23 Eye-Opening Steve Job Quotes

Last Updated on March 10, 2021 by The Unbounded Thinker

Steve Jobs (1955 to 2011) was Apple’s cofounder, NeXT’s CEO, and among the first people to discover the importance of the personal computer. Steve Job was a genius, a risk-taker, a good leader, and a lover of Buddhist philosophy (Some authors believe Zen Buddhism inspired Steve to think differently). Steve was highly respected and many people wanted to learn from him. Thus, people have written journals, books, and even created movies based on him.

Steve Jobs caught my attention after I realized that he dropped out of school but managed to found Apple: one of the most successful companies in the world.

I love listening to his speeches and watching his interviews, and while doing so, I note down powerful quotes.

Here are some of his powerful quotes I noted down.

Enjoy:

‘You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. 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.’
‘Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. That everything around you that you call life was made by people that were not smarter than you.’
‘The only way to do great work is to love what you do.’
‘Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.’
‘Sometimes life hits you with a brick, don’t lose faith.’
‘The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.’
‘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. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death.’
‘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. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown you out of your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.’
‘Most people never ask, and that’s what separates the people who do things from the people that just dream about them.’
‘You can build your own things that other people can use.’
‘I have never found somebody that didn’t wanna help me if I asked them for help.’
‘You gotta be willing to fail.’
‘If you are afraid of failing you won’t get very far.’
‘Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard and in ten years Apple had grown from just the two of us in the garage into a 2 billion dollar company with 4000 employees.’
‘When you have to walk a thousand miles and you take the first step it looks like a long way. It really helps if there is someone there saying we are one step closer.’
‘It’s a lot of work to start a company.’
‘Most people that have started companies because they want to make lots of money don’t succeed.’
‘People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you are doing and it’s totally true.’
‘If you work with people who are better than you, you really grow.’
‘Successful people persevered because they loved what they did.’
‘What separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.’
‘If you don’t love it you gonna fail.’
‘We decided not to do a lot of things so we could focus on a few handful of things and do them well.’