Steve Jobs would have been 60 today. Although he isn’t with us anymore, his legacy as Apple’s founder lives on. These tidbits from his genius make us miss him more.
From his innovative ideas to his entrepreneurial success, we can learn a lot of things that we can apply on our lives.
Here are some inspirational life lessons from Steve Jobs.
1. Don’t let anything slow you down.
“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.” -Steve Jobs
2.Take huge risks.
“The most visible decision he made was to kill, once and for all, the Newton, the personal digital assistant with the almost-good handwriting-recognition system.”
“I had this crazy idea that we could sell just as many Macs by advertising the iPod. In addition, the iPod would position Apple as evoking innovation and youth. So I moved $75 million of advertising money to the iPod, even though the category didn’t justify one hundredth of that. That meant that we completely dominated the market for music players. We outspent everybody by a factor of about a hundred.” — Steve Jobs.
3. Teach.
“To be honest, we didn’t know what it meant for a computer to be ‘friendly’ until Steve told us.” — Terry Oyama, part of the early Macintosh design team.
4. Create a stellar team.
“For most things in life, the range between best and average is 30% or so. The best airplane flight, the best meal, they may be 30% better than your average one. What I saw with Woz was somebody who was fifty times better than the average engineer. He could have meetings in his head. The Mac team was an attempt to build a whole team like that, A players. People said they wouldn’t get along, they’d hate working with each other. But I realized that A players like to work with A players, they just didn’t like working with C players.” -Steve Jobs
5. Be open-minded.
“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
6. Admit your mistakes and be ready to face the consequences.
“I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was twenty-three and the way I handled that,” Jobs said.
7.Trust your gut feel.
“Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?” -Steve Jobs
8. Balance.
“In a company that was led by a CEO prone to tantrums and withering blasts, Cook commanded situations with a calm demeanor, a soothing Alabama accent, and silent stares.”
9. The smallest details can make the biggest difference.
Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year.”
10. Always push yourself.
“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” -Steve Jobs
Happy 60th Birthday Steve Jobs!