The media often glamorizes successful founders and makes their paths seem easier than they actually were.

You've got to say you are a step ahead of where you actually are to move to the step that you want to be at.

Innovations seem inevitable in retrospect, but at the time it's an uphill battle.

Finding a technical cofounder would have been difficult for me. I was an English major and didn't know any computer programmers.

People like the idea of innovation in the abstract, but when you present them with any specific innovation, they tend to reject it because it doesn't fit with what they already know.

My skills weren't that I knew how to design a floppy disk, I knew how to design a printer interface, I knew how to design a modem interface; it was that, when the time came and I had to get one done, I would design my own, fresh, without knowing how other people do it. That was another thing that made me very good. All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money, and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I'd never once done that thing in my life.

Pick a big enough project, something that's really hard, something that over the years you can work on.