Learning & Growth
Curiosity, reading, education, and getting better over time.
Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Verified source2005 Stanford Commencement Address · Watch at 13:49 · Steve Jobs Archive on YouTube
13:49 of 14:26All quotes from this speech →
I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.
SourceIncluded in Portrait-Life of Lincoln (1910) by Francis T Miller · via Wikiquote
A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.
SourceAddress before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (1859) · via Wikiquote
A natural parent has only two things principally to consider, the improvement of his son, and the finances to do it with.
SourceLetter to Dr. Boucher · Mount Vernon Ladies' Association on George Washington's Mount Vernon
...the consideration that human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected, will always continue to prompt me to promote the progress of the former, by inculcating the practice of the latter.
SourceFrom George Washington to the Protestant Episcopal Church · National Archives on Founders Online
Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.
SourceFirst Annual Address · National Archives on Founders Online
...a good moral character is the first essential in a man...It is therefore highly important that you should endeavor not only to be learned but virtuous.
SourceTo George Steptoe Washington · National Archives on Founders Online
...the hours allotted for study, if really applied to it, instead of running up & down stairs, & wasted in conversation with any one who will talk with you, will enable you to make considerable progress in whatsoever line is marked out for you: and that you may do it, is my sincere wish
SourceGeorge Washington to George Washington Parke Custis · National Archives on Founders Online
When I think about my career, my successes are built on learning from failures.
SourceBoy Genius Report: "When I think about my career, my successes are built on learning from failures: Microsoft CEO Satya… · via Wikiquote
We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.
SourceThe Philosophy of Paine (1925) · via Wikiquote
There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island.
SourceAs quoted in Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1977) by Laurence J. Peter · via Wikiquote
No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.
SourceIn Great Contemporaries, "Lord Rosebery" (1937) · via Wikiquote
I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.
SourceIn debate in the House of Commons, 4 Nov 1952 · via Wikiquote
The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.
The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.
The way for a young man to rise is to improve himself in every way he can, never suspecting that anybody wishes to hinder him.
For my part, I desire to see the time when education - and by its means, morality, sobriety, enterprise and industry - shall become much more general than at present, and should be gratified to have it in my power to contribute something to the advancement of any measure which might have a tendency to accelerate the happy period.
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all.
Upon the subjects of which I have treated, I have spoken as I have thought. I may be wrong in regard to any or all of them; but, holding it a sound maxim that it is better only sometimes to be right than at all times to be wrong, so soon as I discover my opinions to be erroneous, I shall be ready to renounce them.
If I like a thing, it just sticks after once reading it or hearing it.
I never went to school more than six months in my life, but I can say this: that among my earliest recollections, I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand.
Our higher education system is one of the things that makes America exceptional. There's no place else that has the assets we do when it comes to higher education. People from all over the world aspire to come here and study here. And that is a good thing.
It's not enough to train today's workforce. We also have to prepare tomorrow's workforce by guaranteeing every child access to a world-class education.
You can choose a future where more Americans have the chance to gain the skills they need to compete, no matter how old they are or how much money they have. Education was the gateway to opportunity for me. It was the gateway for Michelle. And now more than ever, it is the gateway to a middle-class life.
With the changing economy, no one has lifetime employment. But community colleges provide lifetime employability.
Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine. It may make you feel like you're flying high at first, but it won't take long before you feel the impact.
Community colleges play an important role in helping people transition between careers by providing the retooling they need to take on a new career.
America thrived in the 20th century because we made high school free. We sent a generation to college. We cultivated the most educated workforce in the world.
It's not all about talent. It's about dependability, consistency, and being able to improve. If you work hard and you're coachable, and you understand what you need to do, you can improve.
I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.
In ninth grade, I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn't been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A's without taking a book home. I didn't go to math class, because I knew enough and had read ahead, and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam.
We all need people who will give us feedback. That's how we improve.
Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.
I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.
In the long run, your human capital is your main base of competition. Your leading indicator of where you're going to be 20 years from now is how well you're doing in your education system.
Exposure from a young age to the realities of the world is a super-big thing.
Everyone needs a coach. It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player.
Digital technology has several features that can make it much easier for teachers to pay special attention to all their students.
There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.
Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.
I would counsel people to go to college, because it's one of the best times in your life in terms of who you meet and develop a broad set of intellectual skills.
I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.
The best teacher is very interactive.
If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was 'satisfactory,' I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently?
I spend a lot of time reading.
Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.
For a highly motivated learner, it's not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you're a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.
The Gates Foundation has learned that two questions can predict how much kids learn: 'Does your teacher use class time well?' and, 'When you're confused, does your teacher help you get straightened out?'
Unfortunately, the highly curious student is a small percentage of the kids.
If you've found some way to educate yourself about engineering, stocks, or whatever it is, good employers will have some type of exam or interview and see a sample of your work.
In American math classes, we teach a lot of concepts poorly over many years. In the Asian systems they teach you very few concepts very well over a few years.
We all know that there are these exemplars who can take the toughest students, and they'll teach them two-and-a-half years of math in a single year.
In almost every area of human endeavor, the practice improves over time. That hasn't been the case for teaching.
Whether I'm at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I'm looking forward to reading.
Our teachers deserve better feedback.
When you revolutionize education, you're taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you're priming the pump for so many incredible things.
I've always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.
What's amazing is, if young people understood how doing well in school makes the rest of their life so much interesting, they would be more motivated. It's so far away in time that they can't appreciate what it means for their whole life.
I think it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better. I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.
I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.
I tend to approach things from a physics framework. And physics teaches you to reason from first principles rather than by analogy.
I think it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better.
Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive.
Everybody has talent, it's just a matter of moving around until you've discovered what it is.
The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film - whether it's history, psychology, economics, or architecture - so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn't going to help you unless you have something to say.
A lot of people like to do certain things, but they're not that good at it. Keep going through the things that you like to do, until you find something that you actually seem to be extremely good at. It can be anything.
I wanted to race cars. I didn't like school, and all I wanted to do was work on cars. But right before I graduated, I got into a really bad car accident, and I spent that summer in the hospital thinking about where I was heading. I decided to take education more seriously and go to a community college.
Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.
If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.
You can't learn in school what the world is going to do next year.
The only real security that a man can have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience and ability.
Before I left China, I was educated that China was the richest, happiest country in the world. So when I arrived Australia, I thought, 'Oh my God, everything is different from what I was told.' Since then, I started to think differently.
I think young generation is always better than last generation. No matter you like it or don't like it. My father said, 'Jack, I'm so good, you'll never be' - but I'm better than him. My father is better than my grandfather. My children will be better than us.
When I was 12 years old, I got interested in learning English.
I don't want people in China to have deep pockets but shallow minds.
For people who are readers, reading is important to them.
Humans are unbelievably data efficient. You don't have to drive 1 million miles to drive a car, but the way we teach a self-driving car is have it drive a million miles.
No matter what your mission is, have some notion in your head. Forget the model, whether it's government or nonprofit or profit. Ask yourself the more important question: Is my mission improving the world? Are you sure about it? Seek to disconfirm that all the time. And if you can, change your mission.
Today I continue with my science-fiction reading habit and find it very mind-expanding. Always makes me think.
We're taking all of the lessons that we have from New Shepard and incorporating them into New Glenn.
We need to know what the resources of the moon are. We have great evidence now because of different kinds of radar and spectroscopic analysis that people have been able to do. But we really do need to go visit there, and we can do that with a robot craft without any problem.
I like criticism. It makes you strong.
Sweat equity is the most valuable equity there is. Know your business and industry better than anyone else in the world. Love what you do or don't do it.
Whatever you are studying right now, if you are not getting up to speed on deep learning, neural networks, etc., you lose. We are going through the process where software will automate software, automation will automate automation.
You need to turn over every rock and open every door to learn your industry. This process never ends.
I can't say it enough that learning how to learn is one of the greatest skills anyone can have. It's why I advocate that everyone go to college.
I try not to be an ideologue about anything. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, and I'm willing to evolve.
I love being challenged and defending my positions and, when I'm wrong, learning from the exchange. It makes me smarter and better as a businessperson.
I used to drive around looking at the big houses, wondering how they got there. I used to love biographies about successful business people, wondering how they got there. You start to realize that if they can do it, I can do it.
I have stocked shelves, waited on tables, and bartended. I have been a salesperson at many levels. Each giving me a unique view of what made a company successful and, even more importantly, what made a company fail.
I think what has allowed me to be successful is that I can absorb more information than most and drill down to the key business elements of that information and make faster decisions. And of course, I truly try to enjoy every minute of my life. I can never understand why anyone wouldn't.
Every job in a company is important. Unless you experience a wide range of those jobs, I don't think you are as well prepared to start and run a company as you could be.
I personally think there's going to be a greater demand in 10 years for liberal arts majors than there were for programming majors and maybe even engineering, because when the data is all being spit out for you, options are being spit out for you, you need a different perspective in order to have a different view of the data.
I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.
I started the site when I was 19. I didn't know much about business back then.
In terms of doing work and in terms of learning and evolving as a person, you just grow more when you get more people's perspectives... I really try and live the mission of the company and... keep everything else in my life extremely simple.
All of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school - my number one piece of advice is: You should learn how to program.
I actually don't read most of the coverage about Facebook. I try to learn from getting input from people who use our services directly more than from pundits.
We want Facebook to be one of the best places people can go to learn how to build stuff. If you want to build a company, nothing better than jumping in and trying to build one. But Facebook is also great for entrepreneurs/hackers. If people want to come for a few years and move on and build something great, that's something we're proud of.
If you learn something new every day, you can teach something new every day.
Without an open-minded mind, you can never be a great success.
My new motto is: When you're through changing, you're through.
The more you adapt, the more interesting you are.
I never stop making sure that what I say is the best of what could be said about a particular thing. It's a constant evolution. If I planted a tree one way yesterday, and somebody tells me of a better way to plant a tree, I think, 'You know, they're right, that's better.' Then I change my way to accommodate the new way of planting trees.
I can keep learning about all the different technologies. It's my most telling characteristic. I'm interested in trying anything new.
I was a very curious person because of my parents. They encouraged me to be as curious about as many things as I wanted.
I had no idea when I went to college what I'd be doing. I took organic chemistry and did terribly, but I was good in English and art. I took many courses and participated in as many activities as I could. I learned a lot about every single thing.
I like knowing about everything, and I think that really helps me in my business.
When I was young, I had to learn the fundamentals of basketball. You can have all the physical ability in the world, but you still have to know the fundamentals.
I built my talents on the shoulders of someone else's talent.
My challenge when I came back was to face the young talent, dissect their games, and show them maybe that they needed to learn more about the game than just the money aspect.
The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.
The whole point of being alive is to evolve into the complete person you were intended to be.
I am a woman in process. I'm just trying like everybody else. I try to take every conflict, every experience, and learn from it. Life is never dull.
Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.
I always feel that until you take your last breath, you're always growing.
You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.
Treat failure as a lesson on how not to approach achieving a goal, and then use that learning to improve your chances of success when you try again. Failure is only the end if you decide to stop.
So I've seen life as one long learning process. And if I see - you know, if I fly on somebody else's airline and find the experience is not a pleasant one, which it wasn't in - 21 years ago, then I'd think, well, you know, maybe I can create the kind of airline that I'd like to fly on.
Had I pursued my education long enough to learn all the conventional dos and don'ts of starting a business, I often wonder how different my life and career might have been.
There's an inherent danger in letting people think that they have perfected something. When they believe they've 'nailed it,' most people tend to sit back and rest on their laurels while countless others will be labouring furiously to better their work!
I read everything, but generally more fact than fiction - especially autobiographies and biographies. I've read 'Long Walk to Freedom' by Nelson Mandela at least twice on holiday. Every time, I'm totally awed by his vision, strength and forgiveness. I feel honoured to have got to know him and his wonderful wife Graca over the years.
Be passionate and bold. Always keep learning. You stop doing useful things if you don't learn. So the last part to me is the key, especially if you have had some initial success. It becomes even more critical that you have the learning 'bit' always switched on.
Every opportunity I got, I took it as a learning experience.
You renew yourself every day. Sometimes you're successful, sometimes your not, but it's the average that counts.
At Microsoft, we're aspiring to have a living, learning culture with a growth mindset that allows us to learn from ourselves and our customers. These are the key attributes of the new culture at Microsoft, and I feel great about how it seems to be resonating and how it's seen as empowering.
Longevity in this business is about being able to reinvent yourself or invent the future.
The one thing that I would say that defines me is I love to learn. I get excited about new things. I buy more books than I read or finish.
I want everyone inside of Microsoft to take that responsibility. This is not about top-line growth. This is not about bottom-line growth. This is about us individually having a growth mindset.
It's not about the failure, it's about learning from the failures. Failure itself cannot be celebrated.
If you talk about STEM education, the best way to introduce anyone to STEM or get their curiosity going on, it's Minecraft.
I'm a perfectionist. I'm pretty much insatiable. I feel there's so many things I can improve on.
It's always good to get a smaller tournament under your belt so that by the time you get to the Slams, you have a lot of experience.
To excel at the highest level - or any level, really - you need to believe in yourself, and hands down, one of the biggest contributors to my self-confidence has been private coaching.
Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn.
I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
I was making a lot of 8mm home movies, since I was twelve, making little dramas and comedies with the neighborhood kids.
I think documentaries are the greatest way to educate an entire generation that doesn't often look back to learn anything about the history that provided a safe haven for so many of us today.
Documentaries are the first line of education, and the second line of education is dramatization, such as 'The Pacific'.
I even get inspired by movies that aren't very good, because there's always something good in movies that are collectively thought of as a failure. There's good in everything, I find.
I think that a movie can only be an adjunct or only a supplement to books, to different points of view, to scholars, historians and your own teachers.
My first reaction every time I delve into an episode of history that I don't know very much about is... my first reaction is anger that my teachers never taught me about it.
The impact of giving someone a connected smartphone is no different from giving them a real computer. I look at how my kids learn and how different it is from how I learned because the impact of these things is just so huge. Sometimes I think we don't fully internalize what it is to get the power of knowledge in everyone's hand.
I start where the last man left off.
We think coding should be required in every school because it's as important as any kind of second language.
We see that in the top problems in the world between haves and have-nots, generally we find that the root cause is education.
You know, watching Dan Marino and Steve Young get nominated to the Hall of Fame... those guys are unbelievable and they did it for so long. I'd love to play like those guys, but there's still a long way to go and a lot of growing.
I have a memory, and I can just eliminate mistakes when they come up because I've already made them.
You look at another team's style and how they do it, and you just want to understand how they're doing it and see if you can learn something and maybe implement it into what your team does.
I have respect for what other people believe. What I believe in my own life is that it's a search for how I can do things better, whether it's being a better man or a better father or finding ways for myself to improve.
The exciting part of acting, I don't know how else to explain it, are those moments when you surprise yourself.
I'm passionate about learning. I'm passionate about life.
Whether it's making a film or raising my children, personally I'm striving to do the right things and to learn.
Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.
We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.
When you're curious, you find lots of interesting things to do.
Whenever I go on a ride, I'm always thinking of what's wrong with the thing and how it can be improved.
Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource - the minds of our children.
The best thing I did was to choose the right heroes.
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.
Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.
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