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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
Much
Crappy
Really
Microsoft
Way
Personally
Love
Motivation
People
Older
Art
Music
Matter
Motivations

More quotes by Walter Isaacson

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The Mona Lisa, to me, is the greatest emotional painting ever done. The way the smile flickers makes it a work of both art and science, because Leonardo understood optics, and the muscles of the lips, and how light strikes the eye - all of it goes into making the Mona Lisa's smile so mysterious and elusive.
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Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?
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I am a fruitarian and I will only eat leaves picked by virgins in the moonlight - Steve Jobs
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Terrorism is a horrible thing that is the great threat to civilization on our planet.
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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
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More generally, I made an effort to leave out things that weren't relevant to the main narrative themes of the book, namely that there were two sides to Steve Jobs: the romantic, poetic, countercultural rebel on one side, and the serious businessperson on the other.
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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.
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When you write biographies, whether it's about Ben Franklin or Einstein, you discover something amazing: They are human.
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The childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created for their new son was, in many ways, a stereotype of the late 1950s. When Steve was two they adopted a girl they named Patty, and three years later they moved to a tract house in the suburbs.
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You know, one of these things that happened in the '60s and '70s was this confluence of, sort of, a counter-culture with computer culture.
Walter Isaacson
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Smart people are a dime a dozen. What matters is the ability to think different... to think out of the box.
Walter Isaacson
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I think it is valuable and should be valued by its consumers. Charging for content forces discipline on journalists: they must produce things that people actually value.
Walter Isaacson
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I think that we shouldn't be fixated all the time on the ups and downs of the weekly ratings, of the quarter-hour ratings.
Walter Isaacson
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I think that notion of being a seeker, somebody who never felt totally fulfilled, but was always passionate about the search, that comes from the background, probably.
Walter Isaacson
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Just being the seeker, somebody whose open to spiritual enlightenment, is in itself the important thing and it's the reward for being a seeker in this world.
Walter Isaacson
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On Startups: I hate it when people call themselves entrepreneurs when what they're really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on.
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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i had no idea what i wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.
Walter Isaacson
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I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.
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