Walter Isaacson Quote

Jobs, who could identify with each of those sentiments, wrote some of the lines himself, including They push the human race forward. By the time of the Boston Macworld in early August, they had produced a rough version. They agreed it was not ready, but Jobs used the concepts, and the think different phrase, in his keynote speech there. There’s a germ of a brilliant idea there, he said at the time. Apple is about people who think outside the box, who want to use computers to help them change the world. They debated the grammatical issue: If different was supposed to modify the verb think, it should be an adverb, as in think differently. But Jobs insisted that he wanted different to be used as a noun, as in think victory or think beauty. Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in think big.

Walter Isaacson

Jobs, who could identify with each of those sentiments, wrote some of the lines himself, including They push the human race forward. By the time of the Boston Macworld in early August, they had produced a rough version. They agreed it was not ready, but Jobs used the concepts, and the think different phrase, in his keynote speech there. There’s a germ of a brilliant idea there, he said at the time. Apple is about people who think outside the box, who want to use computers to help them change the world. They debated the grammatical issue: If different was supposed to modify the verb think, it should be an adverb, as in think differently. But Jobs insisted that he wanted different to be used as a noun, as in think victory or think beauty. Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in think big.

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About Walter Isaacson

Walter Seff Isaacson (born May 20, 1952) is an American journalist who has written biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Jennifer Doudna and Elon Musk. As of 2024, Isaacson is a professor at Tulane University and, since 2018, an interviewer for the PBS and CNN news show Amanpour & Company.
He has been the president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C., the chair and CEO of CNN, and the editor of Time.
Isaacson attended Harvard University and Pembroke College, Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He is the co-author with Evan Thomas of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986) and the author of Pro and Con (1983), Kissinger: A Biography (1992), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), American Sketches (2009), Steve Jobs (2011), The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014), Leonardo da Vinci (2017), The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race (2021) and Elon Musk (2023).
Isaacson is an advisory partner at Perella Weinberg Partners, a New York City-based financial services firm. He was vice chair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which oversaw the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina, chaired the government board that runs Voice of America, and was a member of the Defense Innovation Board.