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Lesson #1: “I’d scrap things together – try this, try this, try this”

Article Overview: Steve Wozniak could not be considered a failure by any stretch of the imagination. However, he has experienced his fair share of failures in his life, and it is to those failures that he attributes his success.

Lesson #1: “I’d scrap things together – try this, try this, try this”

Steve Wozniak could not be considered a failure by any stretch of the imagination. However, he has experienced his fair share of failures in his life, and it is to those failures that he attributes his success. When he was in high school, Wozniak spent some time designing "blue boxes," devices which could patch into phone calls and allow him to make free calls or redirect other people's lines. It was just one of the tools he spent time tinkering on. "I'd scrap things together - try this, try this, try this," he says.

It was while working at Hewlett-Packard that Wozniak truly got to experiment and learn from the failures of others. He used to walk around to people's workbenches where, he admits, he had a keen ability to quickly tell if his colleagues were building designs that were not going to work. But Wozniak was not exempt from making his own failures. "I once laid out the whole board, and then I got an idea to save one feed-through," he recalls. "So I took the board apart, I trashed maybe a week's worth of work, and then I started over."

Apple II was, in fact, a product of many cycles of failure. In creating the disk drive, Wozniak began with a design based on 50 chips. After dozens of false starts, he reduced the number of chips to just three. The result? A computer that dominated the industry for three years. Even after the later introduction of IBM's PC and Apple's Macintosh, Apple II was able to retain a small portion of the market share.

Failure came to Wozniak on a personal level as well. He was not able to cope with the success of Apple as it grew. He did not want to be a manager or a business person, saying, "I wound up trapped by the world."

His decision to step back from Apple in 1985 led him down a new road paved with several failed companies, including CL9 (Cloud Nine). His universal remote control was not embraced by manufacturers or consumers alike, and Wozniak was losing hope. "It gets to the point where you can't tell where your inventiveness was lost," he recalls of the time.

CL9 disappeared, as did most of the fortune Wozniak amassed after Apple went public. He lost almost half of his estate in a divorce, and $25 million over two years on a series of unsuccessful rock concerts and other ventures.

But it was not over for Wozniak. He turned to teaching, and would become one of the most sought after teachers in the U.S., teaching classes on computer software to elementary school kids from his own garage. He was not making the sum he was previously at Apple, but Wozniak was happy - he was finally interacting one-on-one with the earliest users of computers.

The goal, for Wozniak, is and always has been the same, he says: "Doing something neat and fun."

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Article Tags: apple ii, business person, chips, cloud nine, colleagues, dozens, fair share, free calls, hewlett packard, imagination, keen ability, losing hope, macintosh apple, market share, personal level, phone calls, small portion, steve wozniak, universal remote control, workbenches



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