George Beahm > Quotes

“Perseverance

I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.… Unless you have a lot
of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up. So you’ve got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right
that you’re passionate about; otherwise, you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through.

—Smithsonian Institution Oral and Video Histories,
April 20, 1995”
― George Beahm, I, Steve: Steve Jobs In His Own Words

“Once you get into the problem... you see that it's complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That's where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while. But the really great person will keep going, find the underlying problem, and come up with an elegant solution that works on every level.”
― George Beahm, I, Steve: Steve Jobs In His Own Words

“Broad-Based Education:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.… I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.… It
was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical
application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.

—Commencement address, Stanford University,
June 12, 2005”
― George Beahm, I, Steve: Steve Jobs In His Own Words

“We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our website as quickly as possible. —“Ten Things We Know to Be True,” Google company website”
― George Beahm, The Google Boys: Sergey Brin and Larry Page In Their Own Words

“Sevdiginiz seyi bulmaniz gerek. Bu, sevgiliniz icin oldugu kadar isiniz icin de gecerlidir. Isiniz hayatinizin buyuk bir kismini dolduracak. Gercekten tatmin olmanin tek yolu, muhtesem bir is cikardiginizi dusunmektir. Ve muhtesem bir is cikarmanin tek yolu da yaptiginiz isi sevmektir... Daha azina razi olmayin.”
― George Beahm, I, Steve: Steve Jobs In His Own Words

“Pixar’s seen by a lot of folks as an overnight success, but if you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.”
― George Beahm, I, Steve: Steve Jobs In His Own Words

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me.… Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful…that’s what matters to me.”
― George Beahm, I, Steve: Steve Jobs In His Own Words

“If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much.”
― George Beahm, Steve Jobs: Life By Design

“To be successful, work hard; and when things get tough, work harder.”
― George Beahm, Steve Jobs: Life By Design

“Adam, it’s so good that even after it puts your company out of business, you’ll still want to go out and buy it for your kids.”
― George Beahm, I, Steve: Steve Jobs In His Own Words

“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. 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.… Don’t settle.”
― George Beahm, I, Steve: Steve Jobs In His Own Words

“People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you’re doing and it’s totally true. And the reason is because it’s so hard that if you don’t, any rational person would give up. It’s really hard. And you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don’t love it, if you’re not having fun doing it, you don’t really love it, you’re going to give up. And that’s what happens to most people, actually. If you really look at the ones that ended up being “successful” in the eyes of the society and the ones that didn’t, oftentimes it’s the ones [who] were successful loved what they did, so they could persevere when it got really tough. And the ones that didn’t love it quit because they’re sane, right? Who would want to put up with this stuff if you don’t love it? So it’s a lot of hard work and it’s a lot of worrying constantly and if you don’t love it, you’re going to fail.”
― George Beahm, I, Steve: Steve Jobs In His Own Words

“One of my role models is Bob Dylan. As I grew up, I learned the lyrics to all his songs and watched him never stand still. If you look at the artists, if they get really good, it always occurs to them at some point that they can do this one thing for the rest of their lives, and they can be really successful to the outside world but not really be successful to themselves. That’s the moment that an artist really decides who he or she is. If they keep on risking failure, they’re still artists. Dylan and Picasso were always risking failure. This Apple thing is that way for me. I don’t want to fail, of course. But even though I didn’t know how bad things really were, I still had a lot to think about before I said yes. I had to consider the implications for Pixar, for my family, for my reputation. I decided that I didn’t really care, because this is what I want to do. If I try my best and fail, well, I tried my best.”
― George Beahm, I, Steve: Steve Jobs In His Own Words