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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.

Walter Isaacson

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Walter Isaacson
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: May 20
Biographer
Journalist
Writer
New Orleans
Louisiana
Five
Causing
Turns
Microsoft
Great
Adequate
Turning
Products
Rest
Turn
Focus
Dragging

More quotes by 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.
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The best and most innovative products don't always win...(it's an) aesthetic flaw in how the universe worked
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If you truly have a passion for what you do, you will care even about the parts unseen.
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Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.
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...never let a passion for the perfect take precedence over pragmatism.
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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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And if you don't have your ears open, you're not going to be able to figure out what you should be doing.
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You should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last. Excerpt From: Walter, Isaacson. “Steve Jobs.” Simon & Schuster, 2011-10-23T21:00:00+00:00. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.
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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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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.
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One of the great pressures we're facing in journalism now is it's a lot cheaper to hire thumb suckers and pundits and have talk shows on the air than actually have bureaus and reporters
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I think right now we need to look back at the founding values of our country. Rise above partisanship, be less bitter when it comes to important matters that have to be solved.
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I think that genius comes not just from having great mental processing power. It comes from being able to, as Steve Jobs' ad said, think different.
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Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.
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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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Most of the collaborations of technology were done by teams...Collaboration is key to creativity
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By the end of his career, he [Steve Jobs] has proven that he can do the impossible, and he has gathered probably the most loyal team of eight players of any business in America.
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I think it's really good that you have great competition among news networks, and for that matter all the networks in general. It's bringing more and more people in to watching the news.
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