Walter Isaacson Quotes

We'd buy brochures of Dylan lyrics and stay up late interpreting them. Dylan's words struck chords of creative thinking.

early summer of 2004, I

I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.

It's about doing something larger than yourself. It's about serving this world, helping others.

The Macintosh lacked a fan, another example of Jobs's dogmatic stubbornness. Fans, he felt, detracted from the calm of a computer. This caused many component failures and earned the Macintosh the nickname "the beige toaster," which did not enhance its popularity.

As a publishing magnate and then as a postmaster, he was one of the few to view America as a whole. To him, the colonies were not merely disparate entities. They were a new world with common interests and ideals.

The importance of spawning new

Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion.

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.

Suggested it would be sometime in the second quarter of that year. At the first NeXT retreat back in late 1985, he had refused to budge, despite Joanna Hoffman's pushback, from his commitment to have the machine finished in early 1987. Now it was clear

Steve Jobs: The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

But he also threatened that if Google continued to develop Android and used any iPhone features, such as multi-touch, he would sue. At first Google avoided copying certain features, but in January 2010 HTC introduced an Android phone that boasted multi-touch and many other aspects of the iPhone's look and feel. That was the context for Jobs's pronouncement that Google's "Don't be evil" slogan was "bullshit.

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.

Half-formed ideas, they float around. They come from different places, and the mind has got this wonderful way of somehow just shoveling them around until one day they fit. They may fit not so well, and then we go for a bike ride or something, and it's better."12

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 creative company. And he was able to infuse into its DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination that make it likely to be, even decades from now, the company that thrives best at the intersection of artistry and technology.

Vision without execution is hallucination. .. Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo [da Vinci] knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history's consummate innovator.

When you write biographies, whether it's about Ben Franklin or Einstein, you discover something amazing: They are human.

There's a deep current of humanity in our innovation.

Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground.

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. The more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to say, "Bye. I have to go. I'm going crazy and I'm getting out of here." And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently. (Steve Jobs)

Cover of Time, and soon thereafter he began offering

Internet services at Apple, Jobs's wingman in dealing with content companies. ANDREA "ANDY" CUNNINGHAM. Publicist at Regis McKenna's firm who handled Apple in the early Macintosh years. MICHAEL EISNER. Hard-driving Disney CEO who made the Pixar deal, then clashed with Jobs. LARRY ELLISON. CEO of Oracle and personal friend of Jobs.

Of months, he began encouraging people to talk to me, even foes and former girlfriends. Nor did he try to put anything off-limits. "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," he said. "But I don't have any

treat you like a criminal," he said, showing a slide of an inmate in striped prison garb. Then a slide of Bob Dylan came on the screen. "People want to own the music they love.

Throughout his career, Jobs liked to see himself as an enlightened rebel pitted against evil empires, a Jedi warrior or Buddhist samurai fighting the forces of darkness. IBM was his perfect foil. He cleverly cast the upcoming battle not as a mere business competition,

More generally, I made an effort to leave out things that weren't relevant to the main narrative themes of the book, namely that there were two sides to Steve Jobs: the romantic, poetic, countercultural rebel on one side, and the serious businessperson on the other.

Innovation is driven by people who have both good theories and the opportunity to be part of a group that can implement them. The

Jobs tended to be deeply moved by artists who displayed purity, and he became a fan. He invited Ma to play at his wedding, but he was out of the country on tour. He came by the Jobs house a few years later, sat in the living room, pulled out his 1733 Stradivarius cello, and played Bach. "This is what I would have played for your wedding," he told them. 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 do this." On

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

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.

He was incredibly phony, a complete poseur... He pretended to be interested in technology, but he wasn't. He was a marketing guy, and that is what marketing guys are: paid poseurs.

Life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity."

J. C. R. Licklider and Robert Taylor,
"The Computer as a Communication Device," Science and Technology , Apr. 1968.

In ancient Rome, when a victorious general paraded through the streets, legend has it that he was sometimes trailed by a servant whose job it was to repeat to him, " Memento Mori": Remember you will die. A reminder of mortality would help the hero keep things in perspective, instill some humility. Job's memento mori had been delivered by his doctors, but it did not instill humility. Instead he roared back after his recovery with even more passion. The illness reminded him that he had nothing to lose, so he should forge ahead full speed. " He came back on a mission," said Cook. " Even though he was now running a large company, he kept making bold moves that I don't think anybody else would have done.

Engelbart showed, back in 1968, nearly everything that a networked personal computer does today.

Tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled

Perhaps no matter how fast computers progress, artificial intelligence may never outstrip the intelligence of the human-machine partnership. Let

Franklin's scientific achievements placed him in the pantheon with Newton. Franklin's experiments, he wrote in 1941, "afforded a basis for the explanation for all the known phenomena of electricity."16 Franklin

Throughout his life, Albert Einstein would retain the intuition and the awe of a child. He never lost his sense of wonder at the magic of nature's phenomena-magnetic fields, gravity, inertia, acceleration, light beams-which grown-ups find so commonplace. He retained the ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted, and to marvel when he could smell an underlying unity. "People like you and me never grow old," he wrote a friend later in life. "We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.

Kissinger would probably be outraged even if he reread his own memoirs, on the grounds that they are not favorable enough.

poet convinced both of his own talent and of the need to be self-indulgent in order to be a great artist.

Ever since Apple's first brochure proclaimed "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication," Jobs had aimed for the simplicity that comes from conquering complexities, not ignoring them. "It takes a lot of hard word," he said, "to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.

Laurene, Eve, Erin, and Lisa at the Corinth Canal in Greece, 2006: For young people, this

On its first over was the famous picture of Earth taken from space; its subtitle was "Access to Tools." The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, "A realm of intimate, personal power is developing- power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.

Sure to become mandatory reading for anyone with an interest in big business and popular culture . . . Isaacson is to be commended for explaining the genius of Jobs in fascinating fashion, launching a discussion that could reach infinity and beyond.

It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan ... [Showing the misery of Afghanistan ran the risk of] promoting enemy propaganda ... we must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian shields and how the Taliban have harboured the terrorists responsible for killing close up to 5,000 innocent people.

Syrian-born graduate student in Wisconsin who became biological father of Jobs and Mona Simpson, later a food and beverage manager at the Boomtown casino near Reno.

Franklin asserted his conservatism more forcefully. Most notable was an anonymous piece entitled "On the Laboring Poor," which he signed "Medius,

Old physicist joke: they knew that the approach worked in practice, but could they make it work in theory?

Form follows emotion

Apple's products

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.

In September 1998, one month after they met with Bechtolsheim, Page and Brin incorporated their company, opened a bank account, and cashed his check. On the wall of the garage they put up a whiteboard emblazoned "Google Worldwide Headquarters.

I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis.

There would be times when we'd rack our brains on a user interface problem, and think we'd considered every option, and he would go, " Did you think of this? " said Fadell. " And then we'd all go, " Holy Shit." He'd redefine the problem or approach, and our little problem would go away.

He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

Like many entrepreneurs, Bushnell had no shame about distorting reality in order to motivate people.

Sculley began to believe that Jobs's mercurial personality and erratic treatment of people were rooted deep in his psychological makeup, perhaps the reflection of a mild bipolarity.

In the early summer of 2004, I got a phone call from Steve Jobs. He had been scattershot friendly to me over the years, with occasional bursts of intensity, especially when he was launching a new product that he wanted on the cover of Time or featured on CNN, places where I'd worked. But now that I was no longer at either of those places, I hadn't heard from him much. We talked a bit about the Aspen Institute, which I had recently joined, and I invited him

Most outside experts disagreed. "Maybe it's time Steve Jobs stopped thinking quite so differently," Business Week wrote in a story headlined "Sorry Steve, Here's Why Apple Stores Won't Work.

I want to make this a revolution, not an effort to squeeze out profits.

Steve's head dropped and stared at his feet. After a weighty, uncomfortable pause, he issued a challenge that would haunt me for days. " Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?"
Sculley felt as if he had been punched in the stomach. There was no response possible other than to acquiesce. " He had a uncanny ability to always get what he wanted, to size up a person and know exactly what to say to reach a person," Sculley recalled.

Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!

I think it's really good that you have great competition among news networks, and for that matter all the networks in general. It's bringing more and more people in to watching the news.

Steve and I spent a lot of time on the packaging," said Ive. " I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.

misanthrope." Einstein

Reality has an odd habit of catching up with satire.

You know, one of these things that happened in the '60s and '70s was this confluence of, sort of, a counter-culture with computer culture.

That spring Larry Ellison saw Amelio at a party and introduced him to the technology journalist Gina Smith, who asked how Apple was doing. "You know, Gina, Apple is like a ship," Amelio answered. "That ship is loaded with treasure, but there's a hole in the ship. And my job is to get everyone to row in the same direction." Smith looked perplexed 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.

Some leaders push innovations by being good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details. Jobs did both, relentlessly.

One day someone called the Institute and asked to speak to a particular dean. When his secretary said that the dean wasn't available, the caller hesitantly asked for Einstein's home address. That was not possible to give out, he was informed. The caller's voice then dropped to a whisper. "Please don't tell anybody," he said, "but I am Dr. Einstein, I'm on my way home, and I've forgotten where my house is."40

Any government is evil if it carries within it the tendency to deteriorate into tyranny," he warned the Russian scientists. "The danger of such deterioration is more acute in a country in which the government has authority not only over the armed forces but also over every channel of education and information as well as over the existence of every single citizen."27

Delivered to the Byte Shop within thirty days, when the payment for the parts would come due. All available hands were enlisted: Jobs and Wozniak, plus Daniel Kottke, his ex-girlfriend Elizabeth Holmes (who had broken away from the cult she'd joined), and Jobs's pregnant sister, Patty. Her vacated bedroom as well as the kitchen table and garage were commandeered as work space. Holmes,

One sticking point was that Jobs wanted his payout to be in cash. Amelio insisted that he needed to "have skin in the game" and take the payout in stock that he would agree to hold for at least a year." Jobs resisted. Finally, they compromised: Jobs would take $120 million in cash and $37 million in stock, and he pledged to hold the stock for at least six months.

Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.

A theme of digital success is keeping it simple.

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.

Such a leader knows how to empower groups to self-organize. When it's done right, a governance structure by consensus naturally emerges, as happened both with Linux and Wikipedia. "What astonishes so many people is that the open source model actually works," Torvalds said. "People know who has been active and who they can trust, and it just happens.

If I had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other, I would always choose the latter.

Man is very capable of imagining infinite happiness, and he should be able to grasp the infinity of space - I

He was furious, and that was reflected in his passion to start what was, no matter how he spun it, a rival company.

I think one problem we've had is that people who are smart and creative and innovative as engineers went into financial engineering.

was not just some passing fancy or youthful dabbling. He embraced it with his typical intensity,

To dwell on the things taht depress or anger us does not help in overcoming them. One must knock them down alone.

In other words, the idea for the iPad actually came before, and helped to shape, the birth of the iPhone.

Religion was at it's best when it emphasized spiritual experiences rather than received dogma. "The juice goes out of Christianity when it becomes too based on faith, rather than living like Jesus or seeing the world as Jesus saw it," he told me. "I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don't. It's a great mystery.

It's also a narrative of how they collaborated and why their ability to work as teams made them even more creative.

I think you still have to think differently to buy an Apple computer," he said. "The people who buy them do think different. They are the creative spirits in this world, and they're out to change the world. We make tools for those kinds of people.

Polite and velvety leaders, who take care to avoid bruising others, are generally not as effective at forcing change. Dozens of the colleagues whom Jobs most abused ended their litany of horror stories by saying that he got them to do things they never dreamed possible. And he created a corporation crammed with A players.

A lot of the credit, too, should go to Turing, for developing the concept of a universal computer and then being part of a hands-on team at Bletchley Park. How you rank the historic contributions of the others depends partly on the criteria you value. If you are enticed by the romance of lone inventors and care less about who most influenced the progress of the field, you might put Atanasoff and Zuse high. 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.

Kathryn Smith: 16 DPA/Landov: 21 Courtesy of Daniel Kottke: 56 Mark Richards: 71, 348 Ted Thai/Polaris: 102

Socrates' method of building an argument through gentle queries, he "dropped my abrupt contradiction" style of argument and "put on the humbler enquirer" of the Socratic method. By asking what seemed to be innocent questions, Franklin would draw people into making concessions that would gradually prove whatever point he was trying to assert.

Jobs put his hand on Ellison's left shoulder, pulled him so close that their noses almost touched, and said, Larry, this is why it's really important that I'm your friend. You don't need any more money.

Everything you've ever done in your life is shit," Jobs said, "so why don't you come work for me?

Politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity.

Still allergic to PowerPoints and formal presentations, he insisted that the people around the table hash out issues from various vantages and the perspectives of different departments.
Because he believed that Apple's great advantage was its integration of the whole widget- from design to hardware to software to content-he wanted all departments at the company to work together in parallel. The phrases he used were "deep collaboration" and "concurrent engineering." Instead of a development process in which a product would be passed sequentially from engineering to design to manufacturing to marketing and distribution, these various departments collaborated simultaneously. " Our method was to develop integrated products, and that meant our process had to be integrated and collaborative," Jobs said.
This approach also applied to key hires. He would have candidates meet the top leaders-Cook, Tevanian, Schiller, Rubinstein, Ive- rather than just the managers of the department where they wanted to work. " Then we all get together without the person and talk about whether they'll fit in," Jobs said.

Markets rather than merely chasing old ones.

On Startups: "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.

Knowing that great conceptions are worth little without precision execution

People will provide judgment, intuition, empathy, a moral compass, and human creativity.

If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle things - that's when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before. It's a discipline; you have to practice it.