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.
Fear of being a flawed person lay at the root of my trance, and I had sacrificed many moments over the years in trying to prove my worth. Like the tiger Mohini, I inhabited a self-made prison that stopped me from living fully.
Yesterday you can't alter, but your reaction to yesterday you can. The past you cannot change, but your response to your past you can.
Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.
Meditation is like a gym in which you develop the powerful mental muscles of calm and insight.
A proverb is one man's wit and all men's wisdom.
The only virtue on which I pride myself is my self-doubt; when a writer loses her self-doubt, the time has come to lay aside her pen.
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