After Steve: How Apple became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

by Tripp Mickle

“Why is it done this way?” The school taught them that the common answer—“It’s just the way it’s done”—was unacceptable and urged them to ask follow-up questions to help them isolate what was important about past practices and identify what could be improved.

“We rarely control the timing of opportunities, but we can control our preparation,” he said.

“We are constantly focusing on innovating. We believe in the simple, not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution. We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way others cannot. And frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence.”

“I knew what I needed to do was not to mimic him,” Cook later said of that period. “I would fail miserably at that, and I think this is largely the case for many people who take a baton from someone larger than life. You have to chart your own course. You have to be the best version of yourself.”

ideas should be nurtured, not crushed.

earned a degree in symbolic systems, a combination of philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and computer science.

They studied how pocket-size watches had become wristwatches to assist armies in timing troop advancements during war.

Apple had built a distribution machine.

“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.”