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The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music.

Walter Isaacson

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Walter Isaacson
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: May 20
Biographer
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Love
Motivation
People
Older
Art
Music
Matter
Motivations
Much
Crappy
Really
Microsoft
Way
Personally

More quotes by Walter Isaacson

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Not playing by the rules, not seeing things conventionally, that's the heart of who he [ Steve Jobs] is, and he does it in small ways of everyday rebellion just almost to assert who he is, like not putting a license plate on his car.
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Let's crowd source, curate, and add royalties to books
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I think Leonardo da Vinci teaches us the value of both being focused on things that fascinate us but also, at times, being distracted and deciding to pursue some shiny new idea that you happen to stumble upon. Balancing intense focus with being interested in a whole lot of different things is something that we have to do in the Internet age.
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Politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity.
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I think that's exactly what Silicon Valley was all about in those days. Let's do a startup in our parents' garage and try to create a business.
Walter Isaacson
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When there are multiple versions of a story, you really have three ways to go. You can pick the most sensational version. You can try to balance things in your gut to get to what you think is the honest truth. Or you can err on the side of kindness.
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If you want to be a great American, you have got to understand Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, how the American Revolution happened. I think if you want to be a good citizen of the digital age, it helps to feel comfortable with both the people and the ways of thinking that created the digital revolution.
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What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.
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If you truly have a passion for what you do, you will care even about the parts unseen.
Walter Isaacson
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I hope that some day scientists can be considered heroes again, instead of Paris Hilton.
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Leonardo da Vinci was lucky to be born the same year that Johannes Gutenberg opened his printing shop. As a young person, he could get information about whatever struck his curiosity. The Internet is to our age what Gutenberg's press was to his, so he would have loved being alive today.
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Sometimes, to relieve stress, he would soak his feet in the toilet, a practice that was not as soothing for his collegues.
Walter Isaacson
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Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.
Walter Isaacson
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And if you don't have your ears open, you're not going to be able to figure out what you should be doing.
Walter Isaacson
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It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan ...[Showing the misery of Afghanistan ran the risk of] promoting enemy propaganda...we must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian shields and how the Taliban have harboured the terrorists responsible for killing close up to 5,000 innocent people.
Walter Isaacson
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Was he smart? No, not exceptionally. Instead, he was a genius.
Walter Isaacson
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There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that's the truth
Walter Isaacson
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We have to compete in a universe of 200 networks, so we have to carve out our own niche, and to me, that niche is just basic shoe-leather journalism with some good journalists at the helm you can trust as presenters.
Walter Isaacson
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I've asked Jobs why he didn't get an operation then and he said, 'I didn't want my body to be opened... I didn't want to be violated in that way.'
Walter Isaacson
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Jobs has within him sort of this conflict, but he doesn't quite see it as a conflict between being hippie-ish and anti-materialistic but wanting to sell things like Wozniak's board. Wanting to create a business.
Walter Isaacson