When you retire, you switch bosses - from the one who hired you to the one who married you.
You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.
If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don't have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.
You cannot mandate productivity, you must provide the tools to let people become their best.
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. . . . I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. . . . 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.
I mean, some people say, 'Oh, God, if [Jobs] got run over by a bus, Apple would be in trouble. ' And, you know, I think it wouldn't be a party, but there are really capable people at Apple. My job is to make the whole executive team good enough to be successors, so that's what I try to do.
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
The mode of founding a college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents, and then, following blindly the principles of a division of labor to its extreme,--a principle which should never be followed but with circumspection,--to call in a contractor who makes this a subject of speculation,. . . and for these oversights successive generations have to pay.
Someday death will take us to another star.
I sound like Homer. I mean Winslow Homer.
We are pushed forward by the social forces, reluctant and stumbling, our faces over our shoulders, clutching at every relic of the past as we are forced along; still adoring whatever is behind us. We insist upon worshipping 'the God of our fathers. ' Why not the God of our children? Does eternity only stretch one way?