I'm Steve. I make things.

On Calligraphy

The Reed College Class That Changed Everything

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.

I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

On Getting Fired

The Best Thing That Could Have Ever Happened to Me

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

On Design

The Back of the Fence

When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it.

You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through. That's what we tried to do at Apple. Even the parts you couldn't see, the circuit boards inside the machine, we wanted them to be beautiful.

When we sat down to design the iMac, we didn't start with the technology. We started with the question: what do people want to do with a computer? And then we worked backwards to the technology. Start with the experience. Start with the customer. Work backwards.

On Product

The Prototype in My Pocket

People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never relied on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

When the team showed me the early iPhone prototype, I put it in my pocket and carried it around for a week. At the end of the week, I came back and told them what I thought. The screen needed to be bigger. The edges were wrong. It didn't feel like something you'd fall in love with — it felt like a piece of technology.

So we went back to the beginning. We made the screen bigger. We rounded the corners until it felt like a river stone in your hand. We made the glass go to the edge. And when I held the new one, I knew. That's the process. That's always the process.

On Mortality

Remembering That I'll Be Dead Soon

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right."

It made an impression on me, and since then, 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.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.