iWoz by Steve Wozniak with Gina Smith-优快云博客

The way my dad taught me, though, was not to rote-memorize how parts are connected to form a gate, but to learn where the electrons flowed to make the gate do its job. To truly internalize and understand what is going on, not just read stuff off some blueprint or out of some book.

Those lessons he taught me still drive my intelligence and my methods for all the computer designs I do today.

And thanks to all those science projects, 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 those 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. 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 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.

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—and knowing that helped me with my own children as well as with the fifth graders I taught later on. I kept telling them, like a mantra: One step at a time.

强者

不是不会流泪

也不是忘记了怎样流泪

而是流着泪

依然选择向前奔跑

--赵蕊蕊

最初我们来到这个世界，是因为不得不来；最终我们离开这个世界，是因为不得不走。

--余华

Because of 4AM. --

Kobe Bryant

If I couldn't have been an engineer, I would've been a teacher. Not a high school teacher, not a college teacher. A fifth-grade teacher. I specifically wanted to be a fifth-grade teacher ever since I was in fifth grade.

This was something I wanted to do since so early in life. Who knows where these things come from? Probably because my fourth- and fifth-grade teacher, Miss Skrak, was so good to me and I liked her so much. I felt she had helped me so much in life by encouraging me. And I believed, truly believed, that education was important.

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.

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.