to sell and recommend to our family and friends, and, we want to do that at the lowest price we can.

Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world.

We attract a different kind of person – a person who doesn’t want to wait five or ten years to have someone take a giant risk on him or her. Someone who really wants to get a little over his head and make a little dent in the universe.

My job is to say when something sucks rather than sugarcoat it.

What I’m best at doing is finding a group of talented people and making things with them.

What I do all day, is meet with teams of people, and work on ideas, and solve problems, to make new products, to make new marketing programs, whatever it is.

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.

My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to make them better.

On meetings: We don’t have a lot of process at Apple, but that’s one of the few things we do just to all stay on the same page.

It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.

I want to see what people are like under pressure.

If they fall in love with Apple, everything else will take care of itself. They’ll want to do what’s best for Apple, not what’s best for them, what’s best for Steve, or anybody else.

They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, are they going to fall in love with Apple?

Recruiting is hard. It’s just finding the needles in the haystack.

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.

Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.

No, we don’t know where it will lead. We just know there’s something much bigger than any of us here.

We’re trying to use the swiftness and creativity in a younger-style company, and yet bring to bear the tremendous resources of a company the size of Apple to do large projects that you could never handle at a startup.

The best ideas have to win.

I contribute ideas, sure. Why would I be there if I didn’t?

We are gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make ‘me-too’ products. For us, it’s always the next dream.

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

There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very, very beginning.

You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward to the Technology. You can’t start with the technology and then try to figure out how to sell it.

As we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer?

When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, ‘Get it away!’ and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.

What does Nike do in their advertising? They honor great athletes, and they honor great athletics. That’s who they are, that’s what they are about.

More important than building a product, we are in the process of architecting a company that will hopefully be much more incredible, the total will be much more incredible than the sum of its parts.

Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?

You gotta act. And you’ve gotta be willing to fail, you gotta be ready to crash and burn, with people on the phone, with starting a company, with whatever. If you’re afraid of failing, you won’t get very far.

I believe life is an intelligent thing, that things aren’t random.

When you die, it doesn’t just all disappear.

Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t. I think it’s 50-50 maybe.

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.

The most powerful person in business is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.

I’m a long-term kind of person.

Fortunately, my training has been in doing things that take a long time. You know? I was at Apple 10 years. I would have preferred to be there the rest of my life. So I’m a long-term kind of person.

I hate it when people call themselves “entrepreneurs” when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on.

If you are willing to work hard and ask lots of questions, you can learn business pretty fast.

On starting Apple with Steve Wozniak: We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a 2 billion company with over 4000 employees.

I remember many late nights coming out of the Mac building when I would have the most incredibly powerful feelings about my life.

We used to dream about this stuff. Now we get to build it. It’s pretty great.

The smallest company in the world can look as large as the largest company on the web.

I think this is the start of something really big. Sometimes that first step is the hardest one, and we’ve just taken it.

I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don’t blame them. It’s really tough and it consumes your life.

You’ve got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about, otherwise you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that’s half the battle right there.

I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end.

On the MacIntosh: When we finally presented it at the shareholders’ meeting, everyone in the auditorium gave it a five-minute ovation. What was incredible to me was that I could see the Mac team in the first few rows. It was as though none of us could believe we’d actually finished it. Everyone started crying.

Pixar has been a marathon, not a sprint. 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.

On the MacIntosh: It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn’t be ours anymore.

My wife deserves all the credit for keeping me at it.

I’ve never been so tired in my life. I’d come home at about ten o’clock at night and flop straight into bed, then haul myself out at six the next morning and take a shower and go to work. My wife deserves all the credit for keeping me at it. She supported me and kept the family together with a husband in absentia.

Most people don’t get those experiences because they never ask. I’ve never found anybody that didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help.

Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask. And that’s what separates sometimes the people that do things from the people that just dream about them.

As you may know, I was basically fired from Apple when I was 30 and was invited to come back 12 years later so that was difficult when it happened but maybe the best thing that could ever happen to me you just move on, life goes on and you learn from it.

If you act like you can do something, then it will work.

Life goes on and you learn from it.

Each year has been so robust with problems and successes and learning experiences and human experiences that a year is a lifetime at Apple.

I’ve never found anyone who’s said no or hung up the phone when I called-I just asked. And when people ask me, I try to be as responsive, to pay that debt of gratitude back.

At Apple, people are putting in 18-hour days.

You get your wind back, remember the finish line, and keep going.

People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you’re doing and it’s totally true. And the reason is because it’s so hard that if you don’t, any rational person would give up. It’s really hard. And you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don’t love it, if you’re not having fun doing it, you don’t really love it, you’re going to give up.

I was lucky, I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20.

I’ve been rejected, but I was still in love.

So it’s a lot of hard work and it’s a lot of worrying constantly and if you don’t love it, you’re going to fail. So you’ve got to love it and you’ve got to have passion and I think that’s the high-order bit.

Without death, there would be very little progress.

Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.

I’ve always felt that death is the greatest invention of life. I’m sure that life evolved without death at first and found that without death, life didn’t work very well because it didn’t make room for the young.

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

Death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent, it clears out the old to make way for the new.

I think death is the most wonderful invention of life. It purges the system of these old models that are obsolete.

I think the things you most regret in life are things you didn’t do. What you really regret was never asking that girl to dance.

In business, if I knew earlier what I know now, I’d have probably done some things a lot better than I did, but I also would’ve probably done some other things a lot worse. But so what? It’s more important to be engaged in the present.

So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life. We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. We could be out sailing. Some of the executive team could be playing golf. They could be running other companies. And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it. And we think it is.

I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay.

I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking and don’t settle.

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.

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.

There is no reason not to follow your heart.

And you can change it, you can influence it.

When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader.

If you want it, you can fly, you just have to trust you a lot.

That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to 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. I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will pop out the other side, that you can change it, you can mold it.

The only thing you have in your life is time. If you invest that time in yourself to have great experiences that are going to enrich you, then you can’t possibly lose.

There was a constant flow of intellectual questioning about the truth of life. That was a time when every college student in this country read Be Here Now and Diet for a Small Planet – there were about ten books.

On being fired from Apple and called back 12 years later: What a circle of life. You know? Life is just always mysterious and surprising, and you never know what’s around the next corner.

We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent, because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.

If today were the last of your life, would you do what you were going to do today?

Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice.

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.

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.

It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.

We were really working fourteen-to-eighteen-hour days, seven days a week. For like, two years, three years. That was our life. But we loved it, we were young, and we could do it.

You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

People judge you on your performance, so focus on the outcome. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.

People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.

One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.

There is a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product.

Don’t take it all too seriously. 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.

Don’t get hung up on who owns the idea. Pick the best one, and let’s go.

The most precious thing that we all have with us is time.

We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. We just want to make great products.

The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers.

I think all of us need to be on guard against arrogance which knocks at the door whenever you’re successful.

The Lisa people wanted to do something great. And the Mac people want to do something insanely great. The difference shows.

Once you discover one simple fact, and that is everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you.

I always advise people – Don’t wait! Do something when you are young, when you have nothing to lose, and keep that in mind.

That’s why we started Apple, we said you know, we have absolutely nothing to lose. I was 20 years old at the time, Woz was 24-25, so we have nothing to lose. We have no families, no children, no houses. Woz had an old car. I had a Volkswagen van, I mean, all we were going to lose is our cars and the shirts off our back.

That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity.

We he had everything to gain. And we figured even if we crash and burn, and lose everything, the experience will have been worth ten times the cost.

We are very careful about what features we add because we can’t take them away.

The really great person will keep on going and find the key, underlying principle of the problem, and come up with a beautiful elegant solution that works.

On the blue box: That was what we learned: was that us, too, we didn’t know much. We could build a little thing that could control a giant thing and that was an incredible lesson.

Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart.

Let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.

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.

I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.

I don’t care about being right. I care about success and doing the right thing.

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

The products suck! There’s no sex in them anymore!

For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

The doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker and doer in one person.

Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.

Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.

I do not adopt softness towards others because I want to make them better.

If you don’t love it, you’re going to fail.

You can build your own things that other people can use. And once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

In the broadest context, the goal is to seek enlightenment – however you define it.

Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing.