I hope you're as lucky as I am. The world needs inventors--great ones. You can be one. If you love what you do and are willing to do what it really takes, it's within your reach. And it'll be worth every minute you spend alone at night, thinking and thinking about what it is you want to design or build. It'll be worth it, I promise.

My whole life had been designing computers I could never build.

You have to seek the simplest implementation of a problem solution in order to know when you've reached your limit in that regard. Then it's easy to make tradeoffs, to back off a little, for performance reasons. You can simplify and simplify and simplify yet still find other incredible ways to simplify further.

The way I did it, every job was A+.

I have such a crowded life and crowded schedule. When people send me a link with a gadget, I'll look at it and buy it if it looks interesting, but I don't have time to check out everything I'd like to.

I sold my most valuable possession, but I knew that because I worked at Hewlett Packard, I could buy the next model calculator the very next month for a lower price than I sold the older one for!

I learned not to 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.