People who inspire me: Steve Jobs

I've long admired Steve Jobs, not just because he built one of the world's great companies, but because his ideas have influenced the way I think. I use Apple products every day, especially my MacBook Pro and iPhone, and I continue to be impressed by how intuitive, elegant and thoughtfully designed they are. Jobs understood that great technology isn't just about powerful features—it's about creating products that people genuinely enjoy using.

One of the lessons I value most from Steve Jobs is the power of focus. He believed that saying "no" to hundreds of good ideas was often more important than saying "yes" to a few great ones. In a world full of distractions, that's a principle I try to keep coming back to. I also admire his relentless pursuit of simplicity. He showed that making something simple is often much harder than making it complicated, and that great design begins with understanding the user's experience.

His life story is inspiring in its own right. Being forced out of the company he founded could have been the end of the story, but instead it became the beginning of one of the greatest comebacks in business history. He returned to Apple, transformed it from a struggling company into one of the most valuable businesses on Earth, and changed the way millions of people interact with technology. His vision, resilience and insistence on excellence continue to inspire me.

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I loved this biography about Steve jobs which I read in 2012.

Favourite quotes

• Don’t just live a life; build one.
• None of us are as creative as all of us.
• I’d rather be a Pirate than join the Navy.
• Do not try to do everything. Do one thing well.
• Follow your heart, but check it with your head.
• Innovation means saying ‘no’ to a thousand things.
• If you’re afraid of failing you won’t get very far.
• It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.
• Focus does not mean saying yes, it means saying no.
• Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.
• It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple.
• Our job is to read things that are not yet on the page.
• I hate the way people use PowerPoints instead of thinking.
• Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.
• Focus and simplicity…once you get there, you can move mountains.
• Don’t just follow your passion but something larger than yourself.
• If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution.
• Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
• Let’s go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday.
• The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.
• Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
• If you live each day as it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.
• Quality is much better than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.
• Listen to me. We’re here to make a dent in the universe. Otherwise why even be here?
• Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.
• You cannot mandate productivity, you must provide the tools to let people become their best.
• You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.
• Do you want to sell sugar water all your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?
• It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much.
• If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.
• It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.
• The greatest thing is when you do put your heart and soul into something over an extended period of time, and it is worth it.
• Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works.
• What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
• Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful … that’s what matters to me.
• That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.
• You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to sell it.
• We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life.
• 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.
• You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
• Quotes on Wisdom Trove
• Life lessons