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Jobs's intensity was also evident in his ability to focus. He would set priorities, aim his laser attention on them, and filter out distractions. If something engaged him- the user interface for the original Macintosh, the design of the iPod and iPhone, getting music companies into the iTunes Store-he was relentless. But if he did not want to deal with something - a legal annoyance, a business issue, his cancer diagnosis, a family tug- he w..
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intensity
focus
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Walter Isaacson |
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Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of this time, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors. With a ferocity that could make working with him as unsettling as it was inspiring, he also built the world's most cr..
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steve-jobs
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Walter Isaacson |
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I am a fruitarian and I will only eat leaves picked by virgins in the moonlight - Steve Jobs
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Walter Isaacson |
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if you didn't voice your opinion, [Steve Jobs] would mow you down," said Cook. "He takes contrary positions to create more discussion, because it may lead to a better result. So if you don't feel comfortable disagreeing, then you'll never survive."
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Walter Isaacson |
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I used to be an angry man myself. I'm a recovering assaholic so I could recognize that in Steve. (quoting Jean-Louis Gassee)
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Walter Isaacson |
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Most people have a regulator between their mind and mouth that modulates their brutish sentiments and spikiest impulses. Not Jobs. He made a point of being brutally honest. " My job is to say when something sucks rather than sugar coat it, : he said. This made him charismatic and inspiring, yet also,, to use the technical term, an asshole at times."
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charisma
charismatic-connection
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Walter Isaacson |
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1abe9e7
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A society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.
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Walter Isaacson |
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I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it's inside the box. A great carpenter isn't going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody's going to see it.
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Walter Isaacson |
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242784d
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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.
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Walter Isaacson |
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f120275
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i had no idea what i wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.
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Walter Isaacson |
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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"
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Walter Isaacson |
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progress comes not only in great leaps but also from hundreds of small steps.
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Walter Isaacson |
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i began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis.
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Walter Isaacson |
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How did he get his ideas? "I'm enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
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Walter Isaacson |
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34c5d47
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If we want to be more like Leonardo, we have to be fearless about changing our minds based on new information.
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Walter Isaacson |
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men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of the desire for wisdom, which is the sustenance and truly dependable wealth of the mind.
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Walter Isaacson |
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But the main lesson to draw from the birth of computers is that innovation is usually a group effort, involving collaboration between visionaries and engineers, and that creativity comes from drawing on many sources. Only in storybooks do inventions come like a thunderbolt, or a lightbulb popping out of the head of a lone individual in a basement or garret or garage.
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Walter Isaacson |
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d22143a
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In a bravura demonstration of stonewalling, righteousness, and hurt sincerity, Steve Jobs successfully took to the stage the other day to deny the problem, dismiss the criticism, and spread the blame among other smartphone makers," Michael Wolff of newser.com wrote. "This is a level of modern marketing, corporate spin, and crisis management about which you can only ask with stupefied incredulity and awe: How do they get away with it? Or, mo..
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Walter Isaacson |
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a1f67f3
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The thing that struck me was his intensity. Whatever he was interested in he would generally carry to an irrational extreme." Jobs had honed his trick of using stares and silences to master other people. " One of his numbers was to stare at the person he was talking to. He would stare into their fucking eyeballs, ask some question, and would want a response without the other person averting their eyes."
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intensity
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Walter Isaacson |
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79837b5
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When you open the box of an iPhone or iPad, we want that tactile experience to set the tone for how you perceive the product.
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Walter Isaacson |
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Even when he was barely conscious, his strong personality came through. At one point the pulmonologist tried to put a mask over his face when he was sedated. Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. He ordered them to bring five different options and he would pick the one he liked.
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inspirational
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Walter Isaacson |
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4fbec1b
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The main thing in our design is that we have to make things intuitively obvious.
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Walter Isaacson |
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Knowledge, he realized, "was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue."
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Walter Isaacson |
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The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don't really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you're doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not go..
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motivation
hustling
business-culture
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Walter Isaacson |
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c1b4346
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Jobs had begun to drop acid by then, and he turned Brennan on to it as well, in a wheat field just outside Sunnyvale. "It was great," he recalled. "I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the whole field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat."
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psychological
music
steve-jobs
lsd
walter-isaacson
mystical
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Walter Isaacson |
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a7d7941
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I was on one of my fruitarian diets" Steve Jobs recalled "I had just comeback from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge of the word 'computer', plus it would get us a head of Atari in the phone book. He told Wozniak if a better name did not hit them by the next afternoon, they would just stick with apple and they did. 1 Apr 1976 "
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Walter Isaacson |
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0b85412
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In classic Steve fashion, he would agree to something, but it would never happen," said Lack. "He would set you up and then pull it off the table. He's pathological, which can be useful in negotiations. And he's a genius."
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Walter Isaacson |
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fde9a76
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Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. He was, indeed, an example of what the mathematician Mark Kac called a magician genius, someone whose insights come out of the blue and require intuition more than mere mental processing power. Like a pathfinder, he could absorb information, sniff the winds, and sense what lay ahead.
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Walter Isaacson |
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In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.
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Walter Isaacson |
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A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way," Einstein once said, "but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience." --
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Walter Isaacson |
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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 "h..
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steve-jobs
walter-isaacson
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Walter Isaacson |
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2d63f30
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His lack of reverence for authority and his willingness to challenge received wisdom would lead him to craft an empirical approach for understanding nature that foreshadowed the scientific method developed more than a century later by Bacon and Galileo. His method was rooted in experiment, curiosity, and the ability to marvel at phenomena that the rest of us rarely pause to ponder after we've outgrown our wonder years.
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Walter Isaacson |
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8d586f2
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Leonardo had almost no schooling and could barely read Latin or do long division. His genius was of the type we can understand, even take lessons from. It was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation. He had an imagination so excitable that it flirted with the edges of fantasy, which is also something we can try to preserve in ourselves and indulge in our children.
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Walter Isaacson |
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4f85fc9
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I believe that love is a better teacher than a sense of duty," he said, "at least for me."
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Walter Isaacson |
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Politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity.
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Walter Isaacson |
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29db2df
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A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way," Einstein once said, "but intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience."
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Walter Isaacson |
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It takes a lot of hard work," he said, "to make something simple,"
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Walter Isaacson |
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8b1d3a5
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But I did learn from Leonardo how a desire to marvel about the world that we encounter each day can make each moment of our lives richer.
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Walter Isaacson |
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c9b2ef9
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Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion.
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Walter Isaacson |
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5bb718a
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When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him.
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Walter Isaacson |
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One of Job's business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. " If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will," he said. So even though an Iphone might cannibalize sales of an IPod, or an IPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him."
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innovation
cannibalism
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Walter Isaacson |
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90f8f04
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Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving. --ALBERT EINSTEIN, IN A LETTER TO HIS SON EDUARD, FEBRUARY 5, 19301
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Walter Isaacson |
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ac0e2ab
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Innovation requires having at least three things: a great idea, the engineering talent to execute it, and the business savvy (plus deal-making moxie) to turn it into a successful product.
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Walter Isaacson |
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c197ef7
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He was a loner with an intimate bond to humanity, a rebel who was suffused with reverence. And thus it was that an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe.
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Walter Isaacson |