Success Quote by Steve Jobs

That line is recruitment copy disguised as a creed, and it’s doing more work than it admits. Jobs isn’t talking about “smart people” or even “talent” in the abstract; he’s defining the only acceptable motive for being inside Apple’s walls: an almost moral hunger to build the best. The phrasing is deliberately totalizing. Not “great products,” not “industry-leading,” but “the best things in the world” - a claim so sweeping it forces employees to either buy into the mythology or opt out.

The subtext is control through aspiration. If the goal is “the best,” then the usual workplace compromises - timelines, office politics, personal boundaries - can be reframed as distractions from a higher calling. It’s also a subtle sorting mechanism: people who crave status, money, or stability are implicitly second-tier; people who want to be part of an epic are the real hires. That’s culture as gatekeeping, and it’s effective.

Context matters because Jobs built Apple’s identity around taste and severity: a small number of products, obsessively refined, with an almost theatrical contempt for mediocrity. “We hire people” centers leadership’s power to curate a tribe, while “want to make” elevates desire above credentials. In the Jobs era, wanting wasn’t a feeling; it was a performance standard. The brilliance of the quote is that it flatters prospective employees and pre-justifies the intensity awaiting them.