Steve Jobs Quotes

In business, staying focused requires that you turn most opportunities down.

One skill of a great entrepreneur is to get a whole complicated discussion and then say, 'We're going to do this one and we're only going to do this one'. Managers are good at prioritizing. Entrepreneurs know what is the one thing.

Concentrate your energies, your thoughts and your capital. The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket.

To help you focus, to help you really understand what you're doing, you have to say no a lot. When you say yes to everything, you get distracted. When you say no, you have to get the one thing you're doing really right.

I could go insane if I obsessed over every little detail of all of my companies. My management philosophy is to pay attention to the vital few and ignore the trivial many.

Strategy is choice. Strategy means saying no to certain kinds of things.

The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important.

Strategy 101 is about choices: You can't be all things to all people.

The essence of strategy is that you must set limits on what you're trying to accomplish.

You do what is manageable, and you do it well rather than trying to do a thousand things just a little bit OK.

You can only bite off so much, so you gotta know what you want to do.

Prioritization sounds like such a simple thing, but true prioritization starts with a very difficult question to answer, especially at a company with a portfolio approach: If you could only do one thing, what would it be? And you can't rationalize the answer, and you can't attach the one thing to some other things. It's just the one thing.

One must say no to some opportunities to open the possibilities of others.

One of the key lessons I learned at Netflix was the necessity of focus.

He that pursues two hares at once, does not catch one and lets the other go.

There is great power in focusing on what you want..... The person who tries to do everything accomplishes nothing. Most people try to be all things to everyone. And so they end up being nothing to anyone. Confucius nailed the point: "Person who chases two rabbits catches neither."

We are the most focused company that I know of or have read of or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day. We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose.....It's not just saying yes to the right products, it's saying no to many products that are good ideas, but just not nearly as good as the other ones.

No business can do everything. Even if it has the money, it will never have enough good people. It has to set priorities. The worst thing to do is a little bit of everything. This makes sure that nothing is being accomplished. It is better to pick the wrong priority than none at all.

You need to figure out what the 2 or 3 most important things are, and then just do those.

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.

We all have many opportunities, but limited capacity to pursue them. Make choices, focus your time and energy, so that you can submit your share of masterpieces to the greater good.

It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much.

There are many things I can do, but I have to narrow it down to the one thing I must do. The secret of concentration is elimination.

Focusing is about saying No.

I think one key part of doing more with less is to be more strategic, to realize what the objectives you're truly trying to accomplish are and then to drive with greater focus towards those objectives.