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Hello Inspiration’s Twitter bio lists three simple rules for the account – no quotes from Steve Jobs, Winston Churchill or the Dalai Lama permitted.

So what’s the deal? Is Hello Inspiration some kind of Apple-hater, with no time for anything Steve jobs ever said or did? Have we singled out Steve Jobs for exclusion because we consider Jobs to have been an ego-maniac, out of control show-off and self-important geek?

No. Quite the opposite in fact.

The reason behind the exclusion is simple, and it stems for everything that Steve Jobs was, and everything he said…

He said some *amazingly* inspirational things – his 2005 Stanford commencement speech is still widely quoted nearly ten years on, the “Think Different” campaign for Apple is a modern classic in the advertising world, and he coined one of the most brilliant one-line sales pitches with his “a thousand songs in your pocket” line for iPod.

So, doesn’t Steve Jobs seem like the kind of person that Hello Inspiration should be quoting?

I mean, he’s got inspiration coming out of his ears, right…?

But here’s the thing; jobs was a visionary – a game-changer. He thought differently, and he broke the mould. He didn’t want to beat the competition by simply making better gadgets, he wanted to make the competition irrelevant by making products that no-one had even conceived of before.

For me, the best way to be like Steve Jobs is not to go around blindly quoting his wisdom and then basking in his reflected glory. The best way is to think different. Act different. Forge your own path and be original. Be something that no-one else is being. Hello Inspiration is trying to stay true to his words by not just blindly copying them.

We need to act on his words, not just stare at them on a poster.

At Hello Inspiration we are trying to act on his advice by only using original material in our artwork. Does that make it more difficult? Yes. We can’t just lazily trawl the internet for the same tired old lines that have been quoted and quoted and quoted to death, and churn out artwork by the hundred. We have to sit down with a blank piece of paper, and really *think* about what we want to say.

We may never reach the brand recognition of Apple, and I’d be happy with one millionth of their annual turnover, but at least we’re being original.  That feels important.

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PS – if you want to read more about Steve Jobs, I would definitely recommend Walter Isaacson’s biography “Steve Jobs” – a fascinating journey through the life of this troubled genius.