I'm as proud of many of the things we haven't done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things.

Both ideas in this popular quotation are genuinely Steve Jobs, but the two-sentence version circulated everywhere appears to be a composite that no single primary source supports verbatim. The "focusing is about saying no" theme comes from Jobs's celebrated 1997 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference Q&A, where he defended killing projects like OpenDoc and insisted that focus means saying "no, no, no" — but he did not there utter the polished line "Innovation is saying no to a thousand things." The "proud of what we haven't done" half traces to a separate, later interview in which Jobs, noting Apple was a roughly $30-billion company with fewer than thirty products, said "You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of many of the things we haven't done as the things we have done." The familiar quote fuses these two authentic statements and smooths "I'm actually as proud" to "I'm as proud," which is why it reads so cleanly yet cannot be pinned to one source. We found no competing author and no earlier use, so we credit the sentiment confidently to Jobs while flagging the exact popular wording as a paraphrased composite rather than a verified verbatim quotation.