Older people sit down and ask, 'What is it?' but the boy asks, 'What can I do with it?'.
Interpretation
The quote contrasts the perspectives of older individuals and youth regarding curiosity and engagement with the world.
Steve Jobs highlights a generational difference in perception and attitude towards challenges and opportunities. While older individuals may reflect and question the nature of things, the younger generation embodies a more proactive approach, seeking to understand how to utilize what is available to them. This emphasizes the importance of curiosity and action over mere contemplation.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about engaging youth in innovation.
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.
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.
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 wise man reads both books and life itself.
Woe to the man who is always busy - hurried in a turmoil of engagements, from occupation to occupation, and with no seasons interposed of recollection, contemplation and repose! Such a man must inevitably be gross and vulgar, and hard and indelicate - the sort of man with whom no generous spirit would desire to hold intercourse.
Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.
When I grew older and awkward, when my parents divorced and life had gone all to hell, Demetrie stood me at the wardrobe mirror and told me over and over, 'You are beautiful. You are smart. You are important.' It was an incredible gift to give a child who thinks nothing of herself.
It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens.
Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
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