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.
I think I've got my business notions and my sense for that sort of thing from my dad. My dad never had a chance to go to school. He couldn't read and write. But he was so smart. He was just one of those people that could just make the most of anything and everything that he had to work with.
You must find your dream...but no dream lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular dream.
Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.
Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion.
My idea of a delicious time is to read a book that is wonderful. But the ruling passion of my life is being a seeker after truth and the divine.
We need to look at truth. We need to look at justice, and we need to look at righteousness. And let that be our guide going forward.
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