Eventually I worked out a deal with my local elementary school, the one that Jesse was by then attending. It was the Lexington Elementary School in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It sure was an unusual environment for a school. Not like the ones that are all flat and spread out. It looked rustic, out in the middle of nature with the mountains, the trees, and the Lexington Reservoir nearby. This school was also neat because it only had one classroom for every grade. It was a small school.
So I got to know a lot of people there, especially the school moms, who really are the ones who do so much of the stuff. I couldn't really bring myself to do the home school club—that was the PTA-style group they had—I couldn't make the time. But with the computers, I thought I could make myself useful to the kids and the school in other ways.
Around this same time, I started teaching Jesse about computers. He was in the fourth grade by this time. He would go into his room—he had his own computer with a keyboard—and he was this little kid sitting in front of it. He would just type away all day long. At first he couldn't type very well. He would hunt and peck. But very quickly he learned how to cut and paste text from one page to another so he wouldn't have to retype it.
By the end of fourth grade, his computer skills had evolved so quickly. Sometime during that year, he was actually answering questions I had—like if I was having trouble finding out where something was in the system, he would tell me what menu to look in. I showed him how to do spreadsheets and do calcula-
tioris so he could do his math homework from school with it. He could set it up and do it all on the spreadsheet so the teachers wouldn't see the formula, just the answer. But, of course, I told him he had to do it by hand first, before doing it on the computer. He had to have one handwritten one done, to show me he knew how to do it, and then he would turn in these really nice printouts.
Believe me, there was no other kid in fourth grade who was turning in a spreadsheet and printout for his math homework assignments.
And Jesse just loved doing it. He always stuck by the rule of having to do the homework the real way first—before you do it on the computer. But he loved any homework he could do with his computer. Like typing reports. He loved that.
That year, one of Jesse's schoolmates, Elena, was having trouble in school. I'd known her since she was born. Her mom called and told me that her grades were going down; she wasn't achieving, just having a really hard time. I cared a lot about Elena. So I decided I would go over to her house and we would sit down together. I would take her through ideas to put in reports she would write. We would try to put in comedy—just to make it fun for her. And I'd show her how you do it on the computer.
That became her motivation, doing it on the computer. It was something special, and she really got into it. All her grades in school started going up. Her parents gave me all this credit. She loved doing any homework she could do on the computer; she was a smiling girl and doing well in school. She grew into a woman who is today an incredibly great speaker as well as an actress.
So then I started thinking. If this was so successful with Elena—taking her from basically flunking out of school to A's and B's—what if I could do that with other kids? Why not give it a try? But I was a little scared. Can I teach a group of kids? What's involved? I really did want to teach them normal things—math,
reading, writing, history—but how was I going to be able to do that? I don't have a teaching credential or anything.
So I thought, That's it. I'm going to be a teacher. I'll teach a computer class. The next year was the fifth grade. I took six kids out of Jesse's fifth-grade class and put them in computer class. And we started out the class by unscrewing the computers to look at the parts, and I taught them Base 2—Is and Os, how numbers were represented in computer language. We didn't carry the Base 2 stuff very far throughout the year; I thought I was going to teach them how computers work. It's something easy for a fifth grader to learn; you don't need higher-level math. And we did that.
But the primary goal was to teach them how to make their homework look good. The state of computers back then was such that this only got about one-third of class time attention. Back then, computers were more unreliable, and more subject to software and hardware bugs. On any given day, a hard disk might stop working. Or a battery might go bad. A buggy program might corrupt some files.
Back then, maintaining a computer was a difficult task. So another third of the class involved maintaining the computers. Installing new software and hardware, identifying hardware problems, identifying and fixing software problems of all types. Finally we spent a lot of time on online and network things. Every single year, from the very first class on, I bought AOL accounts for all the students.
It was important that they learn to communicate with people far away, and in a way that had never been done before. The two things my students did the most were to download fun software like games and freeware utilities and visit chat rooms. I encouraged them to go as far as they could in chat rooms. They found it amusing to pretend to be other people, to pretend to be older than they were. Even though it might take them two minutes to
type a short sentence, the girls would claim to be nineteen years old. The boys were always honest.
Some of the girls would get too excited and scream to the rest of their class that they were making a date with another nineteen-year-old! Yeah, right. The thing I always noticed was that the other "nineteen-year-old" was also typing a sentence every two minutes. None of them could type when they started my class, but they sure started learning.
And the things I learned in my ten years as a teacher, well, they're just too numerous to count. I felt this was the most important time in my life.
Chapter 20
Rules to Live By
Maybe you're wondering why I haven't written a memoir before this. People kept asking me to. There are a lot of reasons I didn't. I was busy—too busy. A couple of times I even tried to start working on it, but my plans always fell through. I just didn't have the time.
This time is different. At this point in my life—I'm fifty-five as I write this—I think it's time to set the record straight. So much of the information out there about me is wrong. I've come to hate books about Apple and its history so much because of that. For instance, there are stories that I dropped out of college (I didn't) or that I was thrown out of the University of Colorado (I wasn't), that Steve and I were high school classmates (we were several years apart in school) and that Steve and I engineered those first computers together (I did them alone).
Of course I understand that inaccuracies and rumors happen when you're in the public eye. And I even have a good insider's perspective as to how they happen. A perfect example of this, which I mentioned before, is when I was leaving Apple to start CL 9, my remote control company, in the late 1980s. The
Wall Street Journal
reporter called me and asked me directly if I was leaving because I was unhappy at Apple, and I told him directly that,
no, I wasn't leaving because I was unhappy at Apple. Though I mentioned there were a few problems with morale in my view, I explicitly told him the only reason I was leaving was that I wanted to start a new company. Not because of any problems. And in fact, technically, I wasn't leaving at all.
To this day, I'm an Apple employee—I still have my Apple Employee ID card—and I receive a very low salary. And I continue to represent Apple at events and at speeches.
But the article the paper printed was wrong in two key places: It said I left Apple, and it said I left because I was disgruntled. Both untrue!
But you know what? Both errors went down as history. I mean, pick up almost any book on Apple's history and you'll probably read that wrong version of my story. Everything else major newspapers or early books got wrong about me went down as history, too.
So that's what's been bothering me—the fact that no one has gotten the story straight about how I built the first computers at Apple and how I designed them, and what happened afterward. So I hope this book sets the record straight, finally.
And there's another reason I've written this book, though I didn't realize it until I was well into it. I'd like to give advice, for what it's worth, to kids out there who are like I was. Kids who feel they're outside the norm. Kids who feel it in themselves to design things, invent things, engineer things. Change the way people do things.
I've learned a lot of lessons over the years, and not all of them involved how to handle ex-wives. Ha. In fact, none of them did.
No, my advice has to do with what you do when you find yourself sitting there with ideas in your head and a desire to build them. But you're young. You have no money. All you have is the stuff in your brain. And you think it's good stuff, those ideas you have in your brain. Those ideas are what drive you, they're all you think about.
But there's a big difference between just thinking about inventing something and doing it. So how do you do it? How do you actually set about changing the world?
• o •
Well, 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. 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.
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.
• o •
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. Every tiny part or line of code has to have a reason, and the approach has to be direct, short, and fast. We build small software and hardware components and group them into larger ones. We know how to route electrons through resistors and transistors to make logic gates. We combine a few gates to make a register. We combine many registers to make an even larger one. We combine logic gates to make adders, and we combine adders to create others that can be used to create an entire computer. We write tiny bits of code to turn things on and off. We build upon and build upon and build upon, just like a painter would with colors on a paintbrush or a composer would with musical notes. And
it's this reach for perfection—this striving to put everything together so perfectly, in a way no one has done before—that makes an engineer or anyone else a true artist.
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.