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Staff post about: Steve Wozniak Become an Author

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Wozniak is unique not only in his tremendous talent for building computers, but in the way in which he works. "Keys to happiness came to me that would keep me happy for the whole of my life," he says. "It was just accidental. I don't know how many people get it. It's like religion or something that just popped into my head, walking home from school."

What were those keys to Wozniak's happiness?

"One thing was knowing that I was good and believing that I was good and having a good belief about myself," he says. "The other was knowing that I could disagree with other people."

Knowing that he could disagree with other people was a powerful liberating force for Wozniak. "I had my own little thought in my head, and it was well structured and it was correct for me," he says. "And they could have their own. It's like the song says: ‘There ain't no good guy, there ain't no bad guy, there's only you and me and we just disagree.'"

It was a sort of stubbornness on Wozniak's part, and it gave him the confidence to pursue his ideas and his designs even when he might not have had any supporters. That confidence was also bolstered by a third key to his happiness: Wozniak knew from a young age exactly what he wanted to do when he was older.

"When I was doing this work well, I didn't have a wife or a girlfriend," he says. "I couldn't do anything else."

His personal life might have suffered, but it was a price he was willing to pay to do his work well. "The way I work requires so much concentration," he says. "Getting to know the problem well enough by thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking. And then you try every day to make it a little better, go through it again and again, cutting something off here or there."

Today, Wozniak has distanced himself from his first love. He no longer spends his days pouring over new designs, new software, new features. But there is still one aspect of the industry that interests him, and it is at the level of the user - the young user. Wozniak teaches elementary students the joys of computing, and gives them the space to possibly discover the still unknown, the space to look at his work with a fresh mind. That is where he finds excitement today.

"Do you miss designing computers?" he was recently asked. "I miss it," he replies, "but I don't want to do it."

He may not want to do it, but Wozniak still wants to make the industry better. He does not believe that the typical user necessarily wants a more powerful computer with more features. Instead, he believes they want efficiency, simplicity, and elegance. And, perhaps it is the next student who walks into his classroom who will be able to bring just that.

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