Steve Wozniak is the engineer who built Apple.
Then he did something Silicon Valley still doesn’t understand: he gave millions of his own money away to early employees, walked away from power, and refused to play the game everyone else was playing.
While HP rejected his design and competitors built walled gardens, Wozniak’s philosophy of open architecture, the very one a young Steve Jobs fought against, is what saved Apple long enough for it to become Apple.
This is the story of the reluctant founder who won by refusing to compromise, and a blueprint for success without selling your soul.
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Wozniak’s Rules to Live By
1. Believe in yourself.
“First, you need to believe in yourself. Don’t waver. There will be people—and I’m talking about the vast majority of people, practically everybody you’ll ever meet—who just think in black-and-white terms.
Most people see things the way the media sees them or the way their friends see them, and they think if they’re right, everyone else is wrong.
So a new idea—a revolutionary new product or product feature—won’t be understandable to most people because they see things so black and white.
Maybe they don’t get it because they can’t imagine it, or maybe they don’t get it because someone else has already told them what’s useful or good, and what they heard doesn’t include your idea.
Don’t let these people bring you down. Remember that they’re just taking the point of view that matches whatever the popular cultural view of the moment is. They only know what they’re exposed to. It’s a type of prejudice, actually, a type of prejudice that is absolutely against the spirit of invention.
But the world isn’t black and white. It’s gray scale. As an inventor, you have to see things in gray scale. You need to be open. You can’t follow the crowd. Forget the crowd. And you need the kind of objectivity that makes you forget everything you’ve heard, clear the table, and do a factual study like a scientist would.”
2. Be slow to form an opinion and hold it with the right grip.
“You don’t want to jump to conclusions, take a position too quickly, and then search for as much material as you can to support your side.
Who wants to waste time supporting a bad idea? It’s not worth it, that way of being stuck in your ego.
You don’t want to just come up with any excuse to support your way.
Engineers have an easier time than most people seeing and accepting the gray-scale nature of the world. That’s because they already live in a gray-scale world, knowing what it is to have a hunch or a vision about what can be, even though it doesn’t exist yet. Plus, they’re able to calculate solutions that have partial values—in between all and none.”
3. Think for yourself.
“The only way to come up with something new—something world-changing—is to think outside of the constraints everyone else has. You have to think outside of the artificial limits everyone else has already set. You have to live in the gray-scale world, not the black-and-white one, if you’re going to come up with something no one has thought of before.”
4. Nothing good has ever been invented by committee.
“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me—they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone—best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee. Because the committee would never agree on it!”
“Why do I say engineers are like artists? Engineers often strive to do things more perfectly than even they think is possible.”
5. Work alone in the dark.
“If you’re that rare engineer who’s an inventor and also an artist, I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone.
When you’re working for a large, structured company, there’s much less leeway to turn clever ideas into revolutionary new products or product features by yourself. Money is, unfortunately, a god in our society, and those who finance your efforts are businesspeople with lots of experience at organizing contracts that define who owns what and what you can do on your own.
But you probably have little business experience, know-how, or acumen, and it’ll be hard to protect your work or deal with all that corporate nonsense. I mean, those who provide the funding and tools and environment are often perceived as taking the credit for inventions. If you’re a young inventor who wants to change the world, a corporate environment is the wrong place for you.
You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you’re working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team. That means you’re probably going to have to do what I did. Do your projects as moonlighting, with limited money and limited resources. But man, it’ll be worth it in the end. It’ll be worth it if this is really, truly what you want to do—invent things. If you want to invent things that can change the world, and not just work at a corporation working on other people’s inventions, you’re going to have to work on your own projects. When you’re working as your own boss, making decisions about what you’re going to build and how you’re going to go about it, making trade-offs as to features and qualities, it becomes a part of you.
Like a child you love and want to support. You have huge motivation to create the best possible inventions—and you care about them with a passion you could never feel about an invention someone else ordered you to come up with. And if you don’t enjoy working on stuff for yourself—with your own money and your own resources, after work if you have to—then you definitely shouldn’t be doing it!”
6. If you believe in your power to reason, you can just relax.
“It’s so easy to doubt yourself, and it’s especially easy to doubt yourself when what you’re working on is at odds with everyone else in the world who thinks they know the right way to do things.
Sometimes you can’t prove whether you’re right or wrong. Only time can tell that. But if you believe in your own power to objectively reason, that’s a key to happiness. And a key to confidence. Another key I found to happiness was to realize that I didn’t have to disagree with someone and let it get all intense. If you believe in your own power to reason, you can just relax. You don’t have to feel the pressure to set out and convince anyone. So don’t sweat it! You have to trust your own designs, your own intuition, and your own understanding of what your invention needs to be.”
Lessons from Steve Wozniak
Master the step you are on. Wozniak spent years designing computers on paper because he couldn’t afford the parts. “I learned to not worry so much about the outcome,” he wrote, “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.” He’d design a computer, then redesign it over and over again. By the time he got real components, he’d already done the hardest work: the thinking. Most people rush through fundamentals chasing the outcome. Woz had the patience to master each step completely before moving to the next.
Nothing good has ever been invented by committee. “Nothing really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee,” Wozniak wrote. “Because the committee would never agree on it!” He designed the Apple I and Apple II alone, in his apartment, after hours at HP, because it was fun. Committees lean toward consensus. Artists optimize for simplicity and truth. Innovation requires the freedom to explore and play.
Be slow to form an opinion, and when you do, hold it with the right grip. “You don’t want to jump to conclusions, take a position too quickly, and then search for as much material as you can to support your side.” It’s a waste of time to support a bad idea. It’s ego over outcome.
Constraints are secret advantages. Wozniak couldn’t afford chips, so he designed computers on paper, competing with himself to use fewer parts. He’d redesign the same computer repeatedly, each time with one less chip. The constraint forced him to develop design tricks “that certainly would never be describable or put in books.” By the time he accessed real components, he’d built deep expertise born from limitation.
The best understand more. When Wozniak’s tic-tac-toe machine blew up the night before the science fair, he was disappointed but still took pride in it. “The most important thing is that you’ve done the learning on your own to figure out how to do it. It’s the engineering, not the glory, that’s really important.” Richard Feynman said it too: “The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out.”
Optimize for the customer. Steve Jobs wanted two expansion slots to keep the Apple II elegant. Wozniak fought for eight slots because he’d been going to Homebrew meetings and watching actual users share ideas and push boundaries. Jobs was optimizing for beauty. Wozniak was optimizing for the people who want to play. Woz won that argument, and it saved the company. Those eight slots created an ecosystem of companies building products and marketing for Apple. Your first customers aren’t average users. They’re evangelists. Design for them.
Question everything. Every computer before the Apple I had switches and blinking lights. Industry experts accepted that’s just how computers worked. Wozniak asked: “Why not put a keyboard and screen on it?” When he built the Disk II controller, competitors used twenty-two chips. Wozniak used two. He realized the idle CPU could do the controller’s work in software. Sometimes the most important question isn’t “How do I do this better?” It’s “Why am I doing it this way at all?”
Loyalty has limits. Working at HP was Wozniak’s dream job. When he invented the Apple I, he offered it to them. Five times. They said no every time. Woz kept showing up despite building Apple on nights and on weekends. When Jobs asked him to leave HP, Woz said no. Finally, Steve Jobs had had enough and did what Steve Jobs did, and used an overwhelming amount of force to convince him to leave HP. Jobs called every single friend and family member of Woz, convinced them it was in Woz’s best interest to leave HP, and had them call Woz to convince him to leave. HP’s blindness cost them billions.
Give away control. Wozniak xeroxed his Apple I schematics and handed them to anyone who asked. Hundreds of copies. Every person who tried to build one appreciated the elegance of his solutions. By the time the Apple II was launched, a community of enthusiasts had already formed. Giving away control created something you can’t buy: genuine advocacy. Most people hoard their ideas. The best make them spread.
Success is living life on your terms. The day Apple went public, Wozniak became worth $88 million. He looked around at colleagues who’d been left out and sold them his shares at a discount. When Apple became obsessed with quarterly earnings, he left. Not in anger. Quietly. He went back to Berkeley under a pseudonym to complete his degree and taught fifth graders how to build computers. He’d figured out as a kid: “Happiness equals smiles minus frowns.” The hardest thing you’ll ever do is turn down what everyone else wants so you can have what you actually need.
Simplicity is beautiful. Most disk controllers used twenty-two chips. Wozniak examined the standard design and realized only two were needed. He offloaded the controller’s functions to the idle CPU. Why pay for expensive hardware when you have a processor sitting there doing nothing? Bill Gates would later call it “the most clever program ever written for a small computer.”
Maxims
- Constraints force deep understanding.
- Focus on the step, not the outcome.
- Nothing good has ever been invented by committee.
- Learning is the prize.
- Institutions, by default, reject anything that means existing beliefs are wrong.
- Happiness equals smiles minus frowns.
- Misplaced loyalty is a waste.
- Work alone on what matters if you must.
- Patience is underrated.
- Hold your ideas with the right grip. Let go of incorrect ideas.
- If it’s worth doing, it’s worth giving it 100%.
- Obsession isn’t a problem. It’s an advantage.
- Simplicity has the fewest moving parts.
- Time will do the work for you if you align with how the world works.
- Move with urgency. You can do it much faster than you think.
- Design around engineering, not marketing.
- Optimize for happiness, not fairness.
- You don’t have to run the company to be a co-founder.
- “It takes a lot of work to make something simple.”
- Obsess over customers.
- Don’t accept something because it’s the way it is.
- You win in the dark, when everyone else is partying or sleeping.
- The only way to understand is to get your hands dirty in the work.
- “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
- The best are always learning more.
