# [Outliers] Steve Wozniak: The Engineer Who Built Apple  ## Metadata - Author: [[Farnam Street]] - Full Title: [Outliers] Steve Wozniak: The Engineer Who Built Apple - Category: #articles - Summary: Steve Wozniak built Apple by designing simple, elegant computers alone and out of constraint. He valued open architecture, customer-focused engineering, and lifelong hands-on learning. He gave away power and money rather than trade his principles. - URL: https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/outliers-steve-wozniak/ ## Highlights - This is the story of the reluctant founder who won by refusing to compromise, and a blueprint for success without selling your soul. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kb9vbphmzhc0s1krbty2eswp)) - 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.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kb9vd0h1ass5dn6jjb5ksm86)) - **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.”* ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kb9vdyg1etaxqmkkppxgt169)) - *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.* ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kb9vg9rq8k7ymh1684rfae8a)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kb9vhspn5rp168kpvdm3xatg)) - **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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kb9vkymmqzmf0gxejp81asww)) - **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.”* ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kb9vm7z9cjv82czz9wys39ff)) - 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. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kb9vt7h0q4fwr1mehnj9m035)) - **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.”* ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kb9vsckyswh0m4zqv9ar1b5b))