Steve Wozniak

Patience is usually so underrated.

I mean, for all of those projects from third grade all the way to the eighth grade, I just learned things gradually figuring out how to put electronic devices together without so much as cracking a book.

Sometimes I think, man, I lucked out.

It seems like I was just pointed in such a lucky direction in life.

This early learning of how to do things one tiny little step at a time.

I learned not to 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.

Not everyone gets this in today's engineering community, you know?

Throughout my career at Apple and other places, you always find a lot of geeks who try to reach levels without doing the in-between ones first.

And it won't work.

It never does.

That's just cognitive development.

Plain and simple.

You can't teach somebody two cognitive steps above from where you are.

High school was brutal for Wozniak's social life.

Other kids were flirting and making small talk that Steve couldn't even relate to.

Imagine being smarter than nearly every adult on the planet and being stuck in high school.

He retreated deeper into electronics, but he found one way to connect with his peers, pranks.

In 12th grade, he built an electronic metronome, removed the battery labels so that they look like plain metal canisters, taped them together, and wrote contact explosive on the bundle.

He stuck it in his friend Bill's locker, but a teacher found it first and ran with it onto the football field.

When they hauled Bill to the office, he immediately recognized Wozniak's craftsmanship and gave him up.