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.
Interpretation
Acknowledging mortality helps prioritize what truly matters in life.
In this quote, Steve Jobs emphasizes the power of recognizing our own mortality as a way to clarify what is genuinely important in life. By confronting the reality of death, we can strip away societal pressures, pride, and fears, allowing us to focus on our core values and make significant life choices that align with those values.
In practice
A motivational speech illustrating how to live authentically.
Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.
It is piracy, not overt online music stores, which is our main competitor.
The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay.
Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.
For the past 33 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.
the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
If we shall take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures.
It is commonly seene by experience, that excellent memories do rather accompany weake judgements.
The core of understanding lies in the individual mind, and until that is touched everything is uncertain and superficial. Truth cannot be perceived until we come to fully understand our potential and ourselves. After all, knowledge in the martial arts ultimately means self-knowledge.
Knowledge that does not generate achievement is a pale and bloodless thing, unworthy of mankind.
Mrs. Cadbury: Tell me what you know about yourself. Anne Shirley: Well, it really isn't worth telling, Mrs. Cadbury... but if you let me tell you what I IMAGINE about myself you'd find it a lot more interesting.
It is misleading to imagine that we are developed in spite of our circumstances, for we are developed because of them. It is mastery in circumstances that is needed, not mastery over them.
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