Some great people are leaders and others are more lucky, in the right place at the right time. I’d put myself in the latter category. But I’d never call myself a normal designer of anything.
Geek it’s really more a characteristic where you don’t socialize. You don’t talk the normal languages.
Hard disks have disappointed me more than most technologies.
I had designed -in high school designed hundreds and hundreds of computers over and over and over, so I developed these skills without ever thinking I’d do it in life as job.
In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by.
I sold my most valuable possession, but I knew that because I worked at Hewlett Packard, I could buy the next model calculator the very next month for a lower price than I sold the older one for!
After the Apple II was introduced, then came the Commodore and the Tandy TRS-80.
College just didn’t even have computers for an under-curriculum when I started college.
If my son wants to be a pimp when he grows up, that’s fine with me. I hope he’s a good one and enjoys it and doesn’t get caught. I’ll support him in this. But if he wants to be a network administrator, he’s out of the house and not part of my family.
Imagination is something you do alone.
I’d learned enough about circuitry in high school electronics to know how to drive a TV and get it to draw – shapes of characters and things.
Predictions can sound really good if you’re good with words and can express them eloquently and give people ideas and inspiration in their head. But I’m not really good at that, so I don’t want to.
I just was non-political and didn’t see myself as a person who could push people around, make their decision and tell them how lousy their work was.
I really believe I know why my designs were better than any other human being, but I don’t want to take credit for starting Apple, for turning the world around or anything like that.
I wanted to be funny. And I’m always acknowledged for my pranks and jokes nowadays.
I don’t think I was talking specifically about Steve Jobs. It was just a general philosophy about one person grows up and he’s kind of managing companies and every day he’s working making sure this is in place and that’s in place.
Everything that has a computer in will fail. Everything in your life, from a watch to a car to a radio, to an iPhone, it will fail if it have a computer in it.
And thanks to all those science projects, I acquired a central ability that was to help me through my entire career: patience.
I acquired a central ability that was to help me through my entire career: patience. I’m serious. Patience is usually so underrated. I mean, for all these projects, from third grade all the way to eighth grade, I just learned things gradually, figuring out how to put electronic devices together without so much as cracking a book... I learned to not worry so much about the outcome, but to concentrate on the step I was on and to try to do it as perfectly as I could when I was doing it.
Try to think of new ways to solve the old problems. Very often we look at something we have and say, “I could make it better.′ That’s innovation.
If you read the same things as others and say the same things they say, then you’re perceived as intelligent. I’m a bit more independent and radical and consider intelligence the ability to think about matters on your own and ask a lot of skeptical questions to get at the real truth, not just what you’re told it is.