Again, 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. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator... these are NOT three separate devices! And we are calling it iPhone! Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. And here it is.

[My teacher] basically bribed me back into learning with candy and money and what was really remarkable was before very long I had such a respect for her that it sort of re-ignited my desire to learn.

Let them know precisely what you are going to do with their data

The engineering is long gone in most PC companies. In the consumer electronics companies, they don't understand the software parts of it. And so you really can't make the products that you can make at Apple anywhere else right now. Apple's the only company that has everything under one roof.

What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I didn't really know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down. I was a very public failure.

One: demonstrations always crash. And two: the probability of them crashing goes up exponentially with the number of people watching.