iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It

My notes

Most people don't think of an engineer as an artist, probably, because people tend to associate engineers just with the things we create. But those things wouldn't work, they wouldn't be elegant or beautiful or anything else, without the engineer, carefully thinking it out—thinking how to create the best possible end result with the fewest number of components. That's sophistication.

Good engineers are artists.

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.

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 it 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.

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!

Working on your own, or working for someone else?