Walking into my office at Hello Innovation, it’s hard to miss the many similarities between my own work flow and that of the late Steve Jobs.

Everything - from the way that I’m constantly striving to work alongside passionate, creative people, to the gadgets regularly popping up around the office that inspire disruptive thinking, even down to the young entrepreneur theme that aligns our stories as an innovator myself - make us like-minded.

It’s hard not to be inspired by the amazing things that this visionary accomplished in industries all across the board. (And it’s nothing but a compliment when people often point out our comparisons.)

However, I’m not the first CEO to be inspired by Steve Jobs, and for good reason. As a young man, he managed to change the world of technology and design more than anyone could have imagined. Steve’s legacy has changed the way that I, along with many other CEO’s, look at our business, products and employees. For that, he deserves to be remembered.

With that being said, here are just a few of many inspirational quotes and philosophies that Steve Jobs believed to be important in life. They may just inspire you to change the world around you for the better, just as he did:

 

1. “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.”

 

2. “Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

 

3. “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. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.”

 

4. “That's been one of my mantras - focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

 

5. “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

6. “Stay hungry, stay foolish.”

 

7. “We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here?”

 

8. “But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.”

 

9. “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 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.”

 

10.“Details matter, it’s worth waiting to get it right.”

 

11. “If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.”

 

12. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”

 

13. “Let’s go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday.”

 

14. “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.”

 

15. “You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.”

 

16. “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 — they’re not fond of rules. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

 (This quote was actually a part of Apple's 'Think Differently' campaign, crafted by both Steve Jobs and the masterful creative team at TBWA/Chiat/Day.

17. “Quality is much better than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.”

 

18. “My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.”

 

19. “It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.”

 

20. “If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.”

 

21. “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”

 

22. “We don't get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we've chosen to do with our life.”

 

23. “You can’t con people in this business. The products speak for themselves."

 

24. "I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates."

 

25. "Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life."

What’s your favorite Steve Jobs quote of all time? Tell me in the comments below.