George Beahm

“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.… Itwas 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 practicalapplication 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”

“PerseveranceI’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.… Unless you have a lotof 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 rightthat 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”

“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.”