My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better.

If you ask who are the customers of education, the customers of education are the society at large, the employers who hire people, things like that. But ultimately I think the customers are the parents. Not even the students but the parents. The problem that we have in this country is that the customers went away. The customers stopped paying attention to their schools, for the most part.

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.

I don't think I've ever worked so hard on something, but working on Macintosh was the neatest experience of my life. Almost everyone who worked on it will say that. None of us wanted to release it at the end. It was as though we knew that once it was out of our hands, it wouldn't be ours anymore.

Fear of failure falls away in the face of death.

I'm as proud of many of the things we haven't done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things.