7/11/23, 9:04 PM Make Something Wonderful | Steve Jobs

Make Something Wonderful

Steve Jobs in his own words

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There’s lots of ways to be, as a person. And some

people express their deep appreciation in different
ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express
their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make
something wonderful and put it out there.
And you never meet the people. You never shake their
hands. You never hear their story or tell yours. But
somehow, in the act of making something with a great
deal of care and love, something’s transmitted there.
And it’s a way of expressing to the rest of our species
our deep appreciation. So we need to be true to who we
are and remember what’s really important to us.

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—Steve, 2007

Introduction by
Laurene Powell Jobs
The best way to understand a person is to listen to that
person directly. And the best way to understand Steve
is to listen to what he said and wrote over the course of
his life. His words—in speeches, interviews, and
emails—offer a window into how he thought. And he
was an exquisite thinker.
Much of what’s in these pages reflects guiding themes
of Steve’s life: his sense of the worlds that would
emerge from marrying the arts and technology; his
unbelievable rigor, which he imposed first and most
strenuously on himself; his tenacity in pursuit of
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assembling and leading great teams; and perhaps,

above all, his insights into what it means to be human.
Steve once told a group of students, “You appear, have
a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.” He
gave an extraordinary amount of thought to how best
to use our fleeting time. He was compelled by the
notion of being part of the arc of human existence,
animated by the thought that he—or that any of us—
might elevate or expedite human progress.
It is hard enough to see what is already there, to gain a
clear view. Steve’s gift was greater still: he saw clearly
what was not there, what could be there, what had to
be there. His mind was never a captive of reality. Quite
the contrary: he imagined what reality lacked and set
out to remedy it. His ideas were not arguments, but
intuitions, born of a true inner freedom and an epic
sense of possibility.
In these pages, Steve drafts and refines. He stumbles,
grows, and changes. But always, always, he retains
that sense of possibility. I hope these selections ignite
in you the understanding that drove him: that
everything that makes up what we call life was made
by people no smarter, no more capable, than we are;

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that our world is not fixed—and so we can change it

for the better.

Edited by Leslie Berlin

Published by the Steve Jobs Archive
Contents have been edited and
excerpted for clarity and privacy.

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✂
or paragraphs have been
removed from the original.

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Steve at two. He later called computers “a bicycle of the mind.”

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Preface: Steve on His Childhood

and Young Adulthood
Steve typically kept his personal life private, but he did
occasionally talk about growing up in the San Francisco
Bay Area. It was a time when engineers and
programmers began flooding into what came to be
known as Silicon Valley.
In 1995, he recorded an oral history for the Smithsonian.
I was very lucky. I had a father, named Paul, who was a
pretty remarkable man. He never graduated from high
school. He joined the Coast Guard in World War II
and ferried troops around the world for General
Patton, and I think he was always getting into trouble
and getting busted down to Private. He was a
machinist by trade and worked very hard and was kind
of a genius with his hands.
He had a workbench out in the garage where, when
I was about five or six, he sectioned off a little piece of
it and said, “Steve, this is your workbench now.” And
he gave me some of his smaller tools and showed me
how to use a hammer and saw and how to build things.
It really was very good for me. He spent a lot of time
with me, teaching me how to build things, take things
apart, put things back together.
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One of the things that he touched upon was

electronics. He did not have a deep understanding of
electronics himself, but he’d encountered electronics a
lot in automobiles and other things that he would fix.
He showed me the rudiments of electronics, and I got
very interested in that.
I grew up in Silicon Valley. My parents moved from
San Francisco to Mountain View when I was five. My
dad got transferred, and that was right in the heart of
Silicon Valley, so there were engineers all around.
Silicon Valley, for the most part, at that time, was still
orchards—apricot orchards and prune orchards—and
it was really paradise. I remember almost every day
the air being crystal clear, where you could see from
one end of the valley to the other. It was really the
most wonderful place in the world to grow up.
There was a man that moved in down the street,
maybe about six or seven houses down the block, who
was new in the neighborhood with his wife. And it
turned out that he was an engineer at Hewlett-Packard
and he was a ham-radio operator and really into
electronics. What he did to get to know the kids on the
block was rather a strange thing: he put out a carbon
microphone and a battery and a speaker on his
driveway, where you could talk into the microphone
and your voice would be amplified by the speaker.
Kind of a strange thing when you move into a
neighborhood, but that’s what he did. ✂
I got to know this man, whose name was Larry Lang,
and he taught me a lot of electronics. He was great. He
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used to build Heathkits. Heathkits were really great.

Heathkits were these products that you would buy in
kit form. You actually paid more money for them than
if you just went and bought the finished product, if it
was available. These Heathkits would come with these
detailed manuals about how to put this thing together,
and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and
color coded. You’d actually build this thing yourself.
I would say that gave one several things. It gave one an
understanding of what was inside a finished product
and how it worked, because it would include a theory
of operation. But maybe even more importantly, it
gave one the sense that one could build the things that
one saw around oneself in the universe. These things
were not mysteries anymore. I mean, you looked at a
television set, and you would think, “I haven’t built
one of those—but I could. There’s one of those in the
Heathkit catalog, and I’ve built two other Heathkits,
so I could build a television set.” Things became much
more clear that they were the results of human
creation, not these magical things that just appeared
in one’s environment that one had no knowledge of
their interiors. It gave a tremendous degree of self-
confidence that, through exploration and learning,
one could understand seemingly very complex things
in one’s environment. My childhood was very
fortunate in that way. ✂
School was pretty hard for me at the beginning. My
mother taught me how to read before I got to school,
and so when I got there I really just wanted to do two
things: I wanted to read books, because I loved
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reading books, and I wanted to go outside and chase

butterflies. You know, do the things that five-year-olds
like to do. I encountered authority of a different kind
than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like
it. And they really almost got me. They came this close
to really beating any curiosity out of me.
By the time I was in third grade, I had a good buddy of
mine, Rick Ferrentino, and the only way we had fun
was to create mischief. I remember there was a big
bike rack where everybody put their bikes, maybe a
hundred bikes in this rack—and we traded everybody
our lock combinations for theirs on an individual
basis. Then [we] went out one day and put everybody’s
lock on everybody else’s bike, and it took them until
about ten o’clock that night to get all the bikes sorted
out. We set off explosives in teachers’ desks. We got
kicked out of school a lot.
In fourth grade I encountered one of the other saints
of my life. They were going to put me and Rick
Ferrentino into the same fourth-grade class, and the
principal said at the last minute, “No, bad idea.
Separate them.” So this teacher, Mrs. Hill, said, “I’ll
take one of them.” She taught the advanced fourth-
grade class, and thank God I was the random one that
got put in the class. She watched me for about two
weeks and then approached me. She said, “Steven, I’ll
tell you what. I’ll make you a deal. I have this math
workbook, and if you take it home and finish it on
your own without any help, and you bring it back to
me, if you get it 80 percent right, I will give you five
dollars and one of these really big suckers.” She [had]
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bought [a sucker], and she held it out in front of me—

one of these giant things.
And I looked at her like, “Are you crazy, lady?
Nobody’s ever done this before!” And of course I did
it. She basically bribed me back into learning, with
candy and money. And what was really remarkable
was before very long I had such a respect for her that it
sort of reignited my desire to learn. She was
remarkable. She got me kits for making cameras.
I ground my own lens and made a camera. It was really
quite wonderful. I think I probably learned more
academically in that one year than I’d ever learned in
my life.

In 1984, Steve chatted with reporter David Sheff about

how, as young adults, he and others of his generation
began to develop their own cultural outlook.
My parents never pushed me to go to college, but they
always wanted to make sure that if I wanted to go, they
had the resources to do it. And they saved, they really
sacrificed some and saved some money up [for me to
attend Reed College], but […] after six months, it just,
it just seemed really absurd to be spending their life
savings putting me through college.
I didn’t know enough about what I wanted to do, and
besides that, I figured I could drop out and then drop
back in and take the classes anyway and learn just as
much. So I dropped out after six months, and then
I dropped in for a little over a year.
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I spent about a year and a half there, maybe close to

two years. And I enjoyed it greatly. It was a hard time
in my life, but I enjoyed it a lot. I didn’t know what
I wanted to do with my life. And Reed was a very
intense place, very bright people—everyone out to
change the world, but not knowing quite how. ✂
The early seventies was the time that sort of Eastern
mysticism hit the shores of the United States. And we
had a constant flow of people traveling through Reed,
stopping off at Reed. Everyone from Timothy Leary
and Richard Alpert to Gary Snyder, people like that.
So there’s a constant flow of intellectual questioning
about the truth of life and existence. ✂
The idealistic wind of the sixties was still at our back,
and most of the people that I know that are my age
have that ingrained in them forever. They have that
idealism in them, but they also have a certain
cautiousness about sort of ending up working in a
natural food store behind the counter when they’re
forty-five years old, which is what they saw some of
their older friends [doing]—not that that’s bad in and
of itself, but it’s bad if that’s not what you really set
out to do or what you really wanted to be doing.
So that idealism was formed, but also the feeling that
there had to be a more successful way [of] realizing
some of that idealism.

Steve also recalled his time in California and India after

leaving Reed College.
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I came back down [to the San Francisco Bay Area]

’cause I decided I wanted to travel, but I was lacking
the necessary funds.
This was California. You can get LSD fresh-made from
Stanford University. You can go sleep on the beach at
night with your girlfriends and whatever meaningful
others. You could … I didn’t really realize how
different California was than the middle of America,
and even to some extent the East Coast, until
I traveled to those places. I’d never been to any of
those places until my early twenties. California has a
sense of experimentation about it, and a sense of
openness about it—openness and new possibility—
that I really didn’t appreciate till I went to
other places.
So I came back down to get a job, and I was looking in
the paper and there was this ad that […] talked about
being an engineer and having fun at the same time. It
sounded like fun, so I called. It was [video game
manufacturer] Atari. And I filled out an application,
just listed all the things that I’d done, and the
personnel woman said, “Well, don’t call us, we’ll call
you!” But then some stroke of luck got my application
to a man named Al Alcorn, who was the vice president
of engineering at Atari at the time. And he called me
up the next day and hired me, and it was great. […]
I was there a little less than a year, and they had
shipped a bunch of games to Europe that had some
engineering defects in them. I figured out how to fix
them, but it was necessary for somebody to go over
there and actually do the fixing.
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So I volunteered to go; well, they asked me if I’d go,

and I said I definitely would love to, but I’d like to take
a leave of absence when I was there. So they let me do
that, and I ended up in Switzerland and flew from
Zurich to New Delhi. And I spent some time in India.
I’m stupefied to sort of summarize [my trip to India].
Anyone would have a hard time summarizing a
meaningful experience of their life in a page. I mean,
if I was William Faulkner, I might be able to do it for
you, but I’m not.
Coming back was more of a culture shock than going.
All I really wanted to do [after returning to California]
was to go find a grassy meadow and just sit. I didn’t
want to drive a car. I didn’t want to go to San
Francisco or do all these things. I didn’t want to do it.
So I didn’t, for about three months. I just read and sat.
When you are a stranger in a place, you notice things
that you rapidly stop noticing when you become
familiar. I was a stranger in America for the first time
in my life, and so I saw things I’d never seen before.
And I tried to pay attention to them for those three

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months because I knew that gradually, bit by bit, my

familiarity would be gained again.

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Steve’s passport, spring 1973. He was eighteen.

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A poem sent to a friend in 1974: “Don’t waste your life.”

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Part I, 1976–1985
“A lot of people put a lot of
love into these products.”

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In 1976, when Steve and his friend Steve Wozniak

(“Woz”) began assembling what would come to be known
as the Apple I in the Jobs family’s garage, the word
“computer” conjured images of hulking machines tended
by professional programmers. A single company—IBM—
dominated the industry. But Steve and Woz were part of
a new generation of creative thinkers, engineers, and
hobbyists trying to build small, cheap machines that
they could program themselves.
When Apple launched, Steve was twenty-one, precocious
but inexperienced and unpolished. At Apple’s first board
meeting, he put his bare feet on a conference room table,
earning a quick rebuke from the board chair. The
company’s breakthrough came with the introduction of
the Apple II, a machine that could run right out of the
box, with cassette storage and a built-in color screen.
Within a year, Apple was one of the fastest-growing
companies in America—and by the time Steve turned
thirty, he was the public face of a Fortune 500 company.
Inside Apple, his ideas and passion were inspiring, but
Steve’s management style was divisive. His
responsibilities changed almost every year as he was
assigned to and removed from various projects and
teams. He began clashing with his handpicked CEO,
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John Sculley. In September 1985, the Apple board

fired Steve.
Later, when he talked about these first years at Apple,
Steve focused on one thing: Macintosh, the computer
that he and a tight-knit team introduced to the world in
1984. To Steve, Macintosh was everything technology
should be. It was streamlined and practical, simple and
sophisticated, a tool for enhancing creativity as much
as productivity.
In another age, Steve believed, the people on the
Macintosh team would have been writers, musicians, or
artists. “The feelings and the passion that people put
into it were completely indistinguishable from a poet or
a painter,” he said. He called their work a form of love
and their product “a computer for the rest of us,” with a
mouse as well as arrow keys, desktop icons instead of
programming commands, and, at startup, instead of a
blinking cursor: a smile.
Macintosh also represented the first time Steve led a team
developing a product that he believed had changed the
world. “It ushered in a revolution,” Steve recalled
twenty-three years later, during the rollout of another
world-changing innovation: the iPhone. “I remember
the week before we launched the Mac, we all got together,
and we said, ‘Every computer is going to work this way.
You can’t argue about that anymore. You can argue
about how long it will take, but you can’t argue about
it anymore.’”

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Steve on Launching Apple

In 1984, Steve recalled the friendships behind Apple.
I met Woz when I was thirteen in a friend of mine’s
garage. He was, I think, about eighteen. […] He moved
down the street from a friend of mine named Bill
Fernandez, and I was over at Bill’s. We were working
late one night on a project, and Woz dropped by. We
ended up talking for hours. I was real impressed with
him. I thought he was great. He had a good sense of
humor […] and we had a common interest [in
electronics] that sort of bound us together even
though we were totally different in every other way
possible. ✂
We’re sort of like two planets in our own orbits that
every so often intersect each other. There’s a bond
there that will last as long as we both live.

In 1996, the year Apple celebrated its twentieth

anniversary, Steve recalled how a teen hobby building
computers turned into a business.
The reason we [Woz and I] built a computer was that
we wanted one, and we couldn’t afford to buy one.
They were thousands of dollars at that time. We were
just two teenagers. We started trying to build them
and scrounging parts around Silicon Valley where we
could. After a few attempts, we managed to put
together something that was the Apple I. All of our
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friends wanted them, too. They wanted to build them.

It turned out that it took maybe fifty hours to build
one of these things by hand. It was taking up all of our
spare time because our friends were not that skilled at
building them, so Woz and I were building them
for them.
We thought if we could just get what’s called a printed
circuit board, where you could just plug in the parts
instead of having to hand-wire the whole thing, we
could cut the assembly time down from maybe fifty
hours to more like an hour. Woz sold his HP
calculator, and I sold my VW Microbus, and we got
enough money together to pay someone to design one
of these printed circuit boards for us. Our goal was to
just sell them as raw printed circuit boards to our
friends and make enough money to recoup our
calculator and transportation.
What happened was that one of the early computer
[stores], in fact, the first computer store in the world,
which was in Mountain View at the time, said, “Well,
I’ll take fifty of these computers, but I want them fully
assembled.” Which was a twist that we’d never
thought of.
We went and bought the parts to build one hundred
computers. We built fifty of them and delivered them.
We got paid in cash and ran back and paid the people
that sold us parts. Then we had the classic Marxian
profit realization crisis, which was our profit wasn’t
liquid—it was in fifty computers sitting on the floor.
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We decided we had to start learning about sales and

distribution so that we could sell the fifty computers
and get back our money. That’s how we got in the
business. We took our idea [for the computer] to a few
companies, one where Woz worked [Hewlett-Packard]
and one where I worked at the time [Atari]. Neither
one was interested in pursuing it, so we started our
own company.

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At work on an Apple I, 1976.

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An Apple I that Steve kept in his office.

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Apple’s first fan letter, a Polaroid of a computer screen.

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Steve demonstrates the Apple II prototype, 1977.

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Interview with The New Yorker

“It’s a domesticated computer.”
Steve’s first appearance in a national publication came
in a 1977 issue of The New Yorker. The magazine sent a
reporter to the First Annual Personal Computing Expo,
held in the New York Coliseum. Most people at the time
had never seen a personal computer.
At a booth marked “Apple Computer, Inc.,” we paused
to chat with the young man in charge, who introduced
himself as Steven Jobs, the company’s vice-president
for operations. Mr. Jobs was pleased at the turnout for
the exhibition. “I wish we’d had these personal
machines when I was growing up,” he said. “People
have been hearing all sorts of things about computers
during the past ten years through the media.
Supposedly, computers have been controlling various
aspects of their lives. Yet in spite of that, most adults
have no idea of what a computer really is, of what it
can or can’t do.
“Now, for the first time, people can actually buy a
computer for the price of a good stereo, interact with
it, and find out all about it. It’s analogous to taking
apart 1955 Chevys. Or consider the camera. There are
thousands of people across the country taking
photography courses. They’ll never be professional
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photographers. They just want to understand what the

photographic process is all about. Same
with computers.
“We started a little personal-computer manufacturing
company in a garage in Los Altos in 1976. Now we’re
the largest personal-computer company in the world.
We make what we think of as the Rolls-Royce of
personal computers. It’s a domesticated computer.
People expect blinking lights, but what they find is
that it looks like a portable typewriter, which,
connected to a suitable readout screen, is able to
display in color.
“There’s a feedback it gives to people, and the
enthusiasm of the users is tremendous. We’re always
asked what it can do, and it can do many things, but in
my opinion the real thing it is doing right now is to
teach people how to program the computer.”
Recalling Mr. Jobs’ wish that he had had such
machines when he was growing up, we asked him if he
would mind telling us his age.
“Twenty-two,” Mr. Jobs said.

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Apple outgrew its headquarters twice in 1977.

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With the Apple II in 1981, the year IBM introduced its PC.
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Steve was an avid photographer.

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He set up his bike in Apple’s lobby for design inspiration.

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Speech at the International

Design Conference in Aspen
“Computers and society are out on a first date.”
Steve spoke to designers at this annual gathering in
Aspen, Colorado, on June 15, 1983, five months after
Apple introduced the Lisa computer.
How many of you are over thirty-six years old? You
were born pre-computer. Computers are thirty-six
years old. I think there’s going to be a little slice in the
timeline of history as we look back, a pretty
meaningful slice right there. A lot of you are products
of the television generation. I’m pretty much a
product of the television generation, but to some
extent starting to be a product of the
computer generation.
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But the kids growing up now are definitely products of

the computer generation, and in their lifetimes the
computer will become the predominant medium of
communication, just as the television took over from
the radio, took over from even the book.
How many of you own an Apple? Any? Or just any
personal computer?
Uh-oh.
How many of you have used one, or seen one, or
anything like that? Good. ✂
Computers are really dumb. They’re exceptionally
simple, but they’re really fast. The raw instructions
that we have to feed these little microprocessors—or
even these giant Cray-1 supercomputers—are the
most trivial of instructions. They get some data from
there, get a number from here, add two numbers
together, and test to see if it’s bigger than zero. It’s the
most mundane thing you could ever imagine.
But here’s the key thing: let’s say I could move a
hundred times faster than anyone in here. In the blink
of your eye, I could run out there, grab a bouquet of
fresh spring flowers, run back in here, and snap my
fingers. You would all think I was a magician. And yet
I would basically be doing a series of really simple
instructions: running out there, grabbing some
flowers, running back, snapping my fingers. But
I could just do them so fast that you would think that
there was something magical going on.
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And it’s the exact same way with a computer. It can do

about a million instructions per second. And so we
tend to think there’s something magical going on,
when in reality, it’s just a series of simple
instructions. ✂
One of the reasons I’m here is because I need your
help. If you’ve looked at computers, they look like
garbage. All the great product designers are off
designing automobiles or buildings. But hardly any of
them are designing computers. If we take a look, we’re
going to sell 3 million computers this year, 10 million
in ’86, whether they look like a piece of shit or they
look great. People are just going to suck this stuff up
so fast no matter what it looks like. And it doesn’t cost
any more money to make them look great. They are
going to be these new objects that are going to be in
everyone’s working environment, everyone’s
educational environment, and everyone’s home
environment. We have a shot [at] putting a great
object there—and if we don’t, we’re going to put one
more piece-of-junk object there.
By ’86, ’87, pick a year, people are going to spend more
time interacting with these machines than they do
interacting with automobiles today. People are going
to be spending two, three hours a day interacting with
these machines—longer than they spend in the car.
And so the industrial design, the software design, and
how people interact with these things certainly must
be given the consideration that we give automobiles
today—if not a lot more.
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If you take a look, what we’ve got is a situation where

most automobiles are not being designed in the
United States. Televisions? Audio electronics?
Watches, cameras, bicycles, calculators, you name it:
most of the objects of our lives are not designed in
America. We’ve blown it. We’ve blown it from an
industrial point of view because we’ve lost the markets
to foreign competitors. We’ve also blown it from a
design point of view.
And I think we have a chance with this new computing
technology meeting people in the eighties—the fact
that computers and society are out on a first date in
the eighties. We have a chance to make these things
beautiful, and we have a chance to communicate
something through the design of the objects
themselves. ✂
When I was going to school, I had a few great teachers
and a lot of mediocre teachers. And the thing that
probably kept me out of jail was the books. I could go
and read what Aristotle or Plato wrote without an
intermediary in the way. And a book was a
phenomenal thing. It got right from the source to the
destination without anything in the middle.
The problem was, you can’t ask Aristotle a question.
And I think, as we look towards the next fifty to one
hundred years, if we really can come up with these
machines that can capture an underlying spirit, or an
underlying set of principles, or an underlying way of
looking at the world, then, when the next Aristotle
comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these
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machines with him his whole life—his or her whole

life—and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday,
after this person’s dead and gone, we can ask this
machine, “Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What
about this?” And maybe we won’t get the right answer,
but maybe we will. And that’s really exciting to me.
And that’s one of the reasons I’m doing what
I’m doing.
So, what do you want to talk about?

Steve answered questions at two conference sessions.

How are these computers all going to work together?
They’re probably going to work together a lot like
people do. Sometimes they’re going to work together
really well, and other times they’re not going to work
together so well. ✂
What’s happened, there’s been a few installations
where people have hooked these things together. The
one installation that stands out is at Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center, or PARC, for short. And they hooked
about a hundred computers together on what’s called
a local area network, which is just a cable that carries
all this information back and forth. […]
Then an interesting thing happened. There were
twenty people interested in volleyball. So a volleyball
distribution list evolved, and then, when the volleyball
game next week was changed, you’d write a quick
memo and send it to the volleyball distribution list.
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Then there was a Chinese food cooking list. And

before long, there were more lists than people.
And it was a very, very interesting phenomenon,
because I think that that’s exactly what’s going to
happen as we start to tie these things [computers]
together: they’re going to facilitate communication
and facilitate bringing people together in the special
interests that they have.
And we’re about five years away from really solving
the problems of hooking these computers together in
the office. And we’re about ten to fifteen years away
from solving the problems of hooking them together
in the home. A lot of people are working on it, but it’s
a pretty fierce problem.
Now, Apple’s strategy is really simple. What we want
to do is put an incredibly great computer in a book
that you carry around with you, that you can learn how
to use in twenty minutes. That’s what we want to do.
And we want to do it this decade. And we really want
to do it with a radio link in it so you don’t have to hook
up to anything—you’re in communication with all
these larger databases and other computers. We don’t
know how to do that now. It’s impossible
technically. ✂
We’re trying to get away from programming. We’ve
got to get away from programming because people
don’t want to program computers. People want to use
computers. ✂

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We [at Apple] feel that, for some crazy reason, we’re in

the right place at the right time to put something
back. And what I mean by that is, most of us didn’t
make the clothes we’re wearing, and we didn’t cook or
grow the food that we eat, and we’re speaking a
language that was developed by other people, and we
use a mathematics that was developed by other
people. We are constantly taking.
And the ability to put something back into the pool of
human experience is extremely neat. I think that
everyone knows that in the next ten years we have the
chance to really do that. And we [will] look back—and
while we’re doing it, it’s pretty fun, too—we will look
back and say, “God, we were a part of that!” ✂
We started with nothing. So whenever you start with
nothing, you can always shoot for the moon. You have
nothing to lose. And the thing that happens is—when
you sort of get something, it’s very easy to go into
cover-your-ass mode, and then you become
conservative and vote for Ronnie. So what we’re trying
to do is to realize the very amazing time that we’re in
and not go into that mode. ✂
I can’t tell you why you need a home computer right
now. I mean, people ask me, “Why should I buy a
computer in my home?”
And I say, “Well, to learn about it, to run some fun
simulations. If you’ve got some kids, they should
probably know about it in terms of literacy. They can

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probably get some good educational software,

especially if they’re younger.
“You can hook up to the source and, you know, do
whatever you’re going to do. Meet women, I don’t
know. But other than that, there’s no good reason to
buy one for your house right now. But there will be.
There will be.” ✂
I don’t think finance is what drives people at Apple.
I don’t think it’s money, but feeling like you own a
piece of the company, and this is your damn company,
and if you see something … We always tell people,
“You work for Apple first and your boss second.” We
feel pretty strongly about that. ✂
When you have a million people using something,
then that’s when creativity really starts to happen on a
very rapid scale. […] We need some revolutions like
[the] Lisa [computer], but we also then need to get
millions of units out there and let the world
innovate—because the world’s pretty good at
innovating, we’ve found.

On the Macintosh
Macintosh was less than a year old—but clearly poised to
transform the personal computer industry—when Steve
reflected on its significance with reporter David Sheff.

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One of the things I love is that with Macintosh, you

can write memos that are Times Roman or Helvetica,
or you can throw in an Old English if you want to have
a little fun for a party, you know, for a volleyball
announcement. Or you can use a very serious font for
something very serious. And you can express yourself.
It’s sort of like in 1844, the telegraph was invented,
and it was an amazing breakthrough in
communications. And you actually could send
messages from New York to San Francisco in an
afternoon. And some people talked about putting a
telegraph on every desk in America to
improve productivity.
But it wouldn’t have worked. It wouldn’t have worked.
And the reason it wouldn’t have worked was because
you would have had to learn this whole sequence of
strange incantations—Morse code in this case, dots
and dashes in this case—to use the telegraph. And it
took about forty hours to learn how to use Morse
code. And a majority of people would never have
learned how to use Morse code.
So fortunately, in the 1870s, Alexander Graham Bell
filed the patents for the telephone—another radical
breakthrough in communications that performed
basically the same function, but people already knew
how to use it. The neatest thing about it was that, in
addition to allowing you to communicate with just
words, it allowed you to sing. It allowed you to intone
your words with meaning beyond the
simple linguistics.
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We’re in the same exact parallel situation today. Some

people are saying we need to put an IBM PC on every
desk in America to improve productivity. But it won’t
work. The special incantations you have to learn this
time are slash-qz’s and things like that. Most people
are not going to learn slash-qz’s any more than they’re
going to learn Morse code.
And that’s what Macintosh is all about. It’s the first
“telephone” of our industry. But the neatest thing
about it to me is, the same as the telephone to the
telegraph, Macintosh lets you sing. It lets you use
special fonts. It lets you make drawings and pictures
or incorporate other people’s drawings or pictures
into your documents.
Even in business, you’re seeing five-page memos get
compressed down to a one-page memo because there’s
a picture to express the key concept. And so we’re
seeing less paper flying around and more quality
of communication.
And it’s more fun. There’s always been this myth that
really neat, fun people at home all of [a] sudden get
very dull and boring and serious when they come to
work, and it’s simply not true. So if we can again inject
that liberal-arts spirit into this very serious realm of

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business, I think it would be a

worthwhile contribution.

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7/11/23, 9:04 PM Make Something Wonderful | Steve Jobs

Apple sales conference in Hawaii, 1983.

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Outside the IBM offices in New York.

Speech to Apple Employees

“Was George Orwell right about 1984?”
Steve introduced the Macintosh and its iconic
commercial, which ran during the 1984 Super Bowl, at
an Apple sales meeting in October 1983.
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7/11/23, 9:04 PM Make Something Wonderful | Steve Jobs

Hi, I’m Steve Jobs.

It is 1958. IBM passes up the chance to buy a young,
fledgling company that has invented a new technology
called xerography. Two years later, Xerox is born. And
IBM has been kicking themselves ever since.
It is ten years later, the late sixties. Digital Equipment
[DEC] and others invent the minicomputer. IBM
dismisses the minicomputer as too small to do serious
computing, and therefore unimportant to their
business. DEC grows to become a multi-hundred-
million-dollar corporation before IBM finally enters
the minicomputer market.
It is now ten years later, the late seventies. In 1977,
Apple, a young, fledgling company on the West Coast,
invents the Apple II, the first personal computer as we
know it today. IBM dismisses the personal computer
as too small to do serious computing and unimportant
to their business.
The early eighties, ’81. Apple II has become the world’s
most popular computer. Apple has grown to a $300
million company, becoming the fastest-growing
corporation in American business history, with over
fifty competitors vying for a share. IBM enters the
personal-computer market in November ’81 with the
IBM PC.
1983. Apple and IBM emerge as the industry’s
strongest competitors, each selling approximately one
billion dollars’ worth of personal computers in 1983.
Each will invest greater than $50 million for R&D and
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another $50 million for television advertising in 1984,

totaling almost one quarter of a billion
dollars combined.
The shakeout is in full swing. The first major firm
goes bankrupt, with others teetering on the brink.
Total industry losses for ’83 outshadow even the
combined profits of Apple and IBM for
personal computers.
It is now 1984. It appears IBM wants it all. Apple is
perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its
money. Dealers initially welcoming IBM with open
arms now fear an IBM-dominated and controlled
future. They are increasingly and desperately turning
back to Apple as the only force that can ensure their
future freedom.
IBM wants it all, and is aiming its guns on its last
obstacle to industry control: Apple. Will Big Blue
dominate the entire computer industry? [Audience:
No!] The entire information age? [Audience: No!] Was
George Orwell right about 1984?
[Steve runs the “1984” commercial. Directed by Ridley
Scott, the ad depicts a dystopian, Orwellian world. In
one scene, people dressed in gray, their heads shaved, sit
expressionless in front of a large screen on which a
dictator drones nonsense. A woman in bright red
running shorts and a Macintosh shirt bursts into the
room. She hurls a hammer at the screen, destroying it.
The commercial ends with a promise: “On January

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24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And

you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984.’”]
[There is tumultuous applause and shouting from the
audience; once it dies down, Steve resumes.] That ad is
going to run one week before Macintosh is introduced.
And our ad agency that put it together is here today,
Chiat/Day. Jay Chiat is here, the principal. Lee Clow
and Steve Hayden, [who] wrote the copy and did the
creative, are also here.
You might—I guess they just heard what you thought.

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Enjoying a rare break before the Macintosh release.

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Exhausted after a sales conference in New Orleans, 1984.

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Steve’s 1984 shoot for Time at his Woodside home.

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Pausing to watch a Macintosh in action.

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Interview with Michael Moritz

“Your aesthetics get better as you make mistakes.”
Steve and Michael Moritz, a reporter who would soon
switch careers and become a venture capitalist, spoke at
Steve’s office at Apple in May 1984. They covered a wide
range of topics, including Steve’s thoughts on
product design.
Steve Jobs: I went around and looked at Cuisinarts
when we were designing Mac. It was like my
Cuisinart week.
Michael Moritz: But no other particular products
[influenced you]? Say, from the late seventies
or something.
SJ: Well, we’re around automobiles our whole lives.
I’ve never been a car guy, but I’ve always loved
Volkswagen Beetles. I’ve always loved Volkswagen
vans, actually, too.
Just a bunch of little things: wine labels, paintings in
galleries. Just simple things. Not anything real
profound, just lots and lots of little things. I don’t
think my taste in aesthetics is that much different than
a lot of other people’s. The difference is that I just get

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to be really stubborn about making things as good as

we all know they can be. That’s the only difference.
MM: Yeah, I think you’re being modest.
SJ: Well, things get more refined as you make
mistakes. I’ve had a chance to make a lot of mistakes.
Your aesthetics get better as you make mistakes. But
the real big thing is: if you’re going to make
something, it doesn’t take any more energy—and
rarely does it take more money—to make it really
great. All it takes is a little more time. Not that much
more. And a willingness to do so, a willingness to
persevere until it’s really great.
But aesthetics? I think aesthetics are a lot like singing.
Joanie [Baez] has a beautiful voice, but the reason her
voice is beautiful isn’t because her voice is just
beautiful. It’s because she has an incredibly good ear.
She can listen to somebody speak for thirty seconds
and imitate their voice almost perfectly. Her ear is
superb. And I think, in the same way, good aesthetics
result from just your eye. An instinct of what you see,
not so much what you do. ✂
SJ: I want to build products that are inherently
smaller than any of the products on the market today.
And when you make things smaller, you have the
ability to make them more precisely. Obviously, a
perfect example of that is a watch. It’s beautiful, but
the precision has to be the scale of the object itself,
and so you make it very precise. And as our products
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get smaller, we have the opportunity to do that. So,

obviously, I would like everything to be smaller.
I also think that it’s really nice to be able to carry
products around. Even if they’re not portable, it’s very
nice to be able to have a handle on them that says,
“Pick me up and move me when you want to change
where I am.” Carry them from room to room, or from
office to office. Lisa’s too heavy to carry from office to
office, or room to room, or home on the weekends. So
the question is, “How do we find a way to package that
same functionality into something that we can carry
around with us and that is smaller, obviously—and be
able to express the form of that more precisely?”
That’s where we’re going in the future, those
directions. ✂
MM: What are the uglier, offensive designs of
products, or are there just too many to list?
SJ: Yeah—pick any car before three years ago, you
know? Pick most cars today. Anything. Just look
around the room. Tables, chairs: all ugly. You can ask
me, what am I doing in this office? But anyway, most
things are not very nice.
The telephone’s a perfect example. The only telephone
that’s ever been any good is the original one and the
Trimline. The Trimline is the only decent one. What
they’ve done to the new stuff is just garbage. ✂
SJ: [At Apple] we’re just getting simpler and simpler
and simpler. Very, very simple. Simple. ✂
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SJ: Have you ever seen HP’s buildings over on Page

Mill Road, the original ones? They’re really neat.
They’ve got these scalloped roofs, and they face the
glass north, and you can actually put solar collectors
on them, if you wanted to. They stick out. In a
building, they make a whole glass wall. And so people
work down there, and they get tons of natural light
coming in. Just tons.
The problem with these buildings [at Apple] is there’s
no light. I mean, you spend five minutes outside, and
you walk in here, it’s really dark, and you can’t see
anything. And we’re all sort of like living in these little
tiny caverns.
I just want a ton of natural light. ✂
MM: Was all the stuff about Big Brother [in the “1984”
commercial] very conscious of the IBM stuff, or was
that something that outsiders quickly interpreted, and
you guys weren’t exactly going to—
SJ: Deny it?
MM: Deny it.
SJ: Well, the best response to that was the response
given, I think, in Fortune, which was, “If seeing Big
Brother in 1984 connotes IBM to a large number of
people, that says more about IBM’s image problem
than our intentions.”
In truth: of course, we saw the analogy. And I think
that we were saying two things. I think the first thing
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we were saying was, this image of computers as sort of

a centralized group of people having control of very
powerful machines to keep track of us, that iconic fear
in our minds—we were commenting on that cultural
fear that we have.
And of course, one couldn’t—you’d have to be an idiot
not to see the parallels to IBM.

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Under his double-breasted suit coat, Steve wore jeans.

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Interview with Newsweek

“I want to build things.”
Steve left Apple in September 1985, after losing a power
struggle with CEO John Sculley. The departure was
officially a resignation, but Steve considered it a
betrayal. A few weeks later, he spoke to Newsweek.
Newsweek: How did you react when you heard the
[Apple] board’s decision [to sue you]? These were
people that you knew and worked with for a long time.
Steve Jobs: Oh, yeah. I mean, in my wildest
imagination, I couldn’t have come up with such a wild
ending to all of this. I had hoped that my life would
take on the quality of an interesting tapestry where
I would have weaved in and out of Apple: I would have
been there a period of time, and maybe I would have
gone off and done something else to contribute, but
connected with Apple, and then maybe come back and
stay for a lengthy time period, and then go off and do
something else. But it’s just not going to work out that
way. So I had ten of the best years of my life, you know.
And I don’t regret much of anything. ✂
I personally, man, I want to build things. I’m thirty.
I’m not ready to be an industry pundit. I got three
offers to be a professor during this summer, and I told
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all of the universities that I thought I would be an

awful professor. What I’m best at doing is finding a
group of talented people and making things with
them. I respect the direction that Apple is going in.
But for me personally, you know, I want to make
things. And if there’s no place for me to make things
there, then I’ll do what I did twice before. I’ll make my
own place. You know, I did it in the garage when Apple
started, and I did it in the metaphorical garage when
Mac started. ✂
SJ: Though the outside world looks at success from a
numerical point of view, my yardstick might be quite
different than that. My yardstick may be how every
computer that’s designed from here on out will have to
be at least as good as a Macintosh. ✂
SJ: I used to go into work, I’d get there, and I would
have one or two phone calls to perform, a little bit of
mail to look at. But—this was in June, July—most of
the corporate management reports stopped flowing by
my desk. A few people might see my car in the parking
lot and come over and commiserate.
And I would get depressed and go home in three or
four hours, really depressed. I did that a few times,
and I decided that was mentally unhealthy. So I just
stopped going in. You know, there was nobody really
there to miss me.
Q: Do you feel that they have taken your company
away from you?
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SJ: To me, Apple exists in the spirit of the people that

work there, and the sort of philosophies and purpose
by which they go about their business. So if Apple just
becomes a place where computers are a commodity
item and where the romance is gone, and where people
forget that computers are the most incredible
invention that man has ever invented, then I’ll feel
I have lost Apple. But if I’m a million miles away and
all those people still feel those things and they’re still
working to make the next great personal computer,
then I will feel that my genes are still in there. ✂
SJ: One of the five most difficult days was that day
John [Sculley, Apple’s CEO] said at the analysts
meeting about there not being a role for me in the
future, and he said it again in another analysts
meeting a week later. He didn’t say it to me directly; he
said it to the press. You’ve probably had somebody
punch you in the stomach and it knocks the wind out
of you and you can’t breathe. If you relax, you’ll start
breathing again. That’s how I felt all summer long.
The thing I had to do was try to relax. It was hard. But
I went for a lot of long walks in the woods and didn’t
really talk to a lot of people. ✂
Q: You’ve talked about being tough to get along with,
having a rough-edge personality. Did you contribute
in some way to your own downfall?
SJ: You know, I’m not a sixty-two-year-old statesman
that’s traveled around the world all his life. So I’m
sure that there was a situation when I was twenty-five
that if I could go back, knowing what I know now,
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I could have handled much better. And I’m sure I’ll be

able to say the same thing when I’m thirty-five about
the situation in 1985. I can be very intense in my
convictions. And I don’t know—all in all, I kind of like
myself, and I’m not that anxious to change.
Q: But has this experience changed you?
SJ: Oh, this has—yeah, I think I am growing from this,
and I think I’m learning a lot from it. I’m not sure how
or what yet. But yes, I feel that way. I’m not bitter; I’m
not bitter. ✂
Q: There’s been a lot in the press about your interest in
Buddhism, vegetarianism.
SJ: As we descend into the isms.
Q: The isms. Are you still interested in those things?
SJ: Well, I don’t know what to say. I mean, I don’t eat
meat, and I don’t go to church every Sunday.
Q: They said at some point you had thought of going
to Japan and sitting in a monastery.
SJ: Yeah, yeah. I’m glad I didn’t do that. I know this is
going to sound really, really corny. But I feel like I’m
an American, and I was born here. And the fate of the
world is in America’s hands right now. I really feel

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that. And you know, I’m going to live my life here and
do what I can to help.

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Steve circa 1985.

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Part II, 1985–1996

“You never achieve what you want
without falling on your face a few times.”

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The years after Steve left Apple were among the toughest
of his career—and the most formative.
Determined to build a new great computer company, he
started NeXT with several members of the Macintosh
team. “We’ll make a whole bunch of mistakes, but at
least they’ll be new and creative ones,” he predicted.
Around the same time, Steve invested $10 million in a
small company called Pixar. It was a tiny computer
graphics operation, newly spun off from filmmaker
George Lucas’s empire. The technical expertise at Pixar
attracted Steve; its initial product was a high-end
graphics computer that cost more than $100,000.
Both NeXT and Pixar quickly ran into trouble. The NeXT
computer system, which debuted in 1988, was powerful
and packed with the humanistic touches Steve loved. It
was visually striking and intuitive to use, with high-
quality audio and the complete works of Shakespeare
built in. But it was also late to market and expensive—
and it sold poorly. Within six years of NeXT’s launch, the
entire founding team, other than Steve, had resigned.
Pixar, meanwhile, was eking out an existence selling
computers and software and, later, animating
commercials. The company was also making award-
winning short films that charmed Steve. This use of
technology in service of brilliant storytelling embodied
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one of his favorite things: work at the intersection of

technology and the liberal arts. The short films fired
Steve’s enthusiasm and kept him writing check after
check to Pixar, ultimately investing some $60 million.
But the films were, as Steve put it, “in the background,”
not the company’s focus. He described Pixar’s early
business strategy as “find a way to pay the bills,” and he
later speculated that the only reason the company didn’t
fall apart then was that the leadership team “would all
get depressed … but not all of us at once.”
If at times in these years he seemed disappointed by the
possibilities of technology—“this stuff doesn’t change
the world. It really doesn’t,” he told a reporter in an
uncharacteristic flash of pessimism—his world was also
expanding beyond his work. He treasured his privacy,
saying of his public persona, “I think of it as my well-
known twin brother. It’s not me.”
Steve learned how to hone a company to its essence, even
when it was painful. He shifted NeXT’s focus to selling
software. The shift meant closing a factory and laying
off more than two hundred of NeXT’s five hundred and
thirty employees. Meanwhile, Pixar stripped away its
advertising and hardware businesses and entered into an
agreement with Disney, all to pursue what sometimes
seemed an impossible dream: to make fully computer-
animated feature films.
After nearly a decade of difficulty, the streamlined NeXT
and Pixar both transformed into unlikely success stories.
At the end of 1995, Pixar premiered Toy Story in the
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same month it held its initial public offering. A year

later, Apple, in need of operating-system software,
bought NeXT for $427 million. “If you really look
closely,” Steve liked to say, “most overnight successes
took a long time.”

Steve on Starting NeXT

A few weeks after starting NeXT, Steve spoke with
Newsweek about the original insight for the company.
I had been reading some biochemistry, recombinant
DNA literature. [I had recently met] Paul Berg, the
inventor of some of the recombinant techniques.
I called him up, and I said, “You remember me. I’m
ignorant about this stuff, but I’ve got a bunch of
questions about how it works, and I’d love to have
lunch with you.” So we had lunch at Stanford. He was
showing me how they were doing gene repairing.
Actually, it’s straightforward, it’s kind of neat. It
smells a lot like some of the concepts you find in
computer science. So he was explaining how he does
experiments in a wet laboratory and they take a week
or two or three to run. I asked him, “Why don’t you
simulate these on a computer? Not only will it allow
you to run your experiments faster, but someday every
freshman microbiology student in the country can
play with the Paul Berg recombinant software.” So his
eyes lit up. And that was sort of a landmark lunch.
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Because that’s when I started to really think about this

stuff and get my wheels turning again.

On Becoming Majority Shareholder in Pixar

In 1996, the year after Pixar released Toy Story and held
its IPO, Steve looked back on the work and ideas that
first drew him to the company.
I met Ed Catmull, who was running the computer
division of Lucasfilm, in 1985. […] I’d been involved in
graphics most of my life. The Apple II, though most
people don’t remember, was the first real color
computer that you could get your hands on. The
Macintosh, obviously, was graphics. The LaserWriter
was graphics. But it was all 2-D. We’d done some 3-D
work at Apple, and I was certainly aware of the field—
but the stuff that Ed and his team were doing was way
ahead of anything I’d ever seen anyone do.

On Pixar’s Early Days

In 2003, with Disney and Pixar deep in negotiations
over the future of the studio, Steve told filmmaker Leslie
Iwerks about Pixar’s start.
Our strategy in the early days of Pixar was: find a way
to pay the bills. In the background, we were
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developing animation software, and John [Lasseter]

was making the succession of short films on the way to
Toy Story. But we were trying to pay the bills and just
buy time. That strategy really turned out not to work.
Probably if you look back in the rearview mirror, we
would have been better off just funding the animation
efforts and not trying to pay the bills through these
other products, such as the Pixar Image Computer
and software, but that was our best attempt to try to
keep the company going. In the end, I just ended up
writing checks to keep the company going—and that
basically went on for ten years. ✂
You could see there was magic in [a Pixar animated
short film], right from the beginning. With the rest of
Pixar’s technology, you had to be an expert to
understand it. [… But] you didn’t have to know
anything about the technology to enjoy the film. It
was incredibly refreshing and really pointed the way to
where we wanted to go. We didn’t want to have to
convince people that our technology was great—we
knew it was great. We wanted to use our technology to
make something where nobody needed to know
anything about the technology to love it. And that’s
what we ended up doing.

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Shortly before becoming the majority shareholder of Pixar.

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NeXT planned to capture the education market.

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NeXT’s ban on Thursday meetings was short-lived.

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Reviewing a Styrofoam model of the NeXT machine, 1987.

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Taking a break at a NeXT company picnic in Menlo Park.

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Email to NeXT Employees

“Pixar led the way!”
From: Steve Jobs
To: NeXT
Subject: A great day and a half
Date: March 30, 1989, 8:08 p.m.
Well, we did it again. Congrats to all for a real TEAM
effort. And, Pixar did it too.
For those of you who didn’t see the Academy Awards
last night, Pixar won an award in the category of short
animated films: for their computer generated film
Tin Toy
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Tin Toy is the first computer generated film to ever

win an award, and was competing against several very
good traditionally animated (non-computer-
animated) films!
The computer graphics industry just achieved a major
milestone, and Pixar led the way!

Speech at Reed College

“Character is built not in good times,
but in bad times.”
When Steve welcomed the incoming class of freshmen at
his alma mater, Reed College, on August 27, 1991, NeXT
computers were not selling well and Pixar had just had a
round of layoffs.
Thank you very much for this. It means a lot to me.
I’m a peculiar Reed alumnus, as many of you know.
I never graduated from Reed—although that doesn’t
make me that unusual, I suppose.
But maybe more unusual: I ran out of money after one
semester here at Reed, so I dropped out. But then
I dropped in for another year and a half. So, I was
actually here by choice, which is somewhat more
unusual. And I had some experiences here—that I’m
sure many of you will have as freshmen and
throughout your years here—that have stayed with me

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my whole life. I was thinking of some of them to

recount to you.
Remember that I’m much older than you now. I’ve
always thought that people’s spark of self-
consciousness turns on at about fifteen or sixteen. So
if we normalize age to fifteen or sixteen, then most of
you are two or three or four years old here, as
freshmen. I’m about twenty. So that maybe puts in
perspective what it’s like to return to Reed after so
many years. But a few things stick in my mind that
I wanted to pass on that maybe could be of some
value. The first was that, as you will be shortly, I was
forced to go to humanities lectures—it seemed like
every day. I studied Shakespeare with Professor
Svitavsky. And at the time, I thought these were
meaningless and even somewhat cruel endeavors to be
put through. I can assure you that as the patina of
time takes its toll, I thank God that I had these
experiences here. It has helped me in everything I’ve
ever done, although I wouldn’t have ever guessed it at
the time.
The second experience that I remember from Reed is
being hungry. All the time. The cafeteria here taught
me quickly to be a vegetarian. I didn’t have so much
money, so I would gather up Coke bottles and take
them up to the store to find out how to eat.
I discovered the cheapest way to eat was Roman Meal.
Have you ever heard of this? It’s cereal. It was
invented by a Harvard professor who was a history
professor who one day wondered what the Roman
legion took with them to eat as they conquered and
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pillaged these villages, and he found out through his

research that it’s Roman Meal. And you can buy it at
the local store, and it’s the cheapest way to live. So
I lived for many months on Roman Meal.
But also, several of us, after not eating for a few days,
would hitchhike across town to the Hare Krishna
temple on Sundays, where they would feed all comers.
Through practice, we discovered just the right
moment to arrive—after their particular religious
practices and right before the food. And not having
eaten for days, we would eat a lot, and on several
occasions stay over, because we were not able to move.
The following morning, they would wake us up at four
o’clock in the morning because it was their time to go
gather flowers for their temple to honor Krishna. So
they would take us with them, predawn, out into the
neighborhood—where they would proceed to steal
flowers from the neighbors. And the neighbors that
lived close to the Hare Krishna temple soon were wise
to their pillage and would get up early in the morning
and guard their flower beds. And so they would have
to go in an ever-wider circumference around their
temple. In spending a little time with these people,
I noticed some of their other behaviors. They used to
sell incense to the local department stores and then go
steal it back, so that the department stores would buy
more, and they would have a thriving business. And
their ethics told them that this was fine, that anything
in the service of Krishna was fine. In interacting with
them, I think I learned more about situational ethics
than I ever did on campus.
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The last experience I wanted to recount for you: there

is a man—I think he’s here today—named Jack
Dudman, who used to be the dean of the school. He
was one of the heroes of my life while I was here,
because Jack Dudman looked the other way when
I was staying on campus without paying. He looked
the other way when I was taking classes without being
a formal student and paying the tuition. And
oftentimes, when I was at the end of my rope, Jack
would go for a walk with me, and I would discover a
twenty-dollar bill in my tattered coat pocket after that
walk, with no mention of it from Jack before, during,
or after.
I learned more about generosity from Jack Dudman
and the people here at this school than I learned
anywhere else in my life. So I wanted to thank this
community, because the things I learned here stayed
with me. Character is built not in good times, but in
bad times; not in a time of plenty, but in a time of
adversity—and this school seems to manage to
nurture that spirit of adversity, and I think does build
some character. So I thank you for teaching me how to
be hungry and how to keep that with me my whole life.

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Thank you very much.

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Steve sometimes exchanged calls with President Bill Clinton.

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In 1995, the year Toy Story was released and Pixar had its IPO.

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In 1995, around the time of the Pixar-Disney deal renegotiation.

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Email Exchange Between Steve, Intel CEO Andy

Grove, and an Intel Engineer
“I have changed my position 180 degrees.”
As Pixar became a leader in graphics, Steve and his
mentor, Intel CEO Andy Grove, discussed how Intel
might learn from Pixar. When an Intel engineer tried to
follow up, Steve resisted.
From: [Engineer 1 at Intel]
To: Steve Jobs
Cc: Andy Grove
Subject: Pixar-3D graphics
Date: September 22, 1995, 2:04 p.m.
Steve,
Andy asked me to look into what we should do in
dramatically improving the Intel architecture
platform’s 3D graphics performance. He indicated
that you and key people at Pixar like Ed Catmull have
lots of good ideas on what we should do in this area.
I actually contacted Ed several months ago but he was
real busy and cannot commit to meeting until after
Sept. As you know, I am in charge of microprocessors
at Intel.
I have located several key Intel 3D experts. One of
them, [Engineer 2], came from Sun over a year ago.
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I would like to have a meeting (at Next, Intel or Pixar)

with you, Catmull, and others with me and our
graphics experts to discuss your ideas and map out
what our action plans are. I am in Tokyo next week but
will be back in my office on Monday Oct. 2. I will ask
my admin to contact your office to set that
meeting up.
Thanks.
[Engineer 1]

From: Steve Jobs

To: [Engineer 1]
Subject: Pixar-3D graphics
Date: September 23, 1995, 7:11 p.m.
[Engineer 1],
Pixar does indeed possess the knowledge to enable
Intel’s processors to render 3D graphics at much high
performance and quality. These “secrets” could
definitely make their way into future Intel general
purpose processor hardware.
We believe this single capability is the key for Intel to
dramatically enlarge the PCs market share in the
consumer market – by significantly surpassing the
dedicated gaming machines (Sega, Nintendo,
Playstation, etc) graphics capabilities.
Pixar’s secrets were invented through significant
investment over ten years or more, and we value them
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highly. Even without the secrets implemented in the

processor, Pixar can gain significant competitive
advantage and differentiation through implementing
them in software. By disclosing the “correct” way to
do high quality, high performance graphics, Pixar will
lose much of this to any and all competitors, with no
work on their part. Hence, the need for compensation.
What does Intel propose to give Pixar for disclosing
and licensing its secrets to Intel?
Steve

From: [Engineer 1]
To: Steve Jobs
Cc: Andy Grove
Subject: Re: Pixar-3D graphics
Date: September 25, 1995, 11:22 a.m.
Steve,
We would very much like to have our meeting, but
I will put that on hold based on your input. We talked
to many key people on ideas to improve the
microprocessor capability with the aim that this will
benefit the whole industry, and everyone will benefit.
We have not entered into any financial arrangement in
exchange for good ideas for our microprocessors in
the past and have no intention for the future.
[Engineer 1]
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From: Steve Jobs

To: [Engineer 1]
Cc: Andy Grove
Subject: Re: Pixar-3D graphics
Date: September 25, 1995, 5:29 p.m.
This approach has not served you well in the past, as
evidenced by your poor graphics architectures and
performance. Maybe you should think of changing it
for the future…
Steve

From: Steve Jobs

To: Andy Grove
Subject: Re: Pixar-3D graphics
Date: September 25, 1995, 10:27 p.m.
Andy,
Maybe it’s just me, but I find [Engineer 1]’s approach
extremely arrogant, given Intel’s (his?) dismal
showing in understanding computer graphics
architectural issues in the past…
If I were going to make hundreds of millions of
something, I sure as hell would be willing to pay for
the best advice money could buy… Any[way], this isn’t
a sales pitch; I just wanted you to know what
I thought, as always.
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Best,
Steve

From: Andy Grove

To: Steve Jobs
Subject: Re[2]: Pixar-3D graphics
Date: September 26, 1995, 3:12 p.m.
Steve,
I am firmly on [Engineer 1]’s side on this one. He is
taking your offer to help us very seriously, rounded up
the best technical people and was ready to go when
you introduced a brand new element into the
discussion: money.
You and I have talked many times about this subject;
you never suggested or hinted at this being a
commercial exchange. I took your offer to help us
exactly as that: help, not an offer of a
commercial relationship.
You may remember, that from time to time I offered
suggestions that pertained to your business. Examples
range from porting NextStep to the 486 - - which was
in our interest too - - to my presentation to your staff
on repositioning NextStep beyond that. I am not
suggesting that these are comparable in value to your
expertise in graphics, but I gave what I had, put some
thought into the problem I saw you were facing - - and
it never entered my mind to charge for it. In my view,
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that’s what friendly companies (and friends) do for

each other. In the long run, these things balance out.
I am sorry you don’t feel that way. We will be worse off
as a result, and so will the industry.
Regards,
a

From: Steve Jobs

To: Andy Grove
Subject: Re[2]: Pixar-3D graphics
Date: October 1, 1995, 3:50 p.m.
Andy,
I have many faults, but one of them is not ingratitude.
And, I do agree with you that “In the long run, these
things balance out.”
Therefore, I have changed my position 180 degrees - -
we will freely help [Engineer 1] make his processors
much better for 3D graphics. Please ask [Engineer 1]
to call me, and we will arrange for a meeting as soon
as the appropriate Pixar technical folks can be freed
up from the film.
Thanks for the clearer perspective.
Steve

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Email to Pixar Employees

“To $175M and beyond!”
From: Steve Jobs
To: Pixar
Subject: Toy Story Crosses $150M !!
Date: January 2, 1996, 9:30 a.m.
Yesterday Toy Story crossed $150M in domestic box
office receipts -- only 13 days after crossing $100M !!
Toy Story was the undisputed blockbuster of the
holiday season, topping all other films including
Jumanji, Father of the Bride II, Waiting to Exhale and,
of course, Balto. Toy Story may even surpass the
current 1995 box office leaders, Batman Forever
($184M) and Apollo 13 ($172M), and become the
most successful film of 1995.
Toy Story has already become the third most
successful animated feature film of all time, topping
all of Disney’s classics except “Aladdin” ($217M) and
“The Lion King” ($312M).
To $175M and beyond!
Congratulations team,
Steve

Interview with Terry Gross

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“One of the things I always tried to coach myself on

was not being afraid to fail.”
In 1996, Steve and the Fresh Air radio host Terry Gross
looked back on his time at Apple and ahead to the future
of the computer industry. They spoke shortly after
Pixar’s release of Toy Story and its successful initial
public offering. NeXT, meanwhile, continued to struggle.
Terry Gross: How do you think that the web might
change in the near future with the help of the type of
software that you are producing now?
Steve Jobs: I think most large companies and medium-
size companies (and even small companies) are
starting to look at the web as the ultimate direct-to-
customer distribution chain, bypassing all
middlemen, going directly from the supplier to the
consumer. That’s a pretty powerful concept when you
think about it. One of the things that I love is that a
very small company, if they invest a lot in their
website, can look just as formidable and just as solid
on the web as a very large company can. As a matter of
fact, some of the smaller companies are more hip on
the web, getting more hip to the web sooner, and so
they actually look better than some of the large
companies do right now. It’s going to be this very
leveling phenomenon, but I think a tremendous
amount of goods and services is going to be sold, or at
least the demand created for such things, over
the web.

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TG: What else do you see in the near future for the
web, besides the ability to shop in a more kind of
complete way through the web?
SJ: It’s not just shopping for goods and services. It’s
shopping for information. I mean, you’re going to find
out … Already, when I want to find out the movies that
are playing around Silicon Valley, I just go up on the
local web page and check it out. It’s a lot faster than
going through the newspaper, and a lot faster than
calling the theaters, et cetera. More and more, we’re
shopping for information on the web. I just recently
bought a Sony, one of the new Sony camcorders.
I went on Sony’s web page, and I found out all about
the ones they offer and picked the one I wanted right
from that web page before I even called the store to try
to find it physically. The demand to get me to buy that
thing was created from Sony’s web page. I think we’re
going to see more and more of that. You’re going to be
buying information or finding information, and really
making a lot of decisions about what you’re going to
do with your life, or what you’re going to purchase,
from the web.
TG: Is the whole idea of going to the store to buy
software going to become obsolete, too? Do you think
we’ll be downloading our software from the web?
SJ: Of course. Yeah, there’s no question about it.
There’s no question that that will happen, and I think
it will happen in the next twenty-four months. There’s
some software right now that’s still very large. The
web on-ramps and off-ramps to corporations are now
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very fast, but the off-ramps to the consumers’ homes

are still not so fast. For buying large software, such as
CD-ROM games and stuff, they’ll still be distributed
on physical media for a while, but when the off-ramps
to the consumer get faster, possibly with cable
modems in the near future, then that could possibly go
fully electronic as well.
TG: Tell me what else you see for the web beyond the
world of retail.
SJ: There’s a lot of things happening with the web
right now, in terms of allowing people access to
information that they would just never have before.
What this does is, of course, it lets special-interest
groups get together. I know people who have had, as
an example, a stroke, and have gotten on the web and
found that there are several web pages now devoted to
information for stroke victims where they can learn
about some of the latest treatments. They can learn
about avoidance, the latest in avoidance advice, and
things like that. Those things didn’t exist before, as
well. ✂
TG: Do you think that when you were ousted from
Apple that people kind of wrote you off? I mean, here
you are with these big successes now.
SJ: Oh golly, I don’t know. I’m sure that a lot of people
did, and that was fine. It was a very painful time, as
you might imagine.

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TG: What, to be forced out of the company

you created?
SJ: Oh, of course. That was a very painful time, but
you just march forward, and you try to learn from it.
One of the things I always tried to coach myself on was
not being afraid to fail. When you have something
that doesn’t work out, a lot of times, people’s reaction
is to get very protective about never wanting to fall on
their face again. I think that’s a big mistake, because
you never achieve what you want without falling on
your face a few times in the process of getting there.
I’ve tried to not be afraid to fail, and, matter of fact,
I’ve failed quite a bit since leaving Apple.
TG: Are you surprised at the problems Apple is having
now, or did you see that coming?
SJ: I try not to talk about Apple too much. What I will
say is that the day I left Apple, we had a ten-year lead
over Microsoft. In the technology business, a ten-year
lead is really hard to come by. It happens, maybe a
company has that once every few decades, whether it
be Xerox or IBM with mainframes. Apple had that
with the graphical user interface. The problem at
Apple was that they stopped innovating. If you look at
the Mac that ships today, it’s 25 percent different than
the day I left, and that’s not enough for ten years and
billions of dollars in R&D.
It wasn’t that Microsoft was so brilliant or clever in
copying the Mac. It’s that the Mac was a sitting duck
for ten years. That’s Apple’s problem, is that their
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differentiation evaporated. Unlike Compaq, or others

who play in the Intel-Microsoft standard space, where
they only … Compaq only has to be 5 percent better
than its competitors for everyone to want to buy
their computers.
Apple has to be 50 percent or 100 percent better,
because when you buy something that is out of the
mainstream a little bit, you take a risk, and you want a
much bigger reward for taking that risk. […] That
differentiation has not completely evaporated, but for
the most part it has. That’s the predicament Apple’s in
now. That’s why cost-cutting and other things at Apple
are not going to be the cure. The cure for Apple is to
innovate its way out of its current predicament.
There’s a lot of good people left at Apple that are
capable of doing that with the proper leadership,
which is what’s been missing.
TG: Some Mac users are afraid that the Mac operating
system is in danger of becoming obsolete in the way
that Beta video became obsolete because it was
outdone by VHS. What do you think?
SJ: I think with the appropriate leadership at Apple,
that’s not going to happen, but I think we have to wait
and see.
TG: Do you care? How still involved, invested, do you
feel in the future of Apple, the company you co-
created?

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SJ: I’m happy every time a Mac gets shipped. I still

have people sending me emails, telling me how much
they love their Macs. It’s sort of … how do you explain
it? It’s like the first person you were ever in love with.
You know? It’s like your first love, and there will never
be another one like it. In my case, we were together for
ten years, and that’s a long time. But if you move on in
your life, you can’t always stay in love with your first
girlfriend. Right? ✂
TG: What do you think the state of the computer
would be if it weren’t for Apple? This is a chance,
I guess, for a really self-serving answer. But, I mean,
I’m really curious what you think.
SJ: I usually believe that if one group of people didn’t
do something, within a certain number of years, the
times would produce another group of people that
would accomplish similar things. We happened to be
at the right place, at exactly the right time, with the
right group of people. We did some wonderful work.
I’m extraordinarily proud of the work that the team at
Apple did when I was there. I think that, personally,
our major contribution was a little different than some
people might think. I think our major contribution
was in bringing a liberal arts point of view to the use
of computers.
TG: Yeah, explain what you mean by that.
SJ: What I mean by that is that if you really look at the
ease of use of the Macintosh, the driving motivation
behind that was to bring—not only ease of use to
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people so that many, many more people could use

computers for nontraditional things at that time—but
it was to bring beautiful fonts and typography to
people. It was to bring graphics to people, not for
plotting laminar flow calculations, but so that they
could see beautiful photographs, or pictures, or
artwork, et cetera, to help them communicate what
they were doing, potentially. Our goal was to bring a
liberal arts perspective and a liberal arts audience to
what had traditionally been a very geeky technology
and a very geeky audience.
TG: What made you think that that more liberal arts
direction was the direction to head in?
SJ: Because in my perspective, and the way I was
raised, was that science and computer science is a
liberal art. It’s something that everyone should know
how to use, at least, and harness in their life. It’s not
something that should be relegated to 5 percent of the
population over in the corner. It’s something that
everybody should be exposed to, everyone should have
a mastery of, to some extent, and that’s how we viewed
computation, or these computation devices.
TG: And you think that concept really caught on in the
whole industry, eventually?
SJ: That’s the seed of Apple: computers for the rest of
us. I think the liberal arts point of view still lives at
Apple. I’m not so sure that it lives that many other
places. I mean, one of the reasons I think Microsoft
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took ten years to copy the Mac was because they didn’t
really get it at its core.
TG: Do you think the PC, as we know it, is on the road
of changing?
SJ: That’s a really big question. I think the PC as we
know it is going to be around for quite some time, but
the heart of the question is, are we entering a time
window where we might see the first successful post-
PC devices? Personal digital assistants, or PDAs,
attempted to be that and failed.
The next attempt, I think, is going to be these very
low-cost consumer internet appliances. Can somebody
make a three-hundred-dollar box that hooks up to
your television on one side and maybe hooks up to
ISDN or a cable modem on the other side and allows
you for, three hundred dollars, to have a web browser
on your TV and to access the entire internet? I think
that’s entirely possible, and I think that we’re going to
see those devices soon, hopefully some innovative
marketing and distribution techniques surrounding
those devices so that a lot of people can all of a sudden
have an internet browser in their living room. I think
that’s going to be very exciting, and I think that could
be the beginning of the first real post-PC market.
TG: I know at Apple there was, at least early on, a very
informal, non-corporate type of atmosphere. I wonder
if there are any lessons you learned about what worked
and didn’t work in the corporate lifestyle at Apple that
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you’ve applied to your current companies, NeXT

and Pixar.
SJ: Well, I don’t know what a corporate lifestyle is.
I mean, Apple was a corporation; we were very
conscious of that. We were very driven to make money
so that we could continue to invest in the things we
loved. I would say Apple was a corporate lifestyle, but
it had a few very big differences to other corporate
lifestyles that I’d seen. The first one was a real belief
that there wasn’t a hierarchy of ideas that mapped
onto the hierarchy of the organization. In other words,
great ideas could come from anywhere and that we
better sort of treat people in a much more egalitarian
sense, in terms of where the ideas came from.
And Apple was a very bottoms-up company when it
came to a lot of its great ideas. And we hired truly
great people and gave them the room to do great work.
A lot of companies—I know it sounds crazy—but a lot
of companies don’t do that. They hire people to tell
them what to do. We hired people to tell us what to do.
We figured we’re paying them all this money, their job
is to figure out what to do and tell us. And that led to a
very different corporate culture, and one that’s really
much more collegial than hierarchical.
TG: In spite of this kind of different approach to the
corporate hierarchy, it was probably still a very high-
stress place.
SJ: Well, we were very young, and most of the folks
were not married, and so they could work fifteen-hour
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days. You didn’t have a typical situation where you

worked so that you can support your life. Your work
was your life, in many cases.
TG: Right. Do you feel you’ve changed from that? Is
that still your life?
SJ: I feel it is still my life, but it’s not all my life. It’s
less of a percentage, but I still don’t really … I’ve never
been able to think of my work and my life as different
things. They’re the same thing. Where it used to be 99
percent of my life, it’s maybe 50 percent of my
life now.

Email to NeXT Colleagues

“White House”
From: Steve Jobs
To: [NeXT Colleagues]
Subject: White House
Date: April 2, 1996, 4:17 p.m.
I am sending you this email from the White House !!

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Steve

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Steve’s slide rule. He was born before the electronic calculator.

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1996: At his childhood home, where Apple was founded.

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Steve’s notes on his speech at Palo Alto High School.

Speech at Palo Alto High School

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“What you follow with your heart will indeed come

back to make your life much richer.”
Steve spoke at the Palo Alto High School graduation in
June 1996.
I have been invited here today to address you as you
leave high school, and in most cases your parents, too,
to venture out into the world on your own. I am
supposed to offer you some wisdom and advice that
you may remember along your travels.
I will address my remarks to you, the students, rather
than to your parents. It is proper that I do so, being
that the only wisdom I have comes from my advanced
age; your parents are as old as I am, and much wiser,
I am sure.
However, I am wiser than you, and maybe you will
listen to me more than you listen to your parents.
Some of your parents may not agree, or agree fully,
with what I will say today. This is OK. I will simply be
one of the first in your post-high-school life to fill your
head with ideas that they disagree with. Wait until you
get to college! But, in any event, if there is any
discordance between what they have told you and
what you hear from me today, rest assured that
I am right.
Be aware of the world’s magical, mystical, and artistic
sides. The most important things in life are not the
goal-oriented, materialistic things that everyone and
everything tries to convince you to strive for. Most of
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you know that deep inside. Think back on this

spring—the last three or four months—when you are
winding down high school, know where you are going
next year, and begin to really have strong intuitions
about the world you will encounter. Maybe you see an
image of yourself in Paris, sculpting in an artist’s
studio as the setting sun shines in the paned windows.
Maybe you’re in India, running a hospital for poor
children, and you hear the distant clatter of the
outdoor marketplace in the early morning. Maybe you
see yourself in a recording studio laying down a track
for your album. Maybe you see yourself alone in a
rented room at 4:30 in the morning being the only
person alive to understand a new law of physics you
just figured out.
Whatever it may be, I bet many of you have had some
of these intuitive feelings about what you could do
with your lives. These feelings are very real, and if
nurtured can blossom into something wonderful and
magical. A good way to remember these kinds of
intuitive feelings is to walk alone near sunset—and
spend a lot of time looking at the sky in general. We
are never taught to listen to our intuitions, to develop
and nurture our intuitions. But if you do pay attention
to these subtle insights, you can make them
come true.
People will come at you with reasons why you
shouldn’t do these things:
You can’t make a living writing songs. (Right, just ask
Bob Dylan.)
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Helping children in India is nice, but you need to

prepare for real life. (Just ask Mother Teresa.)
You could be doing so much more with your life. (You
can hear Albert Einstein’s parents encouraging him to
get a real job, when he was working a low-level job in
the Swiss patent office rather than teaching in a
university, so that he could stay up late at night
working through his new ideas.)
If you don’t have any of these feelings, called dreams,
then you’re in trouble. Before you “spend” four or
more years of your life going in a direction your heart
may or may not want you to go, you need to
recapture them.
Be a creative person. Creativity equals connecting
previously unrelated experiences and insights that
others don’t see.
You have to have them to connect them. Creative
people feel guilty that they are simply relaying what
they “see.” How do you get a more diverse set of
experiences? Not by traveling the same path as
everyone else …
I’ll give you an example. The college I went to was a
small liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, named
Reed College. It was, at that time, the center of a
calligraphy revival movement in the US. I ended up
taking a calligraphy course before I left college, and at
the age of eighteen was exposed to a totally new world
of typography, graphic layout, font design, and the
like. There was no hope of earning any income from
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this skill or knowledge, and some of my friends

derided me for wasting my time and talents on
learning how to write with “fancy letters.”
However, years later, when we were designing the
Macintosh, it was this very same experience and set of
insights which drove me to insist that we find a way to
use proportionally spaced type and offer a range of
fonts—in essence, to bring a much richer world of
typography to the computer world than had ever
existed before. And this also led to the LaserWriter
printer, so that one could print these letterforms with
the quality they deserved. And this set the stage for
“desktop publishing.” I tell you truly: none of this
would have ever happened at Apple if I had sacrificed
that calligraphy class for a more “substantive” class of
economics or engineering.
So to be a creative person, you need to “feed” or
“invest” in yourself by exploring uncharted paths that
are outside the realm of your past experience. Seek out
new dimensions of yourself—especially those that
carry a romantic scent.
But one has no way of knowing which of these paths
will lead anywhere in advance. That’s the wonderful
thing about it, in a way. The only thing one can do is to
believe that some of what you follow with your heart
will indeed come back to make your life much richer.
And it will. And you will gain an ever firmer trust in
your instincts and intuition.

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Don’t be a career. The enemy of most dreams and

intuitions, and one of the most dangerous and stifling
concepts ever invented by humans, is the “Career.” A
career is a concept for how one is supposed to
progress through stages during the training for and
practicing of your working life.
There are some big problems here. First and foremost
is the notion that your work is different and separate
from the rest of your life. If you are passionate about
your life and your work, this can’t be so. They will
become more or less one. This is a much better way to
live one’s life.
[The] risk factor quotient goes down as you encounter
the real world. Many [people] find what they believe to
be safe harbors (lawyers and accountants), only to
wake up ten or fifteen years later and discover the
price they paid.
Make your avocation your vocation. Make what you
love your work.
The journey is the reward. People think that you’ve
made it when you’ve gotten to the end of the rainbow
and got the pot of gold. But they’re wrong. The reward
is in the crossing the rainbow. That’s easy for me to
say—I got the pot of gold (literally). But if you get to
the pot of gold, you already know that that’s not the
reward, and you go looking for another rainbow
to cross.
Think of your life as a rainbow arcing across the
horizon of this world. You appear, have a chance to
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blaze in the sky, then you disappear.

The two endpoints of everyone’s rainbow are birth
and death. We all experience both completely alone.
And yet, most people of your age have not thought
about these events very much, much less even seen
them in others. How many of you have seen the birth
of another human? It is a miracle. And how many of
you have witnessed the death of a human? It is a
mystery beyond our comprehension. No human alive
knows what happens to “us” upon or after our death.
Some believe this, others that, but no one really knows
at all. Again, most people of your age have not
thought about these events very much, and it’s as if we
shelter you from them, afraid that the thought of
mortality will somehow wound you. For me it’s the
opposite: to know my arc will fall makes me want to
blaze while I am in the sky. Not for others, but for
myself, for the trail I know I am leaving.
Now, as you live your arc across the sky, you want to
have as few regrets as possible. Remember, regrets are
different from mistakes. Mistakes are those things
that you did and wish you could do over again. In some
you were a fool (usually concerning women). In others
you were scared. In others you hurt someone else.
Some mistakes are deep, others not. But if your intent
was pure, they are almost always enriching in some
way. So mistakes are things that you did and wish you
could do over again.
Regrets are most often things you didn’t do, and wish
you did. I still regret not kissing Nancy Kinniman in
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high school. Who knows what might have happened?

Maybe she regrets it too …

Interview about Pixar

“To put these stories into the culture … is a
rare opportunity.”
On November 22, 1996, Steve discussed leading Pixar,
his strategy for the studio’s future, and the privilege of
creating stories for future generations.
Q: What kinds of things did you need to do, both
personally (learning to become a filmmaker) and as a
businessman, to put the company where it is today?
Steve Jobs: Well, Pixar is a studio. I’m not a filmmaker.
I don’t direct our films. […] What I try to do is help
create the environment where all these incredible
people can make films. We’ve got a really unique thing
in the industry, in that the very best creative people
will only go to work at a few places: Disney, Pixar,
possibly DreamWorks. In the same sense, the very best
computer scientists in computer graphics will only go
to work at a few places. Pixar is one of those, but most
of the studios are not because they don’t have [our]
level of technical culture there. I think Pixar is the
only place in the world that can hire the best from
both of these areas. And we’ve worked for ten years to
figure out a way to have them all work together, which
is not easy, because the Hollywood culture and the
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Silicon Valley culture are really different. We think

we’ve picked the best from both. ✂
Q: I’ve heard that there are no contracts at Pixar, and
that’s different than a lot of Hollywood productions.
What’s the philosophy behind that?
SJ: In this blending of [cultures], one of the things
that we encountered was that the Hollywood culture
and the Silicon Valley culture each use different
models of employee retention. Hollywood uses the
stick, which is the contract. And Silicon Valley uses
the carrot, which is the stock option. We examined
both of those in really pretty great detail:
economically, but also sort of psychologically and
culture-wise. What kind of culture do you end
up with?
And while there’s a lot of reasons to want to lock down
your employees for the duration of a film, because if
somebody leaves, you know you’re at risk, those same
dangers exist in Silicon Valley. During an engineering
project, you don’t want to lose people, and yet [Silicon
Valley] managed to evolve another system other than
contracts. And we prefer the Silicon Valley model in
this case: give people stock in the company so that we
all have the same goal, which is to create
shareholder value.
But [not having contracts] also makes us constantly
worry about making Pixar the greatest company we
can, so that nobody would ever want to leave. When
you sign a contract with somebody, you can sort of say,
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“Well, I don’t have to worry about that person for five

years.” You know? And if you’re real sophisticated,
you’ll have a little database that tickles you six months
before their contract’s up so you can start paying them
more attention. And they’re the most important
person in the world for six months, and then after they
sign up again, you put them in a drawer.
Our system’s a little different than that. Every single
day we worry about how we can make Pixar a better
company so that nobody will ever want to leave, and
so we don’t take anybody for granted. Because if they
don’t want to be at Pixar, then probably they should
leave anyway—whether or not they would ever have a
contract. ✂
SJ: In technology, and at Pixar on the creative side,
you’ve got incredibly talented people who are also rare
and in demand. If you don’t treat them right, they can
go get another job in ten minutes. Right?
So a strange thing happens: the hierarchy of power
sort of inverts, and the CEO is actually at the bottom.
I sort of feel like I work for most of these people
because they’re the ones that are doing all the
brilliant work.
And it’s the same in software. It’s the same thing. The
best people are very hard to come by, and so it’s
management’s job to support them because they’re on
the front lines doing the work. ✂

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Q: How is your relationship with Pixar different than

Louis B. Mayer or some of the great studio heads who
may not have been directors or producers themselves,
but who certainly had a great deal to do with what
was done?
SJ: Well, we’re a small studio, and so we don’t want to
let any of this go to our heads.
What we’re trying to do is to build a great animation
studio. We stay very focused on that. The other great
animation studio is, of course, Disney. And they’ve
done an incredible job. Feature animation is really at
the heart of Disney; they’ve created all the character
franchises that really breathe life into the theme
parks. And if you look at where [Disney’s] profits
come from, a tremendous amount of it is dependent
on feature animation, as are the theme parks.
What we’re doing is just a pure play to build a feature
animation studio. My role is to try to understand the
pieces we need to put in place to do that, to work with
everybody to attract and retain the people to do that,
and to get a clear strategy in place. And [I] help with
the relationships with Disney and other people.
I enjoy it tremendously. We’ve got an incredible
collection of people at Pixar, so I learn a lot. I learn a
lot. ✂
SJ: I like to get in there and help where I can. But my
greatest joy is when we have people that are much
better than I am at something, so I can forget about it,
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and not worry about it, and get on to something else

where I can help. ✂
SJ: Making an animated film is entirely different than
making a live-action film. When you make a live-
action film, a director typically shoots between ten
and twenty-five times as much footage as will end up
on the screen. They take that into the editing room
and they build their film. And hopefully they can do a
good job, because if they can’t, it’s too late—the actors
are gone, the sets are down.
Walt Disney realized many decades ago that
animation was so expensive that you couldn’t afford to
animate ten times more than what you need. Matter of
fact, you don’t want to animate even 10 percent more
than what you need. And therefore, the only
conclusion you can come to is, you have to edit your
film before you make it. Disney pioneered a lot of
techniques for doing that, and they’ve refined those
over the last sixty years.
Working with Disney gave us access to that wisdom
that you can’t buy for love or money: the wisdom and
experience of having made tens of feature animated
films. And I think we learned a tremendous
amount. ✂
SJ: Ten years ago, when we made the landmark short
film Luxo Jr., it took about three hours on average to
render each frame. Fast-forward to today. Computers
are a hundred times faster, and yet in Toy Story it took
three hours on average to render each frame. And the
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reason was the frames were a hundred times more

complex in many cases.
And we’re throwing between five and ten times more
computer power at our second feature film, code name
Bugs, than we did at Toy Story. And it’ll still take three
hours to render each frame. Our ambitions visually
are growing as fast as the technology can feed them.
And so I think the visual worlds which we’ll be able to
create will be much richer over time.
On the creative side, though, I think the art of
storytelling is very old. And no amount of technology
can turn a bad story into a good story. […] Storytelling
is a real art, and that’s something that we’re always
going to be working on very, very hard. I don’t think
it’s changed in a long time, and I’m not sure it will.
And I don’t think it’s something that the technology
has anything to do with. ✂
SJ: You can hardly find an Apple II around too much
anymore. You still can in the schools, but that’s about
it. It’s not clear whether you’ll be able to boot up a
Macintosh five years from now or not. All these
technology boxes and all this software: it has a life of a
year or two, if you’re very lucky. If it has a life of five
years, it’s extraordinary. And every once in a while,
something has a life of ten to fifteen years—and I’ve
been lucky to be associated with a few of those
products as well. But sooner or later, they all become
part of the sedimentary layer that is the foundation for
new innovation.
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[By contrast] Disney released its first animated

feature film, Snow White, in 1937. That’s sixty years
ago. A few years ago, they rereleased it on video and
sold 28 million copies, making probably around a
quarter billion dollars of profits—sixty years after its
initial release!
And I have a young son. We got Snow White, and he
loved it. He watched it thirty, forty times. And it really
struck me that I know people on most of the
continents of this world, and I think everyone I know
knows the story of Snow White. I don’t think I know
one person who hasn’t seen it.
Watching my son watch this, it really hit me that these
stories renew themselves with each generation of
young children. You read Joseph Campbell; these are
our myths. Here’s something that’s sixty years old
that’s regenerating itself in my son and other
young children.
And I think people are going to be watching Toy Story
in sixty years. Not because of the computer graphics,
but because of the story about friendship. And that’s
something really amazing to me, something very
different than the industry I worked in in the past.
To have the opportunity to put these stories into the
culture like this, if we can work really hard and be
lucky again and again, is a rare opportunity. And
I think everybody at Pixar feels really, really privileged
to have this opportunity.

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Email to Pixar Employees

“The Pixar Holiday Waltz”
From: Steve Jobs
To: Pixar
Subject: Pixar Holiday Waltz
Date: December 12, 1996, 4:03 p.m.
I am told that around 40 of us are feeling
uncomfortable coming to the Pixar Holiday Waltz
because we don’t have a guest or because we feel it’s a
“hoity toity*” affair that does not reflect “who we are.”
I think very few of us belong to the waltz crowd, nor
often attend formal affairs like this (my last waltz was
ten years ago). That’s exactly why this promises to be
so much fun – it’s a chance to see ourselves and our
colleagues in a strange costume (tuxedo) doing a
totally foreign activity (waltzing). This may be your
last chance during this lifetime to see your favorite TD
trying to dance in a tuxedo.
As for being single, all I can say is that cutting in on a
lovely lady or elegant gentleman during a waltz is
considered proper and flattering. You might also enjoy
the food, music, friends and ambience.
I do hope those of you not planning to attend
reconsider joining your friends and colleagues at our
Pixar Holiday Waltz. We will miss you if you don’t
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come. What do you have to lose? You just might

love it.
Steve
*hoity-toity adj (1690)
1: thoughtlessly silly or frivolous: FLIGHTY
2: marked by an air of assumed importance:
HIGHFALUTIN

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A staff invitation to the Pixar Holiday Waltz.

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Interview for In the Company of Giants

“The worst thing that someone can do in an interview
is to agree with me.”
In the 1990s, when Steve was running NeXT and Pixar,
two Stanford Business School students won a lunch with
him at a charity auction. They later interviewed him for
a book profiling business leaders in technology.
Steve Jobs: You’d better have great people, or you
won’t get your product to market as fast as possible.
Or you might get a product to market really fast, but it
will be really clunky and nobody will buy it. There are
no shortcuts around quality, and quality starts with
people. Maybe shortcuts exist, but I’m not smart
enough to have ever found any.
I spend 20 percent of my time recruiting, even now.
I spend a day a week helping people recruit. It’s one of
the most important things you can do.
Q: If finding the A players is so important, how can
you tell who is an A player and who isn’t?
SJ: That’s a very hard question. Ultimately there are
two paths. If a candidate has been in the workplace for
a while, you have to look at the results. There are
people who look so good on paper and talk such a
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good story but have no results behind them. They

can’t point to breakthroughs or successful products
that they shipped and played an integral part in.
Ultimately the results should lead you to the people.
As a matter of fact, that’s how I find great people.
I look at great results and I find out who was
responsible for them.
However, sometimes young people haven’t had the
opportunity yet to be in a position of influence to
create such results. So here you must evaluate
potential. It’s certainly more difficult, but the primary
attributes of potential are intelligence and the ability
to learn quickly. Much of it is also drive and passion—
hard work makes up for a lot.
When you recruit, you’re rolling the dice. No matter
what, you’re rolling the dice because you’ve only got
an hour to assess the candidate. The most time I spend
with somebody is an hour, and I must then
recommend whether we hire the person or not. Others
will recommend, too, so I won’t be the only one, but
I’ll still have to throw my vote in the hat.
Ultimately it comes down to your gut feeling. Your gut
feeling gets refined as you hire more people and see
how they do. Some you thought would do well don’t,
and you can sense why. If you study it a bit you might
say, “I thought this person was going to do well, but
I overlooked this aspect,” or, “I didn’t think this
person would do well, but they did and here’s why.” As
you hire people over time, your gut instinct gets better
and more precise.
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Over time, my digging in during an interview gets

more precise. For example, many times in an interview
I will purposely upset someone: I’ll criticize their prior
work. I’ll do my homework, find out what they worked
on and say, “God, that really turned out to be a bomb.
That really turned out to be a bozo product. Why did
you work on that?” I shouldn’t say this in your book,
but the worst thing that someone can do in an
interview is to agree with me and knuckle under.
What I look for is for someone to come right back and
say, “You’re dead wrong and here’s why.” I want to see
what people are like under pressure. I want to see if
they just fold or if they have firm conviction, belief,
and pride in what they did. It’s also good every once in
a while to really piss somebody off in an interview to
see how they react because, if your company is a
meritocracy of ideas, with passionate people, you have
a company with a lot of arguments. If people can’t
stand up and argue well under pressure, they may not
do well in such an environment. ✂
Q: What do you think your weaknesses are when it
comes to management?
SJ: I don’t know. People are package deals; you take
the good with the confused. In most cases, strengths
and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin. A
strength in one situation is a weakness in another, yet
often the person can’t switch gears. It’s a very subtle
thing to talk about strengths and weaknesses because
almost always they’re the same thing.
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My strength probably is that I’ve always viewed

technology from a liberal arts perspective, from a
human culture perspective. As such, I’ve always
pushed for things that pulled technology in those
directions by bringing insights from other fields. An
example of that would be—with the Macintosh—
desktop publishing: its proportionately spaced fonts,
its ease of use. All of the desktop publishing stuff on
the Mac comes from books: the typography, that rich
feel that nobody in computers knew anything about.
I think that my other strength is that I’m a pretty good
judge of people and have the ability to bring people
together around common vision.
Q: Well then, when are your strengths—judgment of
character and liberal arts perspective—
your weaknesses?
SJ: In certain cases, my weaknesses are that I’m too
idealistic. [I need to] realize that sometimes best is the
enemy of better. Sometimes I go for “best” when
I should go for “better,” and end up going nowhere or
backwards. I’m not always wise enough to know when
to go for the best and when to just go for better.
Sometimes I’m blinded by “what could be” versus
“what is possible,” doing things incrementally versus
doing them in one fell swoop. Balancing the ideal and
the practical is something I still must pay attention to.
Q: In terms of going for the best, you have a widely
held reputation of being extremely charismatic—
someone who is always able to draw out the best in
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other people. How have you been able to motivate

your employees?
SJ: Well, I think that—ultimately, it’s the work that
motivates people. I sometimes wish it were me, but it’s
not. It’s the work. My job is to make sure the work is as
good as it should be and to get people to stretch
beyond their best. But it’s ultimately the work that
motivates people. That’s what binds them together.
Q: Yet in the case of the Macintosh, you got
tremendous output from people. Regardless of the
type of work, not everybody can elicit that type
of commitment.
SJ: Well, I’m not sure I’d chalk that up to charisma.
Part of the CEO’s job is to cajole and beg and plead
and threaten at times—to do whatever is necessary to
get people to see things in a bigger and more profound
way than they have, and to do better work than they
thought they could do.
When they do their best and you don’t think it’s
enough, you tell them straight: “This isn’t good
enough. I know you can do better. You need to do
better. Now go do better.”
You must play those cards carefully. You must be right
a lot of the time because you’re messing with people’s
lives. But that’s part of the job. In the end, it’s the
environment you create, the coworkers, and the work
that binds. The Macintosh team, if you talk to most of
them—a dozen years since we shipped the product—
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most will still say that working on the Mac was the
most meaningful experience of their lives. If we’d
never shipped a product they wouldn’t say that. If the
product hadn’t been so good they wouldn’t say that.
The Macintosh experience wasn’t just about going to
camp with a bunch of fun people. It wasn’t just a
motivational speaker. It was the product that
everybody put their heart and soul into, and it was the
product that expressed their deep appreciation,
somehow, for the world to see.
So, in the end, it’s the work that binds. That’s why it’s
so important to pick very important things to do
because it’s very hard to get people motivated to make
a breakfast cereal. It takes something that’s
worth doing.

Email to Pixar Employees

“Apple Acquires NeXT.”
From: Steve Jobs
To: Pixar
Subject: Apple Acquires NeXT
Date: December 20, 1996, 9:24 p.m.
Today Apple announced that it is acquiring NeXT!
This is great for Apple -- it gives them a very advanced
object-oriented operating system, OpenStep, that can
leapfrog Microsoft Windows.
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This is great for NeXT -- OpenStep will become

mainstream and be used by millions of people; this
has been a dream of everyone at NeXT for ten years.
This is great for Pixar -- it will free me up from
running two companies, so I can devote even more of
my energies to Pixar. There may even be some
possibilities for Pixar and Apple to work together in
the future (if creatively driven!).
And, this is really great for me. I have been working
with a group of wonderful colleagues at NeXT for over
a decade, and having our work finally become
mainstream will be very gratifying (a feeling everyone
at Pixar already knows). I will be advising Apple on
their product strategy, and I will get to spend even
more of my time at Pixar :).
I am very happy and excited.
Steve
PS: For more details, check out NeXT’s website at
www.next.com

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7/11/23, 9:04 PM Make Something Wonderful | Steve Jobs

Part III, 1996–2011

“Much of what I stumbled into by
following my curiosity and intuition
turned out to be priceless later on.”

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The Apple that Steve returned to after its purchase of

NeXT at the end of 1996 scarcely resembled the company
he remembered. Apple had lost $800 million that year.
Steve had so little trust in the board that he insisted all
but two directors resign.
But he also found many employees whose talents and love
for Apple struck him as “phenomenal.” He assured a
doubtful NeXT colleague, “There’s something there
worth saving.”
Steve remained driven by the same mission he
articulated in his early years, to “put something back
into the pool of human experience.” And in his years
away—longer than his first time at the company—he
had matured and learned how to lead.
As CEO of Apple and Pixar (he held both roles until
Disney acquired Pixar in 2006), he saw his job as
“number one, recruit; number two, set an overall
direction; and number three, inspire and cajole and
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persuade.” He said, “You’re not grabbing the pencil out

of the twenty-five-year-old’s hand to do it better than
they are. If you’re smart, you’re hiring twenty-five-year-
olds who are smarter than you.” He gave particular
thought to his responsibility for the business aspects of a
creative company. A “risk-taking creative environment
on the product side,” he said, required a “fiscally
conservative environment” on the business side.
“Creative people are willing to take a leap in the air, but
they need to know that the ground’s going to be there
when they get back.”
At Apple, making sure the ground was still there meant
streamlining, a skill Steve had mastered in the lean years
at NeXT and Pixar. His second tenure at Apple was a
study in focus. Soon after he returned, he slashed the
company’s product offerings from seventeen to four. This
upset some fans and led to thousands of job losses, but he
was unwavering in his belief that it was necessary to save
the company. “You’ve got to choose what you put your
love into really carefully,” he said.
A stream of Apple breakthroughs—including iMac, OS
X, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad—reflected that
focused love, as did Pixar’s blockbuster and award-
winning films from the same period: A Bug’s Life, Toy
Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The
Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, Wall-E, Up, and Toy
Story 3. Steve saw every product and film as “a way of
expressing to the rest of our species our deep
appreciation.” Apple technology offered tools to make
something wonderful. And Pixar films, he believed, had
the “rare opportunity to put stories into the culture,”
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stories that would speak to “our grandkids’

grandkids’ grandkids.”
Steve wanted to build a foundation for Pixar and Apple
that would last beyond his lifetime. When Disney
acquired Pixar, the deal included language protecting
Pixar’s culture and independence. He was intimately
involved in the design of campuses for both companies,
with beautiful physical environments—an orchard, a
café, a headquarters constructed of handmade bricks—
that encouraged serendipitous encounters and reflected
his reverence for craft.
Six Pixar films won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature
during this third act of Steve’s life. And when he
resigned from Apple, six weeks before his death from
pancreatic cancer in 2011, his beloved company, with its
sixty thousand employees, seasoned leadership team,
and clear mission guiding its future, was the most
valuable in the world.
“It is always a team of people, and the chemistry
between that team of people, that makes great results,”
Steve once said. Under his leadership, the teams at Apple
and Pixar transformed four very different industries:
computing, telecommunications, music, and film. The
engine driving these transformations was a remarkably
consistent set of values that Steve held dear: Life is short;
don’t waste it. Tell the truth. Technology should enhance
human creativity. Process matters. Beauty matters.
Details matter. The world we know is a human
creation—and we can push it forward.
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Steve on Returning to Apple

Speaking to Stanford business school students in 2003,
Steve recalled his internal struggle, seven years earlier,
over whether to return to Apple.
I’m working away at NeXT, working away at Pixar,
reading the rumors in the papers that Apple is going
to buy a company, this other company, for their
operating system. And one of our guys said, “We
should sell NeXT to them. We’ve got a much better
operating system.”
And I said, “Forget it. It will never happen.”
So this is one of those cases where, when you hire the
right people, they don’t always listen to you in key
moments in time. So this person, being very smart,
didn’t listen to me. And he went over and talked to
Apple and said, “You ought to buy NeXT.” And they
were interested.
Then he comes back and says, “They want to talk
to us.”
And I was like, “No. Go away. You’re making this up.”
He did this twice. Finally I said, “OK. Fine. Let’s talk
to them.” I couldn’t believe it. They really were
interested. And so we ended up selling them NeXT.
And the CEO running Apple at that time made it clear
he didn’t want me around, which was fine. And so
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I stayed on just as a consultant to him, to try to help

him a little bit, because the management team he was
inheriting from NeXT was actually quite a bit better
than the one he had at Apple. And so I was trying to
make sure these people didn’t get totally crushed.
And … I have to be careful what I say here. Let me just
say that you need a license to drive a car, but you don’t
need a license to be the CEO of a company. And maybe
you should need one.
Anyway, so I was pretty much out of the picture. Then
one of Apple’s board members called me. I had never
met this person. And he said, “Look, I want your
straight scoop on what you think of the CEO here.”
And I thought, “I don’t even know this person.
Whatever I tell them, they’ll probably go tell the CEO,
and then I will be persona non grata, and I will not
have a chance to help my team not get crushed by
these other folks there.” And I thought a lot.
And then I thought, “You know, this is a director of a
company that I started and that I loved for many
years—and still do to some extent. And so how can
I not tell them the truth?”
So I spilled out my guts—and never heard from him
again. And so I figured, fine. I was spending my days
at Pixar and having a great time. It was springtime,
going into summer. And six years ago a few weeks
from now, I got a call back from him [the director],
and he said, “We are going to dismiss our CEO, and we
would like you to come back and run the company.”
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And I said, “I can’t do that. I’m the CEO of Pixar. It’s a

publicly traded company. We have all these wonderful
employees. We have these shareholders. And I can’t go
be CEO of another public … I can’t desert them. So
I can’t do this. I’ll help you any way I can, but I can’t.”
He called back a few days later and he said, “We’d like
you to come back as an interim leader and help us find
a new CEO.”
And I said, “Well, I have to think about that.” And
I was thinking about it and called up a friend of mine,
a really smart guy, a good friend I’d known for a long
time that works at another company in the industry.
And I probably woke him up in the morning, about
eight o’clock one morning, and I was telling him about
my struggles about, should I, could I do this? Should
I not? And this and that …
And finally, he interrupted me after about four
minutes and he said, “Steve, I don’t give a shit about
Apple. Why are you telling me all this?”
And I said, “Oh, OK. I’m sorry.” And I hung up
the phone.
And I realized: You know, I do give a shit about Apple.
And that’s kind of what crystallized it for me. And so
I went back there as an interim CEO.
And I was terrified because I was afraid our Pixar
employees and shareholders would feel like I was
deserting them. And that’s why I went back just as an
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interim CEO. I only planned to stay ninety days. But

Apple was in a pretty tough situation, and the
candidates it was attracting for the CEO job, they were
not so good. And I almost hired one, and at the last
minute I just said, “I can’t do this to these guys.”
I just thought, “Well, it will take another ninety days
to find somebody.” And that turned into a year. And
I decided right up front that I was just going to act like
I was the permanent CEO, because they didn’t need a
caretaker. This thing was in intensive care. It was
about ninety days away from bankruptcy. It was in
pretty bad shape.

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7/11/23, 9:04 PM Make Something Wonderful | Steve Jobs

A selection of photos from Steve’s return to Apple.

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Email to Apple Employees

“A More Entrepreneurial Apple.”
Steve was not yet CEO when he sent a company-wide
email laying out plans to “take Apple back to its roots.”
From: Steve Jobs
To: Apple employees
Subject: A More Entrepreneurial Apple
Date: August 12, 1997, 8:20 a.m.
Renewing Apple is a journey, and we have begun that
journey during the past four weeks by taking some
decisive first steps—a new Board of Directors, a new
product strategy and product roadmap, a decision to
really focus on two market segments (education and
creative content), a new advertising agency, and a
detente and working partnership with Microsoft. Last
week we announced some of these steps at MacWorld,
and so far our shareholders and the public seem
to approve.
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Today we are taking a few more steps which will begin

to take Apple back to its roots as a more egalitarian,
entrepreneurial company. They are:
1. Stock Options - From now on, we will be using stock
options as a primary form of “beyond-salary”
compensation. Stock options are egalitarian (when
anyone’s stock goes up $1 per share, everyone’s stock
goes up $1 per share) and they are the best way to give
our employees a true stake in the company’s future
success. And, we want our employees to be rewarded
by the company’s success in the same way that our
public shareholders are: through stock appreciation.
To lead the way, the Executive Team has agreed to
forfeit their current and future cash bonus plans in
exchange for more stock options.
As you know, we repriced all stock options to $13.25
on July 11th. In addition, I am pleased to announce
that on August 5th our Board approved new stock
option grants totaling six million shares at the price of
$19.75. Those receiving these new grants will get the
good news later this week.
Apple has granted stock options for over 10 million
shares since the beginning of this calendar year, and
employees now hold stock options for over 20 million
shares - which is more than 16% of Apple’s total
outstanding shares. This is a very high percentage for
a company of Apple’s size, and comparable to many
valley start-ups. As we restore Apple’s fortunes, our
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public shareholders and our employee stock option

holders will all benefit in harmony.
2. New Severance Plan - Effective today, we are
changing our severance plan for all employees to be
more in line with an entrepreneurial company. There
will now be only one severance plan for all employees.
This plan, like the previous plans, will provide a 60
day notice period, with full pay and benefits. In
addition, employees will be eligible to receive one
additional week of severance pay for each full year of
service. For example, if you have worked at the
company for more than three but less than four years,
you will receive your pay and benefits during the 60
day notice period plus severance payments equal to
three weeks of pay. This new severance plan applies to
all employees of Apple, Claris, and Newton in the US -
there is no longer a separate executive severance plan.
We will be changing our international severance
policies to be in line with this new plan to the extent
permitted under local laws.
3. Sabbatical Program - Apple needs all hands on deck
for the foreseeable future as we turn our company’s
fortunes around. We are therefore discontinuing the
sabbatical program at the end of our current fiscal
year. Employees who have earned their sabbatical as of
September 26, 1997, will be eligible to take their
sabbatical at a mutually agreeable time during fiscal
year 1998. This applies to all employees of Apple,
Claris, and Newton worldwide.
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4. Corporate Travel - Corporate travel will continue to

be constrained to essential trips. Our egalitarian
travel policy specifies coach class travel for everyone
on trips lasting less than 10 hours, and business class
travel for everyone on trips of 10 hours or longer. Of
course individuals may use their personal funds or
mileage awards to upgrade their seating class. For
clarification, flights between San Francisco and Tokyo
(either direction) are eligible for business class travel.
5. Facilities - We will continue to move as many
employees as possible onto our R&D Campus site. We
will greatly benefit by the resulting “beehive” effects,
including faster communication paths and more
unplanned interactions between the various groups.
Reflecting this consolidation, we are renaming the
R&D Campus to the Apple Campus, beginning today.
Thank you for your support as we work together to
renew Apple.
Steve and the Executive Team

Email Exchange with Avie Tevanian

“There is something good here worth saving.”
Avie Tevanian ran software engineering at NeXT and
assumed the same role at Apple when it acquired NeXT.
He told Steve that the Apple culture at the time of the
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acquisition was so bad that perhaps the best move might

be to sell the company.
From: Avadis Tevanian
To: Steve Jobs
Subject: Apple engineers
Date: August 14, 1997, 9:31 p.m.
Steve,
The last couple of weeks have been quite interesting.
With this kernel issue spinning out of control it is
clear to me that the “cancer” within Apple, which we
had put into remission (at least in SW engineering) a
few months ago, came back with a vengeance. I am
now applying a new chemo treatment in an attempt to
put it back into remission—and I think it will be
successful—but we will definitely have another wave
of resignations from the sharks that smelled the blood
in the water. A bunch of people will get over it, but
many will not.
The net is the really bad Apple culture we’ve heard
about still lurks out there. And I am convinced that a
major problem with past management was their
inability to deal with it. While I am a strong-willed
person who can survive almost anything (hey, you’ve
seen it first hand), I must admit these guys are wearing
me down. Without any emotional tie to Apple (I, of
course, have none) it gets increasing difficult to come
to work each day. And while I can certainly treat the
patient this time I wonder how long it will be before
the cancer comes out of remission again. The context
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of a continuation of revenue decrease, losing quarters

and ongoing restructuring does not help.
In the case of the kernel issue & OS roadmap I know
the decisions we’ve made are the right decisions. And
each day, as I discuss it with more and more people,
I believe it even more. In fact, I’ve discovered just how
conniving some of these folks can be just to push their
agenda—including pretty severe obfuscation of facts.
While the source of this is probably only a few people,
they are able to quickly spread “evil thoughts”
throughout the population that is just looking for a
place to make a stand.
Combine this all with the reaction to the sabbatical
program—which has been very poorly received in
engineering (I’ve heard threats of a “sick-out”), and it
makes me think this company isn’t worth saving. At
least not for the sake of the employees. Yes, I feel for
the customers. Yes, the shareholders deserve fair
value. And yes, I worry about the ex-NeXTers we
dragged into this. But it is not at all clear to me that
the employees deserve to “win.” This, of course, is an
overgeneralization, and there are some very good folks
here, but you get the gist of this.
It really makes me think that maybe now is the time to
seriously consider selling the company. It’s not clear
we’ll ever again have the positive aura that we have
now—at least temporarily.

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Anyway, we should get together and discuss all this

sometime—face to face, 1-1—not on the phone. Not
urgent—I’m a survivor—but when we both have
some time.
Avie

From: Steve Jobs

To: Avadis Tevanian
Subject: Apple engineers
Date: August 14, 1997, 10:02 p.m.
Avie,
You know, I have had the same feeling lately—that
Apple employees don’t deserve to be saved. They think
they work so hard—heck, I don’t see it. They also
think they have no responsibility for any of the mess
that Apple’s in.
I don’t know who they think engineered and shipped
such bad products, who created and authorized such
bad marketing, who caused the support to be so bad,
etc… They just don’t want to share any responsibility
for the current state of the company…
But, there is something good here worth saving.
I don’t quite know how to express it, but it has to do
with the fact that Apple is the ONLY alternative to
Windows and that Apple can still inject some new
thinking into the equation.
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Let’s go for a walk and talk about this sometime soon,

Steve

From: Avadis Tevanian

To: Steve Jobs
Subject: Re: Apple engineers
Date: August 25, 1997, 10:05 p.m.
We really need to get together to discuss this and
other issues related to the “product strategy” and
overall management of the company. I am worried
about a number of the pieces of the puzzle and as a
result am completely unmotivated to do what it takes
to turn this company around. And for the first time in
10 years I don’t even feel like challenging your ideas
when I disagree—which scares me because I believe as
a “team” we work best when we challenge each other
and come out all-the-better for it.
I am going to sleep on this some more tonight (I feel
fried already and it’s only Monday evening—even the
weekends aren’t sufficient to recharge these days).
I have a pretty hectic schedule tomorrow (except for
late in the day) but have lots of available time on
Wednesday. Let me know when you’re available.
Avie

From: Steve Jobs

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To: Avadis Tevanian

Subject: Re: Apple engineers
Date: August 25, 1997, 10:26 p.m.
Please continue to challenge me. It’s the way we get to
the right decisions, and I enjoy it too.
Steve

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Steve wanted to mimic the album art from Meet the Beatles.

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Speech to Apple Employees

“We believe that people with passion can change the
world for the better.”
Steve introduced the “Think Different” advertising
campaign to a small group of Apple employees on
September 23, 1997. The ad would go on to win an Emmy
Award for Outstanding Commercial.
Howdy. Good morning. We were up till three o’clock
last night finishing this advertising, and I want to
show it to you in a minute—see what you think of it.
I’ve been back about eight to ten weeks, and we’ve
been working really hard. What we’re trying to do is
not something really highfalutin. We’re trying to get
back to the basics. We’re trying to get back to the
basics of great products, great marketing, and great
distribution. I think that Apple has pockets of
greatness but in some ways has drifted away from
doing the basics really well.
We started with the product line. We looked at the
product road map, going out for a few years, and we
said, “A lot of this doesn’t make sense, and it’s way too
much stuff, and there’s not enough focus.” We actually
got rid of 70 percent of the stuff on the product road
map. I couldn’t even figure out the damn product line
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after a few weeks. I kept saying, “What is this model?

How does this fit?”
I started talking to customers, and they couldn’t
figure it out either.
You’re going to see the product line get much simpler,
and you’re going to see the product line get much
better. There’s some new stuff coming out that’s
incredibly nice. In addition, we’ve been able to focus a
lot more on the 30 percent of the gems and add some
new stuff in that is going to take us in some whole new
directions. So we are incredibly excited about the
products. I think we’re really thinking differently
about the kinds of products we have to build. The
engineering team is incredibly excited. I mean, I came
out of the meeting with people that had just gotten
their projects canceled, and they were three feet off the
ground with excitement ’cause they finally understood
where in the heck we were going, and they were really
excited about the strategy.
In the same way we, I think, have not been as … we
have not kept up with innovations in our distribution.
I’ll give you an example. I’m sure it was talked about
this morning, but we’ve got anywhere from two to
three months of inventory in our manufacturing
supplier pipeline, and about an equal amount in our
distribution channel pipeline. We’re having to make
guesses four or five, six months in advance, about
what the customer wants.

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We’re not smart enough to do that. I don’t think

Einstein’s smart enough to do that. So what we’re
going to do is get really simple and start taking
inventory out of those pipelines so we can let the
customer tell us what they want, and we can respond
to it super fast. You’re going to see us be doing a lot of
things like that. Today is just the first of many things
we’re going to be doing with you.
We’re going to be not only, I think, catching up to
where the best of the best are in distribution, but we’re
going to actually be innovating and be breaking some
new ground, I think, in the coming several months.
I’m pretty excited about that as well, in the
distribution manufacturing side of things.
That gets us to the marketing side of things.
To me, marketing is about values. This is a very
complicated world. It’s a very noisy world, and we’re
not gonna get a chance to get people to remember
much about us. No company is.
And so we have to be really clear on what we want
them to know about us. Now, Apple, fortunately, is one
of the half-a-dozen best brands in the whole world—
right up there with Nike, Disney, Coke, Sony. It is one
of the greats of the greats, not just in this country but
all around the globe.
But even a great brand needs investment and caring if
it’s going to retain its relevance and vitality. And the
Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect in this
area in the last few years. And we need to bring it
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back. The way to do that is not to talk about speeds

and feeds. It’s not to talk about MIPS and megahertz.
It’s not to talk about why we are better than Windows.
The dairy industry tried for twenty years to convince
you that milk was good for you. It’s a lie, but they tried
anyway. And the sales were going like this [hand
mimics a line running down and to the right]. And then
they tried “Got Milk?” and the sales started going like
this [hand goes up and to the right]. “Got Milk?”
doesn’t even talk about the product! As a matter of
fact, the focus is on the absence of the product.
But the best example of all, and one of the greatest
jobs of marketing that the universe has ever seen, is
Nike. Remember: Nike sells a commodity! They sell
shoes! And yet when you think of Nike, you feel
something different than a shoe company. In their ads,
as you know, they don’t ever talk about the products.
They don’t ever tell you about their air soles, and why
they are better than Reebok’s air soles. 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.
Apple spends a fortune on advertising. You’d never
know it. You’d never know it.
So when I got here, Apple had just fired their agency,
and there was a competition with twenty-three
agencies, and, you know, four years from now, we
would pick one. We blew that up, and we hired
Chiat/Day, the ad agency I was fortunate enough to
work with several years ago. We created some award-
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winning work, including the commercial voted the

best ad ever made, “1984,” by
advertising professionals.
We started working about eight weeks ago. The
question we asked was, “Our customers want to know:
Who is Apple, and what is it that we stand for? Where
do we fit in this world?”
And what we’re about isn’t making boxes for people to
get their jobs done, although we do that well. We do
that better than almost anybody, in some cases.
But Apple is about something more than that. Apple,
at the core—its core value—is that we believe that
people with passion can change the world for the
better. That’s what we believe.
And we’ve had the opportunity to work with people
like that. We’ve had the opportunity to work with
people like you, with software developers, with
customers, who have done it—in some big and some
small ways.
And we believe that in this world, people can change it
for the better. And that those people that are crazy
enough to think that they can change the world are the
ones that actually do.
And so, what we’re going to do, in our first brand-
marketing campaign in several years, is to get back to
that core value. A lot of things have changed. The
market is a totally different place than it was a decade
ago. And Apple’s totally different, and Apple’s place in
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it is totally different. And believe me: the products,

and the distribution strategy, and manufacturing are
totally different—and we understand that. But values
and core values: those things shouldn’t change. The
things that Apple believed in at its core are the same
things that Apple really stands for today. And so we
wanted to find a way to communicate this. And what
we have is something that I am very moved by. It
honors those people who have changed the world.
Some of them are living. Some of them are not. But
the ones that aren’t, as you’ll see, you know that if they
ever used a computer, it would have been a Mac.
And the theme of the campaign is “Think Different.”
It’s honoring the people who think different and who
move this world forward. It is what we are about. It
touches the soul of this company.
So I’m going to go ahead and roll it, and I hope that
you feel the same way about it that I do.
[Steve runs the video.]
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The
troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond
of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or
vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is
ignore them. Because they change things. They push
the human race forward. And while some may see
them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the

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people who are crazy enough to think they can change

the world are the ones who do.”

Email to Pixar’s Leadership

“My grades as of today.”
As 1997 drew to a close, Steve graded Pixar’s
performance: four A’s, one B, and two F’s.
From: Steve Jobs
To: ec, jl, lawrence, sarahmc
Cc: sj
Subject: Pixar Milestones
Date: December 21, 1997, 9:26 a.m.
From my files, dated Monday, October 28, 1996, with
my grades as of today:
1997 MILESTONES
1. Make BUGS Great – A
2. Ship Two Strong Interactive Products – F (but A for
getting out)
3. Enter Sequel Business – A (and almost exit
sequel business)
4. Greenlight Film #3 – F (but B for great progress)
5. Manage Growth – A (hired >100 people, Pixar U,
expanded infrastructure)
6. Longer Term:
- keep a larger percentage of the profits – A
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- increase Pixar’s brand awareness – B (mostly due to

Apple goings on)
Let’s set our 1998 milestone goals soon after
the holidays.
Steve

Email to Pixar’s Leadership

“This list is to remind us of the ‘forest.’”
Steve’s 1998 goals for Pixar included beginning
animation on the film that would become Monsters, Inc.
From: Steve Jobs
To: ec, jl, lawrence, sarahmc
Subject: Pixar Milestones
Date: December 26, 1997, 10:00 a.m.
Here are proposed key 1998 milestones for us as a
senior management team. The purpose of this list is to
remind us of the “forest” from time to time, and to
help prod us into taking corrective action when we get
off track. Please feel free to shoot full of holes with
your comments.
Steve
1998 MILESTONES
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1. A Bug’s Life opens in November to very strong

critical and box office success
2. PR efforts yield Pixar branding and creative credit
for A Bug’s Life
3. Toy Story 2 becomes a great feature film
4. Hidden City is on schedule to begin animation by
April ’98
5. Film #5 development begins by April 1
6. Emeryville groundbreaking in May
7. Breakthrough new animation system demonstrated
by summer
8. Secure shorts projects to defray carrying costs of
ABL crew through Spring ’99
9. Execute equity financing in Spring/Summer
if necessary

Email to Apple Employees

“Newton protest today.”
When Steve returned to Apple, he jettisoned many
product lines developed during his time away. His goal
was to focus the company’s offerings. Some fans rebelled.
From: Steve Jobs
To: Apple employees
Subject: Newton protest today
Date: March 6, 1998, 8:09 a.m.
Some people are understandably upset that Apple has
decided to stop developing future Newton OS based
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computers, especially the MessagePad. Today some of

them are coming to Apple to protest our decision.
This is OK. We are reserving a space for them on our
campus and will provide them with coffee and other
hot drinks (it may be cold out there!).
Our decision to end Newton development was not
taken lightly, and is unlikely to be reversed. Even so,
let’s welcome the Newton customers and developers
who come to protest this decision. Hopefully they will
feel our enthusiasm about the future of Apple, and
leave more settled than they arrived.
Thanks
Steve

Speech at Macworld
“Apple is coming back in a very big way.”
Steve was still interim CEO of Apple when he gave the
keynote address at Macworld in New York City in
July 1998.
Thank you very much. This is good. I just got off a red-
eye to get here. I didn’t think I could be here today,
and I managed to make it, so this is good. We’ve got
some great stuff to talk about today, so let’s get into it.
An American named Abraham Maslow came up with a
theory that he called the human hierarchy of needs.
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And this theory was a simple one in concept, [though]

somewhat profound in its implications. This theory
was that humans have needs that must be met, and
these needs can be stratified into certain levels.
[Humans] need the bottom needs to be met first, and
then they progress to the next level. And when those
[needs] are met, they progress to the next level.
So, you start off with the physiological needs: food,
clothing, and shelter, let’s say. If those are met, or once
those are met, you then start to be concerned more
with the safety of your environment—and eventually
with love, with esteem, with self-actualization. I don’t
know if this is true or not, but this is what
Abraham believed.
And I thought this was a good model, so I borrowed it
today to construct … Steve Jobs’s version of this
[audience laughs], which I call the Apple Hierarchy
of Skepticism.
Let me explain this to you. When I came to Apple a
year ago, all I heard was, “Apple is dying. Apple
can’t survive.”
And it turns out that every time we convince people
that we’ve accomplished something at one level, they
come up with something new.
I used to think this was a bad thing. I thought, “Oh,
jeez, when are they ever going to believe that we’re
going to be able to turn this thing around?” But
actually, now I think it’s great, because what it means
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is we’ve now convinced them that we’ve taken care of

last month’s question—and they’re onto the next one.
So I thought, “Well, let’s get ahead of the game. Let’s
try to figure out what all the questions are going to be
and map out where we are.” So that’s what the Apple
Hierarchy of Skepticism is. And it borrows from
Dr. Maslow.
So the first level, what we encountered a year ago, was
survival. [Audience applauds.] A lot of people thought
Apple was in some sort of death spiral, which I think
there was some truth to. What did we do? We did
many, many things, but the three things that stood out
in people’s minds were: we brought in a new
management team to run the company, a new board of
directors that’s got some phenomenally experienced
people on it, and we did a deal with Microsoft. The
largest software company in the world want[ing] to
help Apple was a fact that didn’t escape very many
people, and it added a lot of credibility to what we
were doing.
The combination of these three things and a lot of
other medium-sized things, I think, convinced people
fairly rapidly that survival, at least in the short term,
was not an issue. And it gave us some time to
demonstrate that we could accomplish some
other things.
Immediately, once we did these things, then everybody
moved up a level. […] If it wasn’t about survival, it
was, “Well, but there’s no stable business in the Mac
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market.” That was the next level of the hierarchy. So

we had to start demonstrating that we had a stable
business, and that one could be made from the
Macintosh market, because it’s a great market.
So what did we do? Well, the most important thing
was profits. In the end, that’s what a lot of people look
at. And the first full quarter of the new management
team, Apple delivered profits of $47 million […]. And
in the next fiscal quarter […] Apple delivered a quarter
with $55 million of profits. [Audience applauds.] This
went a long way to convincing a lot of the skeptics.
And we will be announcing the results of our third
fiscal quarter, the one that just ended at the end of
June, a week from today. And I’m very pleased to tell
you that it will be our third consecutively profitable
quarter. […]
In terms of people, our retention has gone way up.
We’re losing hardly any people from the company
now, and we’re hiring incredibly good people into the
company. We also realigned our distribution channels
[…] and we began an advertising campaign for
brand—around “Think Different”—and for some very
specific product advertising. […] We invested in an
online store. […] We are one of the largest ecommerce
sites now on the internet. […] And that’s terrific.
So the aggregate of all of these things was that the
market value of Apple’s risen from about $1.8 billion a
year ago, to about $4 billion yesterday. I don’t know
what it is today.
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What this means is that people are seeing a stable

business, which is good, and a business that is under
control, which is also good.
So what do they do, then? Well, they don’t send us a
card or anything. They just go onto the next one.
What’s the next one? “Well, if you’ve survived and
you’ve got a stable business, well, what’s your product
strategy? You’re a product-driven company; you
better have a doggone good product strategy.” ✂
When we got to the company a year ago, there were a
lot of products. There were the product platforms—
fifteen product platforms—and a zillion variants of
each one. I couldn’t even figure this out myself. After
about three weeks, I said, “How are we going to
explain this to others when we don’t even know which
products to recommend to our friends?” There was no
way to do it.
So we went back to Business School 101 and said,
“What do people want?” Well, they want two kinds of
products. They want consumer products […] and we
need pro products because our design and publishing
market wants pro products. […] And in each of those
two categories, we need desktop and portable models.
What this told us was if we had four great products,
that’s all we need. And as a matter of fact, if we only
had four, we could put the A team on every single one
of them. And if we only had four, we could turn them
all every nine months instead of every eighteen
months. And if we only had four, we could be working
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on the next generation or two of each one as we’re

introducing the first generation. So that’s what we
decided to do—to focus on four great products.
And the first one that we introduced, of course, was
the desktop pro product, which was the
Power Mac G3. […] The next product was the pro
portable. And as you know, that is our new
PowerBook G3. […] Now, we also announced on May
6th that we are developing a consumer portable
product, and that we will announce it in the first half
of next year. And we’re hard at work on that, and
I think it’s going to be quite nice.
Which brings us to our consumer desktop product and
something we’re going to spend a fair bit of time on
today, which, of course, is the iMac, which combines
the excitement of the internet with the simplicity of a
Macintosh. And that was our goal in this product.
When we got to Apple a year ago, it was very clear
within the first month that Apple was walking away
from the consumer market because Apple didn’t have
a compelling product under $2,000 and had not had
one for some time. We immediately began a program
to build the most kickass consumer product we knew
how to do—and that’s the iMac.
So we’re really, really happy with this thing. It’s
gorgeous. We believe it’s going to change the way
computers look and should look. ✂
So we’ve survived. We’ve demonstrated that we’ve got
a really great, stable business. We’ve laid out the road
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map of a fantastic product strategy. And we’re getting

apps back on the Mac in unprecedented numbers. So,
what more could you ask for?
Well, there’s always something, right? The last one is
growth! “Well, if all this stuff’s so good, show me
some growth. How are you going to grow?”
Right. And again: when I hear these things, I think it’s
great, because what it means is we’re building the
layers below and people are looking at the next layer.
[…] What’s the next thing to be skeptical about?
Growth. So what are we going to do about growth?
A year ago, when the new management team got to
Apple, we looked at the marketplace and we said that
although Apple’s market share has declined, it’s still
extraordinarily strong in the design and publishing
market, where Apple’s market share is between 50 and
90, depending on what segment you look at. And
[market share is also strong] in the education market,
where Apple owns over half of the installed base and
about 35 percent of the new selling units—bigger than
anybody else.
What we didn’t say was that Apple had declined
rapidly in the consumer market, a market that it
invented. Apple invented the market for selling
computers to consumers, and yet it had failed to come
out with compelling products at consumer price
points for several years. So even though we didn’t talk
about it, we began a program to get back into the
consumer market with a vengeance. And this is where
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we see a tremendous amount of growth for ourselves.

We are doing extremely well in the design and
publishing market, and starting to do much better in
the education market—but adding the consumer
market to that will make both of those even stronger.
And we’re going to do it with the iMac. ✂
There is no brand in the computer industry that is
remotely as strong as Apple’s. Apple’s brand around
the world is right up there with Disney and Sony and
Nike in terms of recognition and in terms of consumer
loyalty. Now, it’s also worth pointing out that the
other three brands on this slide have all had serious
problems. Look at Disney when Michael Eisner got
there. Look at Nike and Sony over the last half-dozen
years. But when these companies have straightened
out their problems, their brands have come back
stronger than ever. Brands take decades to build. And
we think we have one of the best in the world. ✂
We believe that as the price points come down, as the
consumer market blossoms, design and fashion
become even more important. Let me give you an
example. This is [an image of] the most popular
watch in the world. And it’s popular not because it
tells time better than any other watch. It’s popular
because of its design. I’ll give you an interesting
statistic: ten years ago, the average American owned
one watch. Because of design entering the watch
market, today the average American owns seven
watches. OK? Seven watches because of design.
Because of fashion.
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Now, when we dream, we dream of this. Right?

[Audience laughs.] And one of the great joys that
I found at Apple a year ago was the best industrial
design team I’ve ever seen in my life. The designs for
the new PowerBook G3 and the iMac—they’re all done
inside Apple by some brilliant, brilliant, super
hardworking people. And you’re going to see a
continual stream of very innovative design out of
Apple—I think the best in the industry by a mile. ✂
These are four incredibly powerful, unique,
compelling assets: the brand, the installed base,
especially in the consumer and education markets, the
ability of our design to really take these products into
that consumer space of fashion, and the fact that our
products are dramatically simpler to set up and use
than our competition’s. […]
So, again, going back to Abraham Maslow: he created
his hierarchy of needs, and we’ve borrowed it today to
take a look at a hierarchy of skepticism that’s followed
us for the last year as we’ve slowly demonstrated, step
by step, that Apple is coming back in a very big way.

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In the queen’s chair from A Bug’s Life.

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Steve kept this snow globe in his home office.

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Email to Pixar Employees

“A Bug’s Life Sweeps.”
From: Steve Jobs
To: Pixar
Subject: A Bug’s Life Sweeps Thanksgiving Weekend
Box Office
Date: November 30, 1998, 7:19 a.m.
A Bug’s Life swept the Thanksgiving box office with a
record-setting $46.5 million for the five-day weekend,
breaking the previous Thanksgiving weekend record
of $45 million set by Disney’s 101 Dalmatians (live-
action) in 1996. A Bug’s Life also set a new three-day
(Fri-Sat-Sun) Thanksgiving weekend record of
$33.6 million.

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The exit polls are exceptionally positive. The audience

was equally split between males and females (very
high ratio of males), and 16% were the highly-
desirable non-family “date” audience (we didn’t get
this high of a non-family audience for Toy Story until
two weeks after its opening). Audiences loved A Bug’s
Life, and are telling their friends to see it.
As for the competition, over the five-day weekend
Rugrats drooled a respectable $27.6 million, Babe: Pig
in the City squealed across the finish line with just
$8.5 million, and Antz was squashed with just
$1.2 million.
Congratulations go to John, Andrew, Darla, Kevin and
entire A Bug’s Life crew. What a special present you
have given the world. All of us at Pixar feel so proud to
be associated with such excellence. Congratulations
also go to Jan, Karen and the Geri’s Game crew for
their magical short (audiences around the country
loved it too).
If you divide our Thanksgiving weekend box office of
$46.5 million by the average ticket price of around $6 -
- it tells us that around 7.5 million people saw our
movie this weekend!! Few people ever get the chance
to make 7.5 million people laugh so much and feel so
good. Or 450 people at Pixar feel so proud.
Congratulations.
Steve
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Email to Apple Employees

“We Did It!”
From: Steve Jobs
To: Apple employees
Subject: We did it!
Date: December 23, 1998, 9:31 a.m.
Yesterday the market data was released, and …. (drum
roll) …. iMAC WAS THE NUMBER ONE SELLING
COMPUTER IN THE U.S. during the month of
November in U.S. retail and mail order channels,
outselling all other brands!!
iMac captured 7.1% of unit volume and 8.2% of dollar
volume, propelling Apple’s overall market share in
retail and mail order to double from about 5% in
August to 10% in November. You can read all about it
on our website (www.apple.com in hot news section)
or in today’s Wall Street Journal (US Edition, page A1
and B7).
This incredible achievement is the result of our hard
work. Please take a moment and reflect on how far we
have come in the last 18 months. It’s amazing what we
have all accomplished together. I am very proud of our
team, and feel so excited to be at Apple. Have a
wonderful holiday.
Steve
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Email to Apple Employees

“Macintosh Turns Fifteen.”
From: Steve Jobs
To: Apple employees
Subject: Macintosh Turns Fifteen
Date: January 24, 1999, 7:49 p.m.
Fifteen years ago today, on January 24, 1984, Apple
launched the first Macintosh at Flint Center in
Cupertino, California. Its revolutionary ease of use
made computing accessible to “the rest of us”, and its
infusion of graphics and typography placed the
Macintosh at the intersection of computer science and
liberal arts. The Macintosh went on to become the
second revolution in personal computing (the Apple II
was the first), and its revolutionary ideas and benefits
spread beyond Apple - they have changed the face of
an entire industry and touched hundreds of millions
of people around the globe. Apple has a lot to be
proud of here.
While I am not normally one to look back, today is a
good day to remember Apple’s legacy, which is to
bridge the gap between sophisticated technology and
“the rest of us” who make up most of humanity. It’s
our job to make complex technology easy to use and
fun to use. The need for this bridge is even greater
today than it was in 1984 when the Macintosh
debuted. Back then, users didn’t have to deal with the
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complexities of connecting to networks and the

Internet, setting up email, managing device drivers
and init files, and all of the other things that drive
today’s computer users mad.
The computer world shows no signs of getting simpler
as we enter the coming century. And no other
company has yet taken Apple’s place as the bridge
builder. As we return to our roots and once again
begin delivering simpler and better ways to use
computers, Apple’s future looks both bright
and secure.
It’s been an amazing journey so far, yet we have
barely begun.
Steve

Email from Steve to Himself

“Apple’s Reason For Being.”
Steve often captured his thoughts by
emailing himself notes.
From: Steve Jobs
To: Steve Jobs
Subject: Apple’s reason for being
Date: October 29, 2000, 4:39 p.m.

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Apple is the world’s premier company at building high

technology products that are easy to learn and use by
mere mortals. Beginning over 20 years ago, Apple has
consistently set the standard for easy to use computer
systems and software. Why do we do this? Because we
are in love with the potential for personal computers
to enhance and enrich the lives of regular people - not
just with spreadsheets and databases, but
with creative
We’re a creatively driven company in everything we
do. From breakthrough product features and
operating systems to culturally leading product design
and advertising. Heck, we INVENTED the personal
computer, spawned desktop publishing and are now
bringing desktop movies to millions. And our
engineers are hard at work on several more exciting
breakthroughs you’ll see in 2001.
Apple marries state of the art technology with Apple’s
legendary ease-of-use to create products that enable
users to do more
Apple is the world’s premier bridge builder between
mere mortals and the exploding world of high
technology. Apple enables mere mortals around the
world to grasp by making it easy to learn and use
Apple is the premier company in the world at making
the exploding world of high technology easy to learn
and use, thereby enabling mere mortals to enrich their
lives using it.
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Demystified technology, it will have a much greater

impact than any other thing we can do. The stores
need to be thought of as a mecca for understanding
technology and making all of the digits a part of your
life. All things digital, digital music, digital
photography, people who’ve migrated to broadband,
people/families who want to build a home network

Speech to Pixar Employees

“Hopefully we captured a bit of Pixar’s soul in
this building.”
In November 2000, Steve officially opened Pixar’s
headquarters building in Emeryville, California.
I just wanted to say a few words as we sort of come
together to live here. You know, I have seen this
building, every square millimeter of this building, in
almost every stage of its planning and development
and construction—except for one thing, which is
I have never seen people in it. It makes all the
difference. This big space here looks pretty big
without people in it, and with all of us in it, it looks
just right.
We are moving from Point Richmond, where we have
lived for eleven years, to our new home here, where
I think we are going to live forever. We have land to

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expand here, and I think a lot of us will spend the rest

of our corporate lives here.
We are moving from four buildings to one. One of the
things people have said this morning is they are seeing
people for the first time that work at our company.
That’s both startling and kind of exciting. We have
designed this building to be a more urban
environment—that’s what this is, this is Town Square
right here—and it’s a place for you to meet people you
have never met before, a place for us to interact and
collaborate, which is really the basis of our success. So
it’s a very different feeling to get us all into one
building, and yet provide us a nice park so we can get
away from everybody else when we need to.
We bought this land four years ago. It was a giant Del
Monte Fruit Cocktail factory. It had been abandoned
and was decrepit. It was falling apart, and for some
reason, we saw the land underneath it that no one else
saw. We bought it. We bought sixteen gorgeous acres
of land, which is one of the rare large parcels of land
left in the Bay Area.
Deciding what building to build was really hard.
When you are in rented buildings, it is easy because
they don’t define who you are—they define who the
landlord is! But when you decide to design your own
building, you have to ask the question, “Who are we?”
Because you want to capture some of the soul of the
company in the building and reflect who we are.

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The design proceeded much like one of our films.

First, a treatment; throw it away. Then another; throw
it away. And finally, one that is worth developing—and
then zillions and zillions of iterations, model after
model after model, detail after detail. We drove our
architects crazy. And three years of development—
again, much like one of our films.
And hopefully we captured a bit of Pixar’s soul in this
building. Our architects did an amazing job. This is
also a hand‑made building. All the steel is hand-joined
on this site and bolted together, not welded. Just the
drawings to define every connection for every place
where steel is bolted to steel were twenty-five hundred
pages. Every brick was custom hand‑made, with an
old, not-seen-today process, and then hand-laid on the
site. John [Lasseter] even laid a brick—right over
there. And every floorboard was hand-laid and sanded
on the site. This is a handmade building, just like one
of our films.
And the workers discovered that this crazy owner was
letting them build a building like they always had
dreamed of, like none other built these days. And they
brought their families to the construction site on
weekends to see their craftwork like no one else is
doing today—just like all of us feel about our films.
And though a little blood was spilled, no one was
seriously hurt building this building, just like one of
our films.
This land and building and grounds cost just shy of
$100 million, about the same as it costs to make one of
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our films. This equals around one year’s salary and

benefits for everybody in our studio: to build this
whole place, to buy the land, to build the grounds. We
are making this investment in our future because we
want the best place in the world to support the best
talent in the world making the best animated features
in the world.
And we paid for it in cash. We have no debt on this
building. We own it. Basically, this building was paid
for with the profits we made from A Bug’s Life. And we
still have over $200 million of cash in the bank. This
building will be a solid investment, just like one of
our films.
Pixar’s home was in Point Richmond for eleven years.
Now our home is here, and many of us will spend the
remainder of our professional lives here.
We are having an open house and holiday party here
on Saturday, December 9, in the afternoon and early
evening, when you can bring your family to see our
new home. This home has been lovingly built by
talented workers; the building has good karma
already. But its purpose is not just to be a cool
building or to impress anyone on the outside. It is to
house and inspire the most talented group of
filmmakers in the world—that’s you. And so today, the
architects, Tom, Craig, and the amazing crew that we
have here at the company, all of the facilities crew and
the I.S. [Information Systems] crew, and everybody
who has moved us seamlessly over the last week, we
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are officially turning the building over to you: the

creative owners.
So go make some history here!

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Steve, 2000.

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Rehearsing for Macworld keynote, Tokyo, 2001.

Speech Introducing the First Apple Store

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“Wouldn’t it be great if when … you had any questions,

you could ask a Genius?”
In May 2001, Steve recorded a private tour of the first
Apple Store for an audience of software developers. He
had once suggested that the Genius Bar be called the
Geek Bar.
[From the sidewalk outside the store]
Hi, I’m Steve Jobs, and I’m here at Tysons Corner Mall
in Virginia, right outside of Washington, D.C. And I’m
standing in front of this wood barricade we’ve built in
front of our first retail store, that’s going to open in
six days. Now, nobody’s seen inside here yet. And I’d
like to take you inside for a secret little private tour.
[Beckons toward the store]
So come on in. Now, this is our store. And the store’s
divided into four parts. The first quarter of the store
has our home section, with great home and education
products. And our Pro section, with all our great Pro
products. Every product we make is in this first 25
percent of the store. You can see the whole
product line.
So come on over here. Let me show you what we’ve got
going in the home section. ✂
We decided carrying our own products wasn’t enough,
so we’re carrying six digital camcorders, six digital
cameras, six MP3 players, and six handheld
organizers. So you can come in here, and not only can
you buy these digital devices, but you can actually
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hook them right up to the Macs and take them for

a spin.
Wouldn’t it be great if when you went to buy a
computer—or after you bought a computer—if you
had any questions, you could ask a Genius? Well,
that’s what we’ve got. This is called the Genius Bar.
I’m not a Genius, but I’ll stand behind here. There’ll
be somebody here who can do service right in the
store and who could answer any questions you’ve got
about your Mac or any of the peripherals or software
that work with it. And if that person doesn’t know the
answer, they’ve got a hotline to call us in Cupertino at
Apple headquarters, where we have somebody
who does.
But maybe the most exciting part of the back of the
store is our theater. We’ve got an exceptional rear
projection screen. We can play our latest commercials
back here, we can play some incredible videos back
here, and of course we can play iTunes visualizations
back here.
One last thing I want to show you is all our great
software. Look at this stuff. We have over three
hundred titles, from games to the most sophisticated
pro applications. There’s something for everybody.
We can’t wait to feature your software right here, in
every single one of our stores. So go write some more
for us, and we’ll build more shelves for as much as you
can write.
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Take care.

Email to Apple Employees

“Message from Steve.”
From: Steve Jobs
To: Apple employees
Subject: Message from Steve
Date: September 17, 2001, 7:15 a.m.
Team,
Last week’s devastating and tragic events have
touched everyone at Apple. We are all grieving for the
victims and their families. Thankfully, no Apple team
members were among them. I know many of you have
taken time to support various relief efforts, give
blood, and support those around you. We all
appreciate your extra efforts to do so.
I want to let you know that Apple is donating one
million dollars to the families of the firefighters,
police and other emergency response personnel who
lost their lives, through the American Red Cross
Disaster Relief Fund. In addition, we will donate one
iBook to each of these families with children this
holiday season.
Also, today we are announcing the cancellation of
Apple Expo 2001, which was scheduled to take place
in Paris on September 26-30. We are very sorry to
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disappoint our customers and developers, but their

safety must be our primary concern at this time. Apple
is a very visible American company, and having a
highly publicized event at this time would
be irresponsible.
We are also taking extra precautions to insure our
safety. Apple security will remain on heightened alert
at all our facilities around the world for the
foreseeable future. Please immediately report any
suspicious events or personnel to security.
It’s going to take time for the world to return to
“normal”, and some things will never return to the
way they were. The next few months may be rocky.
Please take the time you need for your families, and
please lean on one another. Together, we will all get
through this.
I want to commend everyone for their efforts
throughout this difficult time. As always, I am very
proud of this team.
Steve

Email to Apple Employees

“Excellence.”
Steve said this was his favorite quote.
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From: Steve Jobs

To: Apple employees
Subject: Aristotle
Date: January 20, 2002, 12:47 p.m.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not
an act, but a habit. – Aristotle

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Steve’s iPod. “Bring the joy of music to even more people.”

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A treasured gift Steve kept in his office.

Emails from Steve to Himself

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7/11/23, 9:05 PM Make Something Wonderful | Steve Jobs

“This song moves me like few others.”

Steve drafted playlists of his favorite songs and why he
loved them in 2003, the year the iTunes Music
Store debuted.
From: Steve Jobs
To: Steve Jobs
Subject: Re: Celebrity Playlist
Date: April 16, 2003, 9:02 p.m.
1. Sligo River Blues, In Christ There is No East or
West, John Fahey
2. If I Laugh, Cat Stevens (or Trouble)
3. Every Grain of Sand, Bob Dylan
4. Baby Let Me Follow You Down, Bob Dylan, 66
tour,live, She Belongs to Me, Desolation Row, Just Like
A Woman, It’s All Over Now Baby Blue
5. Vince Guaraldi, Never Never Land
6. Sweet Jane, Velvet Underground
7. Here Comes the Sun, Beatles (Ticket To Ride,
Yesterday, Nowhere Man, In My Life)
8. Little Green, Joni Mitchell
9. Camelot, Lerner & Loewe
10. Suite Judy Blue Eyes, Crosby, Stills & Nash
(Wooden Ships)
11. Neil Young, Harvest
12. Hey Joe, Jimi Hendrix
13. How Long Has This Been Going On, Audrey
Hepburn, Funny Face
14. Good Shepherd, Jefferson Airplane
15. You’re Still My Woman, B.B. King
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16. For A Dancer, Jackson Browne

17. New Morning, Bob Dylan
18. Take Me to the River, Talking Heads,
Stop Making Sense
19. Angel From Montgomery, Bonnie Raitt
20. Father and Son, Cat Stevens
21. Minor Swing, Django Reinhardt
22. Where to Now St. Peter, Elton John
23. Colors/Dance, George Winston
24. The Dark End of the Street, James Carr
25. Come On, Let’s Go, Ritchie Valens
26. Tupelo Honey, Van Morrison
27. Judy Garland, Over the Rainbow, Live

From: Steve Jobs

To: Steve Jobs
Subject: Celebrity Playlist--writeup
Date: December 27, 2003, 4:58 p.m.
For a Dancer
I first heard this on my car radio while driving down
Highway 280, and I started crying. I had not listened
to much Jackson Browne at that time, and was just
blown away by the lyrics. I have since listened to many
more of his songs, but this one is still my favorite.
Little Green
This is an autobiographical song by Joni Mitchell
about giving a daughter up for adoption. Maybe it’s
because I’m adopted, but this song moves me like few
others. After I realized what this song was about, I cry
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every time I hear it. She wrote it when she was young,
and it remains one of the best of her many great songs.
I Get A Kick Out of You
From Ella’s incomparable Cole Porter
Songbook album.
All I Have to Do is Dream
This song was a hit when I was very young, and
I remember listening to it as my parents listened to it,
which brings back great memories. It was a transition
period from the 50s to the 60s -- Buddy Holly was
dead, the Beatles hadn’t arrived yet, and groups like
The Everly Brothers filled the gap nicely.

Email from Steve to Himself

“This is what it feels like to be living in—and
creating—a Golden Age.”
Steve sent himself notes to prepare for a talk on Pixar.
From: Steve Jobs
To: Steve Jobs
Subject: Re: Golden Age
Date: May 3, 2003, 5:08 p.m.
Websters Dictionary states that the term Golden Age
dates from 1555 and means: a period of great
happiness, prosperity, and achievement.
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Pixar is in a Golden Age. With our soon-to-be-released

Finding Nemo, we have completed 5 computer
animated feature films, with three more in some stage
of production. All original Pixar stories. Our track
record of 4 for 4, and hopefully 5 for 5, is unparalleled
in the history of animation, and indeed in the history
of film.
Our real Golden Age is being fueled by the maturing of
our people. I have seen Pete, Andrew and Lee grow
into the second generation of Pixar Directors, all with
the experience of leading the creation of a feature film
under their belts. I have seen Darla and Graham grow
into our industry’s best producers, producing our
films with greater and greater mastery. I have seen
Rob Cook and his R&D team ushering in a new, second
golden age of amazing new Pixar science and
technology. And I see more directors and producers
coming right behind them. In every aspect of our
studio, I see the kind of sprouting that signals
Springtime—and I think the world, which is already
amazed at what we have done so far, is going to be
even more amazed at what’s in store for them in the
coming years.
Tonight is a night for celebration, but don’t forget to
pause for a moment and realize that this is what it
feels like to be living in—and creating—a Golden Age.
And, 25 years from now, when a kid—maybe even your
grandkid—asks you what it was like to be at Pixar
during its Golden Age, you’ll know—if you can only
find the words to describe it.
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Interview with Leslie Berlin

“I think I got lucky and had the chutzpah to call these
guys up.”
On May 24, 2003, Steve spoke with Leslie Berlin about
his mentor Robert Noyce. Noyce co-invented the
microchip and co-founded Intel and Fairchild
Semiconductor, the first successful silicon microchip
company in Silicon Valley.
Leslie Berlin: Why’d you decide to join the Grinnell
College board?
Steve Jobs: Bob asked me to do it. I went to a small
liberal arts college. Six months officially, and for two
years I was kind of a drop-in. And so I’ve always had a
soft spot for private liberal arts colleges. You really
only find them in America, and they’re a very
wonderful thing.
It was a fun experience. And the funnest part was just
traveling down with Bob. We almost died together;
I don’t know if you know about this.
LB: No.
SJ: Well, Bob’s a pilot, as you know. He flew all kinds
of planes. He bought a Seabee. Have you heard
about that?
LB: I’ve heard that he had this plane.
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SJ: It was a Seabee. And a Seabee was a World War II

plane. They stopped making them probably at the end
of the forties. And there were like a hundred of them
left. It was a plane whose fuselage was in the shape of
the hull of a boat. Its wings were on top; and it could
land on a runway or in the water.
He bought one. He had just gotten it, and he called me
up and said, “Hey, there’s a Seabee fly-in up at Trinity
Lake. […] Do you want to go?” I said, “Sure. Let’s go.”
So, we get in the Seabee plane […] and we land in Lake
Shasta. We got out and went for a swim, and it was
really great. Really great. So we take off again, and it’s
getting kind of hot. Bob pulls a lever that he thinks is
the air ventilation. But he pulls the wrong lever. He
pulled the lever that locks the wheels.
We get to Trinity Lake, and he’s landing on the runway
[…] and we hit the tarmac. The wheels on the wings, of
course, are locked, so the plane immediately lunges
forward. Sparks start flying. We very nearly flipped
the plane over. It was only due to his excellent piloting
that we survived.
And I was imagining, as this was all happening, the
headlines: “Bob Noyce and Steve Jobs Killed in Fiery
Plane Crash.” I think it was pretty close. ✂
SJ: I was young. I was in my late twenties. And Bob
was—gosh, he must have been in his later forties.
LB: He was born in ’27.

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SJ: Yeah, and I was born in ’55. So almost thirty years.

Yeah, so, he was in his—well, Jesus—in his early fifties.
And now that I’m approaching fifty, it’s easy to see
how people in their fifties know more than people in
their twenties.
He just kind of tried to give me the lay of the land and
tried to give me a perspective that I could only
partially understand.
I think he was interested in what someone in their
twenties thought too. And he was fascinated by the
personal computer. The personal computer and Intel
had nothing to do with each other at that time. So he
was fascinated by that stuff. That was it. So we just, we
just became buddies.
LB: Do you recall any specific conversations or any
situations where you were thinking one thing and he
was suggesting otherwise, and you did or
didn’t listen?
SJ: The things I remember are not the business things.
It’s actually more personal stuff. I remember him
trying to teach me how to ski better. I remember when
I got fired from Apple, he was one of the first people to
call me.
He just had a lot of soul. And I think he was the soul of
Intel. Gordon [Moore] and Andy [Grove] are fantastic,
but I think Bob, Bob was the soul of that place. ✂
LB: One of my favorite quotes from him is where he
says that optimism is the essential ingredient
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for innovation.
SJ: Well, it’s optimism and passion, because it’s really
hard. And if you don’t really, really care about what
you’re doing, you’re gonna give up if you’re a sane
person—because it’s just super hard. I’m sure it was
extremely hard for him at times. ✂
SJ: When you get into your fifties—I’m forty-eight,
I’m kind of there, pretty much—you’re not grabbing
the pencil out of the twenty-five-year-old’s hand to do
it better than they are. If you’re smart, you’re hiring
twenty-five-year-olds who are smarter than you. You
know things that they don’t know, and they know
things that you don’t know, and it all works.
It shouldn’t have been Bob that was designing the
breakthrough chips, and if it was, then he ain’t
running the company. His job was to, number one,
recruit; number two, set an overall direction; and
number three, you know, inspire and cajole and
persuade. And if that’s what he’s known for, that
means he’s doing the job. He had his day when he was
the young hotshot, and he came through. But that
wasn’t the job. ✂
SJ: I called up him and Andy and a few other people,
Jerry Sanders [the founder of microchip company
AMD]. I just called them up and I said, “Look, I’m
young and I’m trying to run with this company. I’m
just wondering if I could buy you lunch once a quarter
and pick your brain.”
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And everybody I ever asked said yes. It was nice. Bob

said yes. Andy Grove said yes; that was how I met
Andy. Jerry Sanders said yes. It was pretty wonderful.
I was very, very lucky, because I got to meet and get to
know a little bit of Hewlett and Packard, too.
I sort of feel like that second era of the Valley, the
semiconductor companies kind of leading into the
early computer companies—I got to smell that, and
I always held that very near and dear. And Bob was
sort of why.
LB: Do you think this sort of generational link you’re
describing here, in terms of your own relationship
with Bob and, to a lesser extent, your relationship with
Hewlett and Packard—do you think it’s a feature of
the valley, or do you think you just got lucky and had
the chutzpah to call these guys up?
SJ: Well, I think I got lucky and had the chutzpah to
call these guys up. However, there are other people
who have chutzpah to call people up too. The Google
guys called me up, so I had lunch with them. And so
I think it still happens a little. I don’t think it ever
happened a lot, and I don’t think it happens a lot now.
But I think it still happens—it happened a little, and it
still happens a little. Maybe most people aren’t
interested. They have their own things to worry
about. ✂
SJ: I think there’s a tradition here [in Silicon Valley].
And that doesn’t mean that it’s a well-worn groove
that you drop into. It’s not that easy. But there’s role
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models, and there’s legends, and there’s all sort of

folklore—the kind of thing that makes a culture. And
many people don’t spend the time to learn about it,
which is fine. But some people find themselves in it,
and slowly start to absorb it and get curious as to what
came before them.
LB: And when you think of Bob giving you the lay of
the land, is it along these sorts of lines, in some sense?
SJ: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s sort of like … you
know your olfactory sense is your most poignant sense
in terms of its connection to your memory? You can
smell something, in your thirties, and it’ll take you
right back to when you were seven years old. The gift
that Bob gave me was that connection and sense of
smell, that strong connection back to some wonderful
era of this valley that I lived in but [only] through him
got a very strong sense of what it was.
It’s hard to explain. But if you could sort of transmit—
when you smell that smell, and it takes you back to
when you were seven—if you could give that to
somebody else, that was kind of what he was able to
give to me. And I don’t know how it happens, but you
know it. And I was curious.
LB: Why does that sense of connection matter? Why is
it so important to you?
SJ: There’s a human drama to most everything. You
look at it sometimes, and it seems dry as history. But if
you peel the onion, there’s humanity underneath.
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Just to understand what’s going on now—you can’t

really do that unless you understand how it got here.
There’s a great quote by Schopenhauer. It’s a great
quote. I should pull this up. I’ll get it all wrong. I’ve
got to go up and get it.
[Goes upstairs, grabs Schopenhauer’s On the Suffering
of the World, and then reads from it on the stairs.] “He
who lives to see two or three generations is like a man
who sits some time in the conjurer’s booth at a fair
and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in
succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only
once; and when they are no longer a novelty and cease
to deceive, their effect is gone.” ✂
SJ: The other thing I admired about Bob was that he
gave up the CEO job at Intel. You know, he really did
give it up. He wasn’t trying to run it from a back room.
He understood how important it was to have a
succession, to keep the company going, not have it just
be a one-man show.

Speech at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business

“You never know what’s around the next corner.”
On May 29, 2003, Steve gave a talk to MBA students
about his experience as CEO of Pixar and Apple. Two
years later, he would deliver his seminal Stanford
commencement address on the same campus.
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Pixar is a very different kind of company than Apple.

Apple is a company that has new products every few
weeks. It’s a company where you make ten important
decisions a day, but if some of them are wrong, most of
them are not terribly hard to correct a few months
down the road.
Pixar is a company that has one new product a year, at
best. That’s the holy grail for us: to have a movie a
year, and we are just about there. As CEO, you make a
few important decisions a quarter—maybe three—but
they are very hard to change if you decide you want to
change them.
So, they are very, very different sides of the spectrum.
However, you can look at Apple and say Apple is the
most creative of the technology companies, and you
can look at Pixar and say Pixar is by far the most
technical of the creative companies, and in that sense,
maybe they are striving for some ideal in the middle,
coming from different ends of the spectrum. ✂
If we [Apple] come up with a dozen innovations in a
year, we can maybe advertise four or five of them. We
can’t advertise more than that because, even if we had
all the money in the world, the customer would get
very confused with all these messages coming at them
on TV. What do you do with the other half-dozen
innovations you come up with? You know: six, seven,
eight, nine, ten innovations? You have to
communicate those with the customer at the point of
sale. And it [the existing distribution channel] was not
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capable of that. So we decided to start our own. So

that’s why we got into retail.
We did things a little differently. Our goal in retail was
not just to sell to the 5 percent of people who own our
products today; it was to go for the other 95. And we
decided they would not drive ten miles to look at an
Apple Store if they weren’t at all interested in buying
our products.
We decided we had to ambush them. What that meant
was that we had to go to high-traffic locations and put
stores there. They [customers] didn’t have to take the
risk of driving ten miles to find out they weren’t
interested. They just had to take the risk of walking
ten feet because they were walking by anyway, and
they knew they could escape rapidly if it was
something they hadn’t wanted. So we paid extra
money for great locations and put them on great
streets like University Avenue [in Palo Alto] and the A
[-grade] malls across the country. And the real estate
we’ve got is just A+. ✂
I learned this at Pixar: technology companies and
content companies have absolutely no understanding
of each other. None. It’s worse than you’d ever
imagine. In Silicon Valley, most people think the
creative process is a bunch of guys in their early
thirties sitting on a couch, drinking beer, and thinking
up jokes. Really. They really do.
And yet I’ve watched people at Pixar making these
films, and they work as hard as I’ve seen anybody in a
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technology company ever work. The creative process

is as disciplined as any engineering process I’ve ever
seen in my life. And they’re as passionate about it as
any technical person I’ve ever seen.
On the other hand, the content companies have no
appreciation of the creative process in the technical
companies. They think that technology is something
that you write a check for and buy. That’s it. And they
do not understand that there’s a wide, dynamic range
of capability and elegance. They don’t understand the
creativity in the process. So these are like ships
passing in the night. ✂
The most important lesson I ever learned was that you
have to hire people better than you are. […] In normal
life, the difference in dynamic range from average to
best is usually 30, 40, 50 percent. Twice as good:
rarely. So the difference between an average meal in
downtown Palo Alto tonight and the best one—maybe
it’s two to one. Flight home, if you’re going home for
the holidays: 50 percent difference. Rental cars,
breakfast cereals. I don’t know, pick one.
But I saw that Woz [Apple co-founder Steve
Wozniak]—one guy—having meetings in his head
could run circles around two hundred engineers at
Hewlett-Packard. That’s what I saw. And I thought,
“Wow.” And I didn’t really understand it at first.
Then I started to understand it. It took me about ten
years to actually try to put it into practice. Because
you’d try to hire and find those people. And they’re
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really hard to find. And everyone says they are all

prima donnas. But it turns out that when they work
with each other, they’re not prima donnas. They really
like it. The first time I tried to build that
organization—that was the Mac team. And it really
worked. I saw a team of fifty people do something that
literally hundreds, or thousands, of people at other
companies couldn’t do. And so I’ve since then always
tried to find really great people who love what they are
doing and are extremely good at it. And sometimes
they have experience, and sometimes they’re really
young. They’re diamonds in the rough—and you hire
them and take chances on them. But that’s been the
most important lesson I’ve learned in business: that
the dynamic range of people dramatically exceeds
things you encounter in the rest of our normal lives—
and to try to find those really great people who really
love what they do. ✂
I was basically fired from Apple. And that was really
hard. So I’m sure I learned a lot from that. [Audience
laughs.] I did. I did learn a lot from that. And as a
matter of fact, there would have been no Pixar if that
hadn’t happened. Life’s funny in this way. Sometimes
your greatest strengths are your greatest weaknesses.
Sometimes your greatest adversities, you learn the
most from. I don’t know.
But there wouldn’t be a Pixar if it hadn’t been for that.
But life is funny, you know? I never would have
thought I’d end up back at Apple, but here I am. So it’s
a circus world, and you never know what’s around the
next corner.
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People say you learn more from failures than you do

from successes, and that’s probably true. And I’ve
made more mistakes than most people I know. But
getting older does that [helps you grow] too. You get
married. You know, you have a family. And your
perspective starts to change on things.
When I was young, if I had to fire somebody, I didn’t
think—to be honest, I didn’t think twice about it.
When you get a little older, and maybe you have kids,
you realize that the person you have to fire—even if
they totally screwed up, they should be fired, you
should have fired them months ago, anyone else would
have fired them last year—even so, you realize that
that person is going to have to go home to their wife
and their children and tell them they got fired today
and that they don’t have a job anymore. You
realize that.
So part of it is nothing that you do yourself, no
accomplishments you achieve. It’s just the process of
getting older and kicked around, and maybe a little
wiser in the process. That’s, more than anything,
probably what it is. ✂
[When I returned to Apple in 1997,] the individual
contributors were phenomenal. And I asked a lot of
these guys, “Why did you stay?” And they said,
“Because we bleed six colors.” I heard that from a lot
of people—there were six colors in the old Apple logo.
It was management that was a problem. So we actually
got rid of most of the management team and
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promoted a lot of these young people into

management positions.
And what I found is that nobody in their right mind
wants to be a manager. [Audience laughs.] It’s true. It’s
a lot of work, and you don’t get to do the fun stuff. But
the only good reason to be a manager is so some other
bozo doesn’t be the manager—and ruin the group you
care about.
Really. And if you’ve lived through a bad situation
where you’ve had bad management, you’ll do anything
to not have your group destroyed by that again. And
you will even step up and be the manager yourself,
even though you don’t want to do that.
And I talked a few hundred people into doing that.
And 90, over 90 percent of them have turned into
extraordinary managers. Extraordinary. So that’s
what saved Apple, those people right there. And it’s
been one of the great experiences of my life to have the
privilege of working with them. ✂
There’s a lot of management techniques. I’m sure you
study a lot of management techniques. When I was
younger, it was management by objective. It’s all a
crock. They’re all after-the-fact management
techniques: “You’ve failed, and I know that because we
are going out of business tomorrow.” All after the fact.
“You’ve ruined this department; all the good people
have left. So now I’m firing you.” “You’ve
accomplished none of your objectives.” It
doesn’t work.
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And a really smart guy I met a long time ago who used
to teach at Disney University—Walt Disney recruited
him to run Disney University, actually—he told me
about his point of view, which I’ve remembered to this
day. He called it management by values. What that
means is you find people that want the same things
you want, and then just get the hell out of their way.
The way I describe it is, let’s say we’re all going to take
a trip together. The first thing is to figure out where
we all want to go. The worst thing is if we all decide we
want to go to different places. You can never manage
it. [Pointing] You want to go to New Orleans. You
want to go somewhere else. I want to go to San
Francisco. You want to go to San Diego.
It doesn’t work. Right?
But if we all want to go to San Diego, that’s the key.
Then we can argue about how to get there. [Pointing]
You think it’s better to walk. You think it’s better to
take a plane. You think it’s better to take a train. We’ll
figure that [part] out. Because if I say, “I want to take
a train to San Diego,” and somebody goes, “That’s
really stupid! It will take three days! We can fly and be
there in an hour,” I’ll go, “Oh. OK.” Because, actually,
I want to go to San Diego. So if I can get there in an
hour [flying], I’ll ditch my idea about the train.
That’s what management by values is. It’s finding
people with passion that want to go to San Diego—
who want to go to the same place you want to go to!
Right? That’s the key.
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And so, what happened at Apple was that Apple’s

goals used to be to make the best personal computers
in the world. And then the second goal was to make a
profit so we could keep on doing number one. Right?
What happened was that, for a time, those got
reversed: “We want to make a bunch of money, and so,
OK, to do that, we’re going to have to make some good
personal computers.” But it didn’t work. It never
works. And so things start to fall apart.
Those subtle changes in values can mean everything.
The higher up in the organization they are, the more
pervasive influence they have. So if you want to
preserve something, what you want to do is have a
good enough place to go, that’s got a long enough
focal length that it will survive over time, that
everybody agrees on—and not codify how you’re
going to get there. So that each generation can argue
anew about the best way to get to San Diego, and
they’re not just taking your footsteps on how you got
there. You see what I’m saying? But all the people
want to go to the same place.
And that’s one of my mantras around Apple and Pixar:
that recruiting is the most important thing that you
do. Finding the right people—that’s half the battle.

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Well, thank you guys for the chance to be with you.

I appreciate it very much.

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“He’s my favorite of all time.”

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Steve’s harmonicas. He learned to play while hitchhiking.

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In his home office, 2004.

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Drafting the Stanford Commencement Address

In January 2005, John Hennessy, the president of
Stanford, asked Steve to give the commencement address
to that spring’s graduating class. Steve agreed.
On and off for the next six months, Steve took stabs at
writing his talk. He emailed stories and memories to
himself. He asked friends, Apple colleagues, and the
screenwriter Aaron Sorkin for their thoughts. In the end,
however, he wrote the speech on his own. Even three days
before the event, Steve was unsatisfied with his talk. He
sent it to a friend, warning, “I’ll send it to you, but
please don’t puke. I never do stuff like this.” He was still
refining the speech the morning that he gave it.
Uncharacteristically, Steve read from the lectern, rather
than memorizing his text (as he did with Apple keynotes)
or speaking extemporaneously from a few scrawled notes
(as he did in nearly every other talk).
Steve was happy with the speech—he emailed himself a
copy a few days after giving it—but he generally
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deflected the praise that he received for it. “I bought it on

CommencementSpeeches.com,” he joked to one person.
The commencement address has been viewed millions of
times online and is included in school curricula around
the world. The following are ideas Steve emailed to
himself as he drafted the talk.
From: Steve Jobs
To: Steve Jobs
Subject: Commencement
Date: January 15, 2005, 10:35 a.m.
This is the closest I’ve ever come to graduating
from college
- they’ve asked me to say a few things today that you
can learn from
- I should be learning from you
1. Habits are very powerful things
- 20 years - now until you’re 42
- meditate 20 minutes a day
- walk to work (30 minutes × 2 = 1 hour/day ×
5 days/week
= 250/yr × 20 years = 5000hrs / 10 hours per day = 500
days = >1 year
2. You are what you eat
- how many cows, chickens, milk, soda, coffee
- fasting (jesus) 1 day per week
3. Curiosity
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- autobiography of a yogi quote “what is miraculous is

all around us”
4. When I was 20 years old I took classes here just as
Apple was getting started
- no money
- my wife and I donating in your name one free
scholarship per year for offbeat student
You are going into a crazy world
- nuclear, biological weapons, less than great
leadership, etc Gandhi quote - become the change you
want to see in the world
So, I’m going to focus on you - your inner world - how
you approach your life

From: Steve Jobs

To: Steve Jobs
Subject: Stanford Speech
Date: May 1, 2005, 11:10 p.m.
I never graduated from college. Matter of fact, this
right here is the closest I’ve ever got to a college
graduation. So, if you’re foolish enough to listen to me
today, I want to give you three pieces of advice as you
leave college.
First, when I was around your age I made the public
statement “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Of course
I meant it at the time. Now I am 50 years old, and it’s
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funny how, when you get to be my age, you begin to see

more value in experience. But whether its sheer IQ
points or life’s experience, the first piece of advice
I want to give you is to try to always surround yourself
with people smarter than you. This is how you get
smarter and deeper. It doesn’t matter what their field
is. They can be from a completely different walk of life
than you - in fact, that’s even better. Not long after we
started Apple I hired a genius engineer who was
terribly old at the time - I think he was in his 40s - who
was, in addition to being the best analog engineer on
the planet, was also a revolutionary socialist. He
turned me on to Das Kapital and America’s 60
Families and things I had never been exposed
to before.
You have begun your 20s, and during this decade you
will meet many amazing people. And some great
teachers - mentors - who you will never forget. But
remember, a teacher is someone who stands with you
in the dark and holds their flashlight just long enough
for you to find your own flashlight.
Second,
Third, we are all going to die. You are going to die

Added May 2, 7:20 p.m.

A wise observer of the economic scene once
commented that “what can be left to later, usually is --
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and then, alas, it’s too late.” I don’t want to let that
stand as the epitaph of what has been an unparalleled
period of success for the American economy and of
enormous potential for the world at large.

Added May 5, 6:55 a.m.

STAY CURIOUS
Reed - taking calligraphy - no practical value - learned
about typography, fonts, etc - 10 years later working
on mac - if I had never taken class then no multiple
fonts, proportional spaced multiple fonts on Macs
or PCs
ENDING
When I was your age there was an amazing
publication called The Whole Earth Catalog which
influenced my generation. It was created not far from
where we stand today. They put out several issues, and
then when it had run its course put out a final issue
which, on the back cover had a photograph of a
country road in the morning, the kind you might find
yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous,
with the saying “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” It was
their farewell morsel of wisdom to us all. Stay Hungry.
Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself.
And I wish that for you.
Thank you very much.

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Added May 5, 9:09 a.m.

When I was your age there was an amazing
publication called The Whole Earth Catalog which
influenced my generation. It was created in Menlo
Park, not far from where we stand today. They put out
several issues, and then when it had run its course put
out a final issue. That was 1974, and I was your age.
One the back cover of their final issue was a
photograph of an early morning country road, the
kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you
were so adventurous, with the words: “Stay hungry.
Stay foolish.” It was their farewell jewel of wisdom as
they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have
always wished that for myself. And [now] I wish that
for you. Thank you very much.

From: Steve Jobs

To: Steve Jobs
Subject: You can’t plan to meet the people who will
change your life
Date: June 7, 2005, 11:46 p.m.
You can’t plan to meet the people who will change
your life. I am invited to speak at Stanford’s business
school once or twice a year, and I always try to do it.
I had accepted an invitation to speak one Thursday
late in the afternoon, and I wasn’t feeling very well and
I had a dinner later that evening with some important
customers up at a winery on Page Mill Road. The room
for my talk wasn’t large enough, and all the seats were
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full so some of the students were sitting in the aisles.

One of the professors asked them to clear the aisles in
case a fire marshal should appear, and one girl who
was being evicted quickly sat down in one of the four
seats they had left vacant in the front row for me and
whatever entourage I might be bringing. When
I arrived alone and sat down in the front row, it didn’t
take me long to notice this really cute girl sitting next
to me. I think she was stunned when it was me that got
up to speak. And I knew something was up when I was
staring at her, forgetting what I was talking about
mid-sentence. After my talk, I stayed around to speak
with some students, and she stayed too. But then she
left. I didn’t know who she was, and thought I might
never see her again. So I wound things up and left too,
and I caught up with her in the parking lot. I asked her
if she would have dinner with me on Saturday.
She said yes and gave me her phone number. As I was
walking to my car, I asked myself: “If this was the last
day of my life, would I rather have dinner with the
important customers or her?” I raced back to her car,
just as she was about to drive off, and asked her “How
about dinner tonight?” She said: “Sure,” and we were
married 18 months later. Yea, it might have worked
out if I had waited until Saturday night, and those
customers might have given us a few more orders if
I had shown up.
But who knows, maybe she had a hot date Friday night
and things would have turned out much differently… .
You can’t plan to meet the people who will change
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your life. It just happens. Maybe its random, maybe its

fate. Either way, you can’t plan for it. But you want to
recognize it when it happens, and have the courage
and clarity of mind to grab onto it.

From: Steve Jobs

To: Steve Jobs
Subject: Starting Apple
Date: June 7, 2005, 11:55 p.m.
When my partner, Steve Wozniak, and I started Apple,
most of our friends and our family told us we were
nuts. Woz had a great job designing handheld
calculators at Hewlett Packard and I had a fun job
designing games at Atari. And we were giving them up
to start this company to make a primitive computer on
a PC board that a handful of hobbyists, mostly our
friends, might buy for less than it costs us to make.
I remember talking to Woz, and saying: “We may fail,
but we have no responsibility now, no wives, no kids,
no house payments, nothing. If we don’t do this now,
we never will. We have nothing to lose - the worst we’ll
get out of this is that we’ll have the memories of
having gone for it.” To give ourselves the experience of
participating in what Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard
did-- to start a company. So rather than invest in better
cars, or better apartments, or our bank accounts, we
decided to invest in ourselves.

From: Steve Jobs

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To: Steve Jobs

Subject: Story #3?
Date: June 9, 2005, 10:15 p.m.
The most important thing I’ve ever encountered to
help me make the big choices is to remember that I’ll
be dead soon. I know it sounds a bit dramatic, but it’s
true. And when I remember this, I realize that all of
the expectations and standards and restrictions of
others and society mean nothing in the end. I realize
that I have nothing to lose by following my heart and
intuition, even if I embarrass myself or fail in the eyes
of others. Because I’ll be dead soon. And I realize that
I don’t have forever to decide to find what my intuition
tells me is waiting out there for me.
When I was 17, I read a quote that said something like
“If you live each day as if it was your last, someday
you’ll most certainly be right.” And since I was 17,
I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked
myself “If today was the last day of my life, would
I want to do what I am about to do today?” And when
the answer has been “NO” for too many days in a row,
I know I need to change something in my life.
Another way to think about this is that your life is a
story. It’s hard to see it that way when you’re looking
forward at 22. But imagine yourself as an old person
looking back on your life. Your life will be a story. It
will be your story, with its highs and lows, its heros
and villains, its forks in the road that
mean everything.
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And if you can remember that your life is a story in the

making, it will help you make those important
decisions. When you have to decide between taking
the prestigious job that pays well, or the offbeat job
with no future that makes your heart sing, just
imagine yourself looking back on your life in 50 years
and you’ll know what path is yours. You will give
yourself the right advice. You will intuitively know if
something is part of your story or not.
I’m 50 years old now, and my story is entering its third
act. I can tell you with certainty that those times when
I have followed my gut, heart and intuition …

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At the lectern at Stanford.

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Commencement Address at Stanford University

“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
On June 12, 2005, Steve delivered the
commencement address at Stanford University.
I am honored to be with you today for your
commencement from one of the finest universities in
the world. Truth be told—I never graduated from
college. This is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college
graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from
my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped
out of Reed College after the first six months but then
stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen
months or so before I really quit. So why did
I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was
a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to
put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that
I should be adopted by college graduates, so
everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by
a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out
they decided at the last minute that they really wanted
a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a
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call in the middle of the night asking, “We have an

unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said,
“Of course.” My biological mother found out later that
my mother had never graduated from college and that
my father had never graduated from high school. She
refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only
relented a few months later when my parents
promised that I would go to college. This was my start
in life.
And seventeen years later I did go to college. But
I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive
as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’
savings were being spent on my college tuition. After
six months, I couldn’t see the value in it.
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.
And here I was spending all of the money my parents
had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and
trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary
at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best
decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out,
I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t
interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that
looked far more interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so
I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms. I returned Coke
bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and
I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday
night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna
temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into
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by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to

be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best
calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout
the campus, every poster, every label on every drawer,
was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had
dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal
classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn
how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif
typefaces, about varying the amount of space between
different letter combinations, about what makes great
typography great. It was beautiful, historical,
artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture,
and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical
application in my life. But ten years later, when we
were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all
came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac.
It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If
I had never dropped in on that single course in college,
the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or
proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just
copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer
would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would
have never dropped in on that calligraphy class, and
personal computers might not have the wonderful
typography that they do. Of course, it was impossible
to connect the dots looking forward when I was in
college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards
ten years later.
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Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward;

you can only connect them looking backwards. 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. Because believing that
the dots will connect down the road will give you the
confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you
off the well-worn path. And that will make all
the difference.
My second story is about love and loss. 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
twenty. We worked hard, and in ten years Apple had
grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2
billion company with over four thousand employees.
We had just released our finest creation—the
Macintosh—a year earlier, and I had just turned thirty.
And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a
company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired
someone who I thought was very talented to run the
company with me, and for the first year or so things
went well. But then our visions of the future began to
diverge, and eventually we had a falling-out. When we
did, our board of directors sided with him. So, at
thirty, I was out. And very publicly out. What had
been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it
was devastating.
I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt
that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs
down—that I had dropped the baton as it was being
passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob
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Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly.

I was a very public failure, and I even thought about
running away from the Valley. But something slowly
began to dawn on me—I still loved what I did. The
turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit.
I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so
I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired
from Apple was the best thing that could have ever
happened to me. The heaviness of being successful
was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner
again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter
one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named
NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love
with an amazing woman who would become my wife.
Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer
animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most
successful animation studio in the world. In a
remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, and
I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed
at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance.
And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if
I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting
medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometime
life’s gonna hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose
faith. 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. And that is as true for your work as it is
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for your lovers. 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. Don’t settle. As with all
matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.
And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and
better as the years roll on. So keep looking.
Don’t settle.
My third story is about death. When I was seventeen,
I read a quote that went something like, “If you live
each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most
certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and
since then, for the past thirty-three years, I have
looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself,
“If today were the last day of my life, would I want to
do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the
answer has been “No” for too many days in a row,
I know I need to change something.
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, leaving only what is truly
important. 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.

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About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a

scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a
tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a
pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost
certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that
I should expect to live no longer than three to six
months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my
affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for “prepare to
die.” It means to try to tell your kids everything you
thought you’d have the next ten years to tell them in
just a few months. It means to make sure everything is
buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for
your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening
I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down
my throat, through my stomach, and into my
intestines, put a needle into my pancreas, and got a
few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife,
who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells
under a microscope the doctors started crying because
it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic
cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery,
and thankfully, I’m fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and
I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades.
Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with
a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but
purely intellectual concept.
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to
heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is
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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.
Right now the new is you, but someday, not too long
from now, you will gradually become the old and be
cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is
quite true.
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 out your own
inner voice. 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.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication
called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the
bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow
named Stewart Brand, not far from here in Menlo
Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch.
This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers
and desktop publishing, so it was all made with
typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was
sort of like Google in paperback form, thirty-five years
before Google came along. It was idealistic,
overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The
Whole Earth Catalog, and then, when it had run its
course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s,
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and I was your age. On the back cover of their final

issue was a photograph of an early-morning country
road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on
if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words,
“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” It was their farewell
message as they signed off. 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.
Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
Thank you all very much.

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After the address, Stewart Brand gave Steve a signed catalog.

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Email Exchange Between Steve and an

Apple Customer
“Please ‘reset’ the iPod.”
From: [ ____ ]
To: Steve Jobs
Subject: ipod malfunctioning
Date: July 27, 2005, 11:16 p.m.
Hi, my name is [ ____ ], and my father has an ipod.
recently (1-2 days ago), he was charging his ipod and
then, the next morning, when he checked it, it
wouldn’t turn on, he checked the hold button but it
wasn’t it, so, he realized that the ipod had just “died”.
We live in venezuela and want to know where can we
fix the ipod. I think its still on warranty, because, we
bought it around 11 months ago, so we would like to
know what to do, if theres any store autorized by apple
here in Caracas-Venezuela, so we can take the ipod and
check it to see whats wrong and if you guys can fix it.
well thanks for the help.
[ ____ ]
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

From: Steve Jobs

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To: [ ____ ]
Subject: Re: ipod malfunctioning
Date: July 28, 2005, 7:19 a.m.
Please “reset” the ipod by holding down the center
button and the Menu button at the same time for at
least 5 seconds. This should work.
Steve

Speech to Apple Employees

“We thought we could make a contribution by making
something truly great that we loved.”
The day before the release of the iPhone in 2007, Steve
held a meeting with Apple employees. In his invitation,
he wrote, “We’re launching the most revolutionary and
exciting product in Apple’s history this Friday. And
given Apple’s legacy of breakthrough products, that’s
saying a lot.”
You know, one of the reasons we started doing this
[was] we could see that we were getting better and
better at iPods, and we could see that there was an
opportunity to maybe do the next thing—and what
should it be?
And it wasn’t driven by a bunch of market research or
financial spreadsheets about how big certain markets
were. It wasn’t driven by that at all. It was driven by
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the fact that we all hated our phones. We talked to all

of our friends and all the people we knew, and they all
hated their phones.
And we thought, “This is a really important device,
and everybody hates it. They don’t know how to use
even 10 percent of the features that are on
these phones!”
I mean, I’ll use this as an example: you’ve seen how
slick it is to set up a conference call on an iPhone,
right? You know, almost every phone lets you set up a
conference call. Nobody knows it! They’ll never figure
it out! It’s on page 93 of the manual they didn’t read,
and it’s seven, eight cryptic keys! And you can do it,
and nobody ever does it—because they don’t know it’s
there. And that’s true of feature after feature
after feature.
And what our competence is, is making complex
technology easy to use and self-discoverable. And
we’ve done it in spades on the iPhone. So that’s how
we got here. We thought we could make a contribution
by making something truly great that we loved.
And we’ve done it. We love this thing. And starting
tomorrow at 6 p.m., we’re going to find out if other
people love it as much as we do.

Speech at Macworld
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“Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes

along that changes everything.”
Steve introduced the iPhone on January 9, 2007.
This is a day I’ve been looking forward to for two and
a half years.
Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes
along that changes everything. And Apple has been—
well, first of all, one’s very fortunate if you get to work
on just one of these in your career. Apple’s been very
fortunate. It’s been able to introduce a few of these
into the world.
In 1984, we introduced the Macintosh. It didn’t just
change Apple, it changed the whole computer
industry. In 2001, we introduced the first iPod, and it
didn’t just change the way we all listen to music, it
changed the entire music industry.
Well, today, we’re introducing three revolutionary
products of this class.
The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls.
The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the
third is a breakthrough internet communications
device. So, three things: a widescreen iPod with touch
controls; a revolutionary mobile phone; and a
breakthrough internet communications device.
An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator. An
iPod, a phone … Are you getting it?
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These are not three separate devices; this is one

device. And we are calling it iPhone.
Today … today Apple is going to reinvent the phone,
and here it is. [The screen displays an iPod with a rotary
phone-style dial where the click wheel would be.]
No, actually, here it is. [Slides an iPhone out of
his pocket.]
But we’re going to leave it there for now. [Pockets the
iPhone again.]
So, before we get into it, let me talk about a category
of things. The most advanced phones are called
smartphones. So they say. And they typically combine
a phone, plus some email capability, plus they say it’s
the internet—it’s sort of the baby internet—into one
device. And they all have these plastic little keyboards
on them.
And the problem is that they’re not so smart, and
they’re not so easy to use. So if you kinda make a
Business School 101 graph of the smart axis and the
easy-to-use axis—phones, regular cellphones, are
kinda right there. [Points to a spot indicating “not so
smart, somewhat easy to use.”] They’re not so smart,
and they’re not so easy to use. Smartphones are
definitely a little smarter, but they actually are harder
to use. They’re really complicated. Just for the basic
stuff, people have a hard time figuring out how to
use them.

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Well, we don’t want to do either one of these things.

What we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is
way smarter than any mobile device has ever been and
super easy to use. This is what iPhone is. OK?
So we’re going to reinvent the phone. Now, we’re going
to start … with a revolutionary user interface … the
result of years of research and development, and, of
course, it’s an interplay of hardware and software.
Now, why do we need a revolutionary user interface?
I mean, here’s four smartphones, right? Motorola Q,
the BlackBerry, Palm Treo, Nokia E62—the usual
suspects. And what’s wrong with their user interfaces?
Well, the problem with them is really sort of in the
bottom forty [keys] there. It’s, it’s this stuff right here.
They all have these keyboards that are there whether
you need them or not to be there. And they all have
these control buttons that are fixed in plastic and are
the same for every application.
Well, every application wants a slightly different user
interface, a slightly optimized set of buttons, just for
it. And what happens if you think of a great idea six
months from now? You can’t run around and add a
button to these things. They’re already shipped. So
what do you do? It doesn’t work, because the buttons
and the controls can’t change. They can’t change for
each application, and they can’t change down the road
if you think of another great idea you want to add to
this product.
Well, how do you solve this? Hmm. It turns out, we
have solved it! We solved it in computers twenty years
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ago. We solved it with a bitmapped screen that could

display anything we want. Put any user interface up.
And a pointing device. We solved it with the mouse.
Right? We solved this problem.
So how are we going to take this to a mobile device?
What we’re going to do is get rid of all these buttons
and just make a giant screen. A giant screen. Now, how
are we going to communicate with this? We don’t
want to carry around a mouse, right? So what are we
going to do? Oh, a stylus, right? We’re going to use a
stylus. No. No. Who wants a stylus? You have to get
them and put them away, and you lose them. Yuck.
Nobody wants a stylus. So, let’s not use a stylus.
We’re going to use the best pointing device in the
world. We’re going to use a pointing device that we’re
all born with—we’re born with ten of them. We’re
going to use our fingers. We’re going to touch this
with our fingers. And we have invented a new
technology called multitouch, which is phenomenal. It
works like magic. You don’t need a stylus. It’s far more
accurate than any touch display that’s ever been
shipped. It ignores unintended touches, it’s super
smart. You can do multi-finger gestures on it. And
boy, have we patented it.
So, so, we have been very lucky to have brought a few
revolutionary user interfaces to the market in our
time. First was the mouse. The second was the click
wheel. And now we’re going to bring multitouch to the
market. And each of these revolutionary user
interfaces has made possible a revolutionary
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product—the Mac, the iPod, and now the iPhone. So, a

revolutionary user interface.
We’re going to build on top of that with software.
Now, software on mobile phones is like, is like baby
software. It’s not so powerful. Today we are going to
show you a software breakthrough. Software that’s at
least five years ahead of what’s on any other phone.
Now, how do we do this? Well, we start with a strong
foundation: iPhone runs OS X.
Now, why, why would we want to run such a
sophisticated operating system on a mobile device?
Well, because it’s got everything we need. It’s got
multitasking. It’s got the best networking. It already
knows how to power manage. We’ve been doing this
on mobile computers for years. It’s got awesome
security. And the right apps. It’s got everything from
Cocoa and the graphics, and it’s got core animation
built in, and it’s got the audio and video that OS X is
famous for. It’s got all the stuff we want. And it’s built
right into iPhone. And that has let us create desktop-
class applications and networking, right. Not the
crippled stuff that you find on most phones. This is
real, desktop-class applications.
Now, you know, one of the pioneers of our industry,
Alan Kay, has had a lot of great quotes throughout the
years. And I ran across one of them recently that
explains how we look at this—explains why we go
about doing things the way we do, ’cause we love
software. And here’s the quote: “People who are really
serious about software should make their own
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hardware.” You know, Alan said this thirty years ago,

and this is how we feel about it. And so we’re bringing
breakthrough software to a mobile device for the first
time. It’s five years ahead of anything on any
other phone.

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7/11/23, 9:05 PM Make Something Wonderful | Steve Jobs

“This is going to change everything,” 2007.

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The day Steve introduced the iPhone, 2007.

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In 2007, Apple Computer Inc. was renamed “Apple Inc.”

Interview at the All Things Digital D5 Conference

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“There’s something exciting around the next corner.”

In a rare joint interview, Steve and Microsoft chairman
Bill Gates spoke with journalists Kara Swisher and Walt
Mossberg onstage in May 2007.
Kara Swisher: The first question I was interested in
asking is what you think each has contributed to the
computer and technology industry—starting with
you, Steve, for Bill, and vice versa.
Steve Jobs: Well, Bill built the first software company
in the industry. And I think he built the first software
company before anybody really in our industry knew
what a software company was, except for these guys.
And that was huge. That was really huge. And the
business model that they ended up pursuing turned
out to be the one that worked really well for the
industry. I think the biggest thing was, Bill was really
focused on software before almost anybody else had a
clue that it was really the software that—
KS: Was important?
SJ: That’s what I see. I mean, a lot of other things you
could say, but that’s the high-order bit. And I think
building a company’s really hard, and it requires your
greatest persuasive abilities to hire the best people you
can and keep them at your company and keep them
working, doing the best work of their lives, hopefully.
And Bill’s been able to stay with it for all these years.

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Walt Mossberg: Bill, how about the contribution of

Steve and Apple?
Bill Gates: Well, first, I want to clarify: I’m not Fake
Steve Jobs. What Steve’s done is quite phenomenal,
and if you look back to 1977, that Apple II computer,
the idea that it would be a mass-market machine, you
know, the bet that was made there by Apple uniquely.
There were other people with products, but the idea
that this could be an incredible, empowering
phenomenon—Apple pursued that dream. Then one of
the most fun things we did was [developing software
for] the Macintosh, and that was so risky. People may
not remember that Apple really bet the company. Lisa
hadn’t done that well, and some people were saying
that general approach wasn’t good, but the team that
Steve built even within the company to pursue that,
even some days it felt a little ahead of its time; I don’t
know if you remember that Twiggy disk drive and …
SJ: 128K.
KS: Oh, the Twiggy disk drive, yes.
BG: Steve gave a speech once, which is one of my
favorites, where he talked about, in a certain sense,
“We build the products that we want to use ourselves.”
And so he’s really pursued that with incredible taste
and elegance that has had a huge impact on
the industry.
And his ability to always come around and figure out
where that next bet should be has been phenomenal.
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Apple literally was failing when Steve went back and

reinfused the innovation and risk-taking that have
been phenomenal. So the industry’s benefited
immensely from his work. We’ve both been lucky to be
part of it, but I’d say he’s contributed as much
as anyone.
SJ: We’ve also both been incredibly lucky to have had
great partners that we started the companies with, and
we’ve attracted great people. I mean, so, everything
that’s been done at Microsoft and at Apple has been
done by just remarkable people, none of which are
sitting up here today. ✂
SJ: [When I returned to Apple,] there were too many
people at Apple and in the Apple ecosystem playing
the game of, for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.
And it was clear that you didn’t have to play that game
because Apple wasn’t going to beat Microsoft. Apple
didn’t have to beat Microsoft. Apple had to remember
who Apple was because they’d forgotten who Apple
was. So, to me, it was pretty essential to break that
paradigm. And it was also important that Microsoft
was the biggest software developer outside of Apple
developing for the Mac. So it was just crazy what was
happening at that time. And Apple was very weak, and
so I called Bill up and we tried to patch things up.
BG: And since that time, we’ve had a team that’s fairly
dedicated to doing the Mac applications, and they’ve
always been treated kind of in a unique way so that
they can have a pretty special relationship with Apple.
And that’s worked out very well. In fact, every couple
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years or so, there’s been something new that we’ve

been able to do on the Mac, and it’s been a great
business for us.
SJ: The relationship between the Mac development
team at Microsoft and Apple is a great relationship.
It’s one of our best developer relationships.
KS: And do you look at yourselves as rivals now?
Today, as the landscape has evolved—and we’ll talk
about the internet landscape and everything else and
other companies that have [gone] forward—but how
do you look at yourselves in this landscape today?
WM: Because, I mean, you are competitors in certain
ways, which is the American way, right?
KS: We watch the commercials, right?
WM: And you get annoyed at each other from time
to time.
KS: Although, you know what? I have to confess, I like
PC guy.
WM: Yeah, he’s great.
KS: Yeah, I like him. The young guy, I want to
pop him.
SJ: The art of those commercials is not to be mean,
but it’s actually for the guys to like each other.
Thanks. PC guy is great. Got a big heart.
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BG: His mother loves him.

SJ: His mother loves him. ✂
SJ: There’s a lot of things that happened that I’m sure
I could have done better when I was at Apple the first
time, and a lot of things that happened after I left that
I thought were wrong turns, but it doesn’t matter. It
really doesn’t matter, and you kind of got to let go of
that stuff, and we are where we are. So we tend to
look forward.
And, you know, one of the things I did when I got back
to Apple ten years ago was I gave the museum to
Stanford, and all the papers and all the old machines,
and kind of cleared out the cobwebs and said, “Let’s
stop looking backwards here. It’s all about what
happens tomorrow.” Because you can’t look back and
say, “Well, gosh, you know, I wish I hadn’t have gotten
fired, I wish I was there, I wish this, I wish that.” It
doesn’t matter. And so let’s go invent tomorrow rather
than worrying about what happened yesterday.
KS: We’re going to talk a little bit about tomorrow, but
let’s talk about today, the landscape of how you see the
different players in the market and how you look at
what’s developing now. […] There are many, many
companies that are becoming quite powerful. How do
you look at the landscape at this moment and what’s
happening, especially in the internet space?
SJ: I think it’s super healthy right now. I think there’s
a lot of young people out there building some great
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companies, who want to build companies, who aren’t

just interested in starting something and selling it to
one of the big guys, but who want to build companies.
And I think there’s some real exciting companies
getting built out there. Some next-generation stuff
that, you know, some of us play catch-up with, and
some of us find ways to partner with, and things like
that. But there’s a lot of activity out there now,
wouldn’t you say?
BG: Yeah, I’d say it’s a healthy period. The notion of
what the new form factors look like, what natural
interface can do, the ability to use the cloud, the
Internet, to do part of the task in a complementary
way to the local experience, there’s a lot of invention
that the whole approach of start-ups, the existing
companies who do research—we’ll look back at this as
one of the great periods of invention.
SJ: I think so, too. There’s a lot of things that are risky
right now, which is always a good sign. You can see
through them, you can see to the other side and go,
“Yes, this could be huge,” but there’s a period of risk
that nobody’s ever done it before.
KS: Do you have an example?
SJ: I do, but I can’t say. But I can say: when you feel
like that, that’s a great thing. That’s what keeps you
coming to work in the morning, and it tells you there’s
something exciting around the next corner. ✂

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WM: Five years from now, what’s going to be on that

pocket device?
SJ: I don’t know. And the reason I don’t know is
because I wouldn’t have thought that there would have
been maps on it five years ago, but something comes
along, gets really popular, people love it, get used to it,
and you want it on there. So people are inventing
things constantly, and I think the art of it is balancing
what’s on there and what’s not on there—the editing
function. And clearly, most things you carry with you
are communications devices. You want to do some
entertainment with them as well, but they’re primarily
communications devices, and that’s what they’re
going to be. ✂
KS: Steve? I know you’re working on something, it’s
going to be beautiful; we’ll see it soon.
WM: And you can’t talk about it.
SJ: Yeah.
WM: Bill discusses all his secret plans. You don’t
discuss any.
SJ: I know, it’s not fair. But I think the question is a
very simple one, which is how much of the really
revolutionary things people are going to do in the next
five years are done on the PCs, or how much of it is
really focused on the post-PC devices? And there’s a
real temptation to focus it on the post-PC devices
because it’s a clean slate, and because they’re more
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focused devices, and because they don’t have the

legacy of these zillions of apps that have to run in
zillions of markets.
And so I think there’s going to be tremendous
revolution, you know, in the experiences of the post-
PC devices. Now, the question is how much to do in
the PCs. And I think—I’m sure Microsoft is—we’re
working on some really cool stuff, but some of it has
to be tempered a little bit because you do have, you
know, these tens of millions in our case, or hundreds
of millions in Bill’s case, users that are familiar with
something. You know, they don’t want a car with six
wheels. They like the car with four wheels. They don’t
want to drive with a joystick. They like the
steering wheel.
And so, as Bill was saying, in some cases you have to
augment what exists there, and in some cases you can
replace things. But I think the radical rethinking of
things is going to happen in a lot of these post-PC
devices. ✂
KS: What’s the greatest misunderstanding in your
relationship and about each other? What would you
say would be—this idea of catfight? Which one of
the many?
SJ: We’ve kept our marriage secret for over a
decade now.
KS: Canada. That trip to Canada.
[Audience laughs and applauds.]
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BG: I don’t think either of us have anything to

complain about, in general. And I know that the
projects, like the Mac project, was just an incredible
thing, a fun thing where we were taking a risk. We did
look a lot younger in that video.
SJ: We did.
KS: You looked twelve in the first one.
BG: That’s how I try and look.
SJ: He was twelve.
BG: But no, it’s been fun to work together. I actually
kind of miss some of the people who aren’t around
anymore. You know, people come and go in this
industry. It’s nice when somebody sticks around, and
they have some context of all the things that have
worked and not worked. The industry gets all crazy
about some new thing, you know. There’s always this
paradigm of “the company that’s successful is going
to go away” and stuff like that. It’s nice to have people
seeing the waves and waves of that and yet, when it
counted, to take the risk to bring in something new.
WM: One last question and then we’ll go to
the audience.
KS: Oh, no, he didn’t answer us.
WM: Sorry, what?
SJ: I haven’t answered.
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WM: Oh, I’m sorry.

KS: He only talked about his secret gay marriage, so …
WM: Oh, I thought that was your answer.
SJ: No, that wasn’t my answer. You know, when Bill
and I first met each other and worked together in the
early days, generally, we were both the youngest guys
in the room, right? Individually or together. I’m about
six months older than he is, but roughly the same age.
And now, when we’re working at our respective
companies, I don’t know about you, but I’m the oldest
guy in the room most of the time. And that’s why
I love being here.
WM: Happy to oblige. Happy to oblige.
SJ: And, you know, I think of most things in life as
either a Bob Dylan or a Beatles song, but there’s that
one line in that one Beatles song, “You and I have
memories longer than the road that stretches out
ahead.” And that’s clearly true here.

Email Exchange with Art Levinson

“Sic Transit Gloria.”
In November 2007, Fortune named Steve “CEO of the
Decade.” Art Levinson, the CEO of Genentech and chair
of Apple’s board, sent a congratulatory note.
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From: Art Levinson

To: Steve Jobs
Subject: Fortune
Date: November 27, 2007, 11:26 a.m.
The “Beethoven of business” - not sure it gets any
better than that.
Congratulations!

From: Steve Jobs

To: Art Levinson
Subject: Re: Fortune
Date: November 27, 2007, 12:43 p.m.
Sic Transit Gloria. (All glory is fleeting.)
Steve

Speech to the Press

“Five months ago, I had a liver transplant.”
Steve spoke to the press at a music and media event on
September 9, 2009.
Good morning. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Thank you. [Sustained audience applause.] Thanks.
I know. I’m very happy to be here today with you all.
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As some of you may know, about five months ago,

I had a liver transplant. So I now have the liver of a
mid-twenties person who died in a car crash and was
generous enough to donate their organs. And
I wouldn’t be here without such generosity. So I hope
all of us can be as generous and elect to become
organ donors.
I’d like to take a moment and thank everybody in the
Apple community for the heartfelt support I got, too.
It really meant a lot. And I’d also like to especially
thank Tim Cook and the entire executive team of
Apple. They really rose to the occasion and ran the
company very ably in that difficult period. So thank
you, guys.
Let’s give them a round of applause.
So I’m vertical. I’m back at Apple, loving every day of
it. And I’m getting to work with our incredibly
talented teams to come up with some great new
products for you all in the future.
So it’s, it’s wonderful—and thank you. So today, we get
to talk about music …

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Thinking through the Apple Park design, 2010.

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Steve on the iPad

A week after the introduction of the iPad in 2010, Steve
held a meeting for employees in Apple’s “Town Hall.” He
reflected on what made the device—and the company—
special to him.
The great thing about what we do is we approach it
like—like Pixar approaches their movies. I know that
sounds funny, but I will explain.
Pixar doesn’t make kids’ films. Walt Disney’s
definition of family entertainment was it’s
entertaining to every member of the family: kids, the
teens, the adults. That’s what Pixar’s always tried to
do. There’s a lot of layers in one of their films if you’ve
seen them, and they’re really fun for kids, but they’re
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also incredibly great films for adults, if you’ve seen

Ratatouille or Up or Finding Nemo—or any one of
their films.
And when we sit down to design products [at Apple],
we don’t think, “Oh, well, our target audience is fifteen
to twenty-nine, male.” We don’t think that way. We
think about making a great product for just about
everybody. And the beauty of the products we make is
they can be tailored with software to do
almost anything.
So we weren’t thinking, in the iPad, of any specific
audience, but we’re thinking about everybody. ✂
We don’t have to go home at night and tell our kids
when they say, “Well, what do you do? What did you
do today?” “Well, I worked on our next-generation
server, you know, that’ll be powering something or
other.” We can say, “I worked on our next-generation
iPad. You know, the ones that you use in school.”
And that’s a really wonderful thing.

Speech at the Lucile Packard

Children’s Hospital at Stanford
“One simple question.”
In March 2010, Steve advocated for a bill requiring the
California Department of Motor Vehicles to ask driver’s
license applicants if they want to register as organ
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donors. The bill, which later passed and was signed into
law by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, also
established a state registry for people to donate kidneys
during their lifetime.
Thank you, Governor Schwarzenegger.
Last year, I received a liver transplant. I was very
fortunate, because many others died waiting to receive
one. Last year in California, there were six hundred
and seventy-one liver transplants. But last year there
were also over thirty-four hundred people waiting for
a liver, and over four hundred of them died waiting
in California.
I was almost one of the ones that died waiting for a
liver in California last year. I was receiving great care
here at Stanford, but there were simply not enough
livers in California to go around, and my doctors here
advised me to enroll in a transplant program in
Memphis, Tennessee, where the supply-demand ratio
of livers is more favorable than it is in California here.
And I was lucky enough to get a liver in time. As a
matter of fact, this coming week is my one-
year anniversary.
So why aren’t there more organs available in
California? Because in California, like most other
states in the nation, you must specifically request to
become an organ donor at the Department of Motor
Vehicles, when you’re there to get or renew your
driver’s license. No one asks you if you want to become
a donor. And there’s no marketing campaign to make
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you aware of this opportunity either, so unless you

know about it and unless you specifically ask, nobody
is going to ask you. Nobody is going to give you
this opportunity.
And yet even with this obscure procedure, over 20
percent of Californians have signed up to be organ
donors, which is fantastic.
But imagine what it could be if everyone knew of
this opportunity.
And that’s what the governor’s bill will do. It will
simply require the DMV to ask you if you’d like to
become an organ donor. That’s it. Asking this one
simple question may double the number of transplant
organs available in California. One simple question.
And that’s a very high return on investment, especially
for the over twenty thousand Californians currently
waiting for an organ transplant.
So, Governor, thank you for your leadership on this
bill. And now I’d like to introduce Senator Alquist.
Thank you.

Email to Apple Employees

“Today.”
From: Steve Jobs
To: Apple employees
Subject: Today
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Date: May 26, 2010, 5:59 p.m.

Team,
As most of you already know, at the close of today’s
stock market, Apple’s market cap (stock price ×
number of shares) surpassed Microsoft’s market cap.
As I once said in a company email sent a long time
ago: “Stocks go up and down, and things may be
different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a
moment of reflection today.” And so it is again.
Walt Disney used to say to his team: “We’re only as
good as our next picture.” Well, we’re only as good as
our next amazing new product.
Back to work…
Steve

Email from Steve to Himself

[No Subject]
From: Steve Jobs
To: Steve Jobs
Subject:
Date: September 2, 2010, 11:08 p.m.
I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow
I did not breed or perfect the seeds.
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I do not make any of my own clothing.

I speak a language I did not invent or refine.
I did not discover the mathematics I use.
I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive
of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.
I am moved by music I did not create myself.
When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to
help myself survive.
I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor,
object oriented programming, or most of the
technology I work with.
I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am
totally dependent on them for my life and well being.
Sent from my iPad

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Walking through a mockup for Apple Park, 2010.

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“Technology alone is not enough,” 2011.

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Presenting plans to the Cupertino City Council, 2011.

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Steve on his iPhone, circa 2010–2011.

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Steve’s resignation from Apple, August 2011.

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Key Events
January 1975—Popular Electronics publishes a story
about the Altair 8800, sparking the microcomputer
revolution. That same year, Bill Gates drops out of
Harvard to design programming languages for the
Altair. Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, a club launches for
people who want to build their own computers: the
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Homebrew Computer Club, which Steve occasionally

attends with Steve Wozniak.
April 1976—Steve and Woz co-found Apple Computer to
sell the Apple I, designed by Woz. (A third co-founder,
Ron Wayne, drops out ten days after joining.) Apple
I buyers must supply their own keyboards and television
monitors, as well as know how to write hexadecimal code
and use a soldering iron.
January 1977—Apple incorporates, with ownership split
evenly among Steve, Woz, and the angel investor
Mike Markkula.
April 1977—The Apple II, a more user-friendly
computer, debuts at the West Coast Computer Faire in
San Francisco. At $1,298, the Apple II costs about twice
as much as a year of in-state tuition at the University
of California.
May 1978—Lisa Brennan Jobs is born.
May 1979—Apple’s publications department manager,
Jef Raskin, begins work on an inexpensive computer he
calls Macintosh.
December 1979—During a visit to Xerox’s Palo Alto
Research Center, Steve sees, for the first time, a
networked computer with a mouse, windows, icons,
menus, and multiple typefaces. “I was so blown away,”
he later recalled. He brings the technology, and several
PARC researchers, to Apple.
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September 1980—Steve takes over the high-profile Lisa

computer project. He is removed nine months later, after
the team rebels against his management style.
December 1980—Apple goes public in one of the most
successful initial public offerings in American history up
to that time.
February 1981—Ten years after dropping out of the
University of California, Berkeley, Woz leaves Apple
to re-enroll.
Steve takes over the Macintosh project.
August 1981—Apple faces its first real competition when
IBM introduces its personal computer. IBM’s market
share soon surpasses Apple’s.
January 1983—Time shakes up its “Man of the Year”
tradition to choose the computer as “Machine of
the Year.”
Apple introduces the Lisa computer, priced at $10,000,
targeting business users. It fails in the market.
April 1983—Jobs recruits the Pepsi executive John
Sculley to be Apple’s CEO, using the memorable line, “Do
you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or
do you want to come with me and change the world?”
January 1984—Macintosh debuts.
June 1985—When Macintosh sales fall far short of
projections, Apple lays off 20 percent of employees and
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announces the first quarterly loss in its history.

September 1985—After losing a power struggle with
Sculley, Steve leaves Apple with five Mac team members
in tow. Within days, Apple sues for breach of fiduciary
responsibility and charges Steve with masterminding a
“nefarious” scheme to steal trade secrets for his new
computer company, NeXT.
January 1986—Steve becomes the majority shareholder
in Pixar, after the pioneering computer scientist Alan
Kay introduces him to the company’s leaders, Ed
Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith.
NeXT and Apple settle their lawsuit over NeXT’s launch
and Steve’s recruitment of Mac team members out
of court.
August 1986—Steve attends the premiere of Pixar’s first
animated short, Luxo Jr., at a graphics industry
conference. Luxo Jr. showcases Pixar’s software, but it is
the audience’s standing ovation for the storytelling that
catches Steve’s attention.
October 1988—Steve unveils the NeXT Computer System
at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. A highlight
is the machine’s five-minute performance of a Bach
violin concerto, accompanied by a violinist from the
symphony. The computer did not sell well but had its
fans; Tim Berners-Lee wrote the code for the World Wide
Web on a NeXT computer.

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March 1989—Pixar’s film Tin Toy wins an Oscar for

Best Animated Short, a first for a computer-
animated movie.
March 1991—Steve marries Laurene Powell in a
ceremony at Yosemite.
July 1991—Facing heavy financial pressure, Pixar signs
a deal with Disney that is far more favorable to the
larger company. In exchange for financing up to three
Pixar films, Disney owns the films and their characters,
receives most of the films’ profits, and prohibits Pixar
from pitching to another studio any ideas that
Disney rejects.
September 1991—Reed Jobs is born.
February 1993—Steve ends NeXT’s production of
computers to focus entirely on software.
October 1993—With Apple losing tens of millions of
dollars every quarter, CEO John Sculley, who pushed
Steve out of Apple in 1985, resigns. Apple will cycle
through two more CEOs in the next three years but fail to
regain its footing.
August 1995—Erin Jobs is born.
November 1995—Toy Story, the world’s first full-length
fully animated feature film, earns $29 million in its
opening weekend. It goes on to become the top-grossing
animated movie of the year.

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A week after Toy Story opens, Pixar holds a successful

initial public offering. It was a bold bet placed months
earlier; if Toy Story had been a bust, the IPO would have
been one, too.
December 1996—In need of a new operating system,
Apple acquires NeXT for $427 million. As part the
agreement, Steve rejoins Apple as a special adviser to the
CEO, Gil Amelio.
February 1997—The success of Toy Story and Pixar’s
IPO give Steve leverage to negotiate a more favorable
agreement with Disney. The companies sign a five-
picture deal.
June 1997—In a public show of no confidence in Amelio,
Steve sells a huge block of the Apple shares he received in
the NeXT acquisition. Three months later, Steve is
named interim CEO.
August 1997—Bill Gates appears on a giant video screen
at Macworld to announce Microsoft’s commitment to
developing Microsoft Office for Mac. When the audience
begins heckling, Steve reprimands them: “We have to let
go of […] this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has
to lose.”
September 1997—Apple introduces the “Think
Different” advertising campaign. One year later, it wins
an Emmy Award for Outstanding Commercial.
March 1998—Steve hires Tim Cook as Apple’s chief
of operations.
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July 1998—Eve Jobs is born.

August 1998—Apple debuts the Bondi Blue iMac. The “i”
stands for “internet,” targeting consumers who want to
“surf the web” as easily as catching a wave at Australia’s
Bondi Beach.
October 1998—Apple announces its first profitable year
since 1995.
January 2000—In the last three minutes of his
Macworld presentation, Steve surprises the audience
with the announcement that he will drop “interim” from
his CEO title.
March 2000—The wave of internet optimism crashes.
The NASDAQ loses nearly $1 trillion in a single month,
and hundreds of start-up companies fail in a
“dotcom bust.”
November 2000—Pixar’s new campus in Emeryville,
California, opens. Steve has been so involved in the
headquarters design—from the town hall atrium to the
bathrooms—that people call it “Steve’s movie.”
May 2001—The first Apple retail stores open in Tysons,
Virginia, and Glendale, California.
March 2001—Apple releases OS X, an operating system
based on the NeXTStep software developed at NeXT.
Updated versions of the operating system remain at the
heart of many Apple products today.

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October 2001—Apple introduces the iPod. It’s a new kind

of product for the company, not a computer but a
portable device built to sync with a computer. Apple
built a music player, Steve says, because “We love music,
and it’s always good to do something you love.”
April 2003—Apple opens the iTunes Music Store, making
it easy to buy individual songs online. The store is only
available for Apple computers, but users download one
million tracks in the first week. Six months later, at the
urging of his executive team, Steve agrees to make the
store compatible with non-Apple computers.
March 2004—Pixar’s fifth film, Finding Nemo, wins an
Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
July 2004—Steve undergoes surgery to remove a
pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor.
January 2006—Disney acquires Pixar for $7.4 billion in
stock. Steve becomes Disney’s largest shareholder and
joins the board of directors, while John Lasseter and Ed
Catmull assume leadership of Disney Animation.
January 2007—The iPhone debuts. Steve calls it “the
most revolutionary and exciting product in
Apple’s history.”
March 2009—On leave from Apple, Steve receives a liver
transplant in Memphis, Tennessee.
January 2010—Steve introduces the iPad, calling it “a
magical and revolutionary device.”
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August 2010—Toy Story 3 becomes the highest-grossing

animated movie of all time.
August 2011—Six weeks before his death, Steve resigns
as Apple’s CEO and recommends that Tim Cook replace
him. In his resignation letter, Steve writes, “I’ve made
some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank
you all for the many years of being able to work
alongside you.”

One More Thing …

Life can be much broader 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.
And you can change it.
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You can influence it.

You can build your own things that other people
can use.
And the minute you can understand that you can poke
life, and if you push in, then something will pop out
the other side; that you can change it, you can mold
it—that’s maybe the most important thing: to shake
off this erroneous notion that life is there, and you’re
just going to 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. Because it’s kind of messed up in a lot
of ways.
Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
—Steve, 1994

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Copyright © 2023 Steve Jobs Archive.

All rights reserved.

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Make Something Wonderful

Steve Jobs in his own words
Designed by LoveFrom
Typeset in LoveFrom Serif

Credits
Speeches, Interviews and Photos
“There’s lots of ways to be, as a person,” speech at Apple Town Hall,
2007; Steve on his Childhood, courtesy Smithsonian Institution’s
National Museum of American History, 1995; Interviews by David
Sheff, 1984, courtesy SJA; “A lot of people put a lot of love into these
products,” courtesy Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of
American History, 1995; Steve on Launching Apple, interview by
David Sheff, 1984, courtesy SJA; Fresh Air with Terry Gross interview
reprinted with the permission of WHYY, Inc., 1996; “It’s a
domesticated computer,” Talk of the Town: Digitizing, by Thomas
Whiteside, reprinted courtesy Thomas Whiteside / The New Yorker ©
Condé Nast, 1977; “Computers and society are out on a first date,”
speech at the International Design Conference in Aspen, 1983; On the
Macintosh, interview by David Sheff, 1984, courtesy SJA; “Was
George Orwell right about 1984?” speech at an Apple sales meeting,
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1983; “Your aesthetics get better as you make mistakes,” interview by

Michael Moritz, 1984, courtesy SJA; “I want to build things”
interview reprinted with permission of Newsweek (1985) courtesy
EnVeritas Group Inc.; “You never achieve what you want without
falling on your face a few times” Fresh Air with Terry Gross interview
reprinted with the permission of WHYY, Inc., 1996; Steve on Starting
NeXT interview reprinted with permission of Newsweek (1985)
courtesy EnVeritas Group Inc.; On Becoming Majority Shareholder in
Pixar, interview produced by Joel Bloom, 1996, courtesy SJA; On
Pixar’s Early Days, interview by Leslie Iwerks, courtesy The Walt
Disney Company, 2003; “Character is built not in good times, but in
bad times,” speech at Reed College, 1991; “One of the things I always
tried to coach myself on was not being afraid to fail,” Fresh Air with
Terry Gross interview reprinted with the permission of WHYY, Inc.,
1996; “What you follow with your heart,” speech at Palo Alto High
School, 1996; “To put these stories into culture,” interview produced
by Joel Bloom, 1996, courtesy SJA; “The worst thing that someone
can do in an interview is agree with me,” from In the Company of
Giants: Candid Conversations with the Visionaries of the Digital
World, by Dr. Rama Dev Jager and Rafael Ortiz, reprinted courtesy
McGraw Hill © 1997; “Much of what I stumbled into,” from
commencement address at Stanford University, 2005; “Steve on
returning to Apple,” speech at Stanford University Graduate School of
Business, 2003; “We believe that people with passion can change the
world for the better,” speech to Apple employees, 1997; “Apple is
coming back in a very big way,” speech at Macworld in New York City,
1998; “Hopefully we captured a bit of Pixar’s soul,” speech to Pixar
Employees at opening of Pixar’s headquarters in Emeryville,
California, 2000; “Wouldn’t it be great if,” introduction to Apple
Store, 2001; “I think I got lucky,” interview with Leslie Berlin, 2003,
courtesy SJA; “You never know what is around the next corner,” speech
at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, 2003; “Stay hungry. Stay
foolish,” Commencement Address at Stanford University, 2005; “We
thought we could make a contribution,” speech to Apple employees,
2007; “Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along,”
speech at Macworld, 2007; Interview with Kara Swisher and Walt
Mossberg, reprinted with permission of the Wall Street Journal,
Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Worldwide; “Five months ago, I had a liver transplant,” speech at
Apple music and media event, 2009; Steve on the iPad, speech at
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Apple Town Hall, 2010; “One simple question,” speech at the Lucile
Packard Children’s Hospital, 2010; “One more thing,” interview with
Silicon Valley Historical Association, 1994.
Information on Apple’s trademarks is available at www.apple.com.
Apple emails courtesy of Apple.
Other company and product names may be trademarks of their
respective owners.

Photographer unknown, 1976 Photographer unknown, 1957

Photo by Ben Blackwell Courtesy Elizabeth Holmes

courtesy SJA

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Photo by Joe Melena courtesy Photo by Barbara Kinney

of Apple, 1976 courtesy SJA

Photo by Barbara Kinney Photo by Dean Phillips, 1976

courtesy SJA

Photographer unknown, 1977 Photo by Bill Kelley, 1977

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Photo by Ted Thai, 1981 Photo by Andrée Abecassis,

1981

Photo by Ted Thai, 1981 Photo by Jean Pigozzi, 1983

Photo by Jean Pigozzi, 1983 Photo by Bill Atkinson, 1983

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Photo by Jean Pigozzi, 1984 Photo by Norman Seeff, 1984

Photo by Jean Pigozzi, 1984 Photo by Norman Seeff, 1984

Photo by Steve Ringman / San Photo by Jeffrey Aaronson,

Francisco Chronicle / Hearst 1984
Newspapers via Getty Images,
1985

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Photo by Doug Menuez, 1986 Photo by Ben Blackwell

courtesy of Apple

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Photo by Ben Blackwell, © Photo by Louie Psihoyos, 1995,

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1997

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1997 1997

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2000 2001
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2004 2004

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courtesy SJA 2007

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2007

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