Who better to share advice with aspiring innovators than Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak?
VentureBeat caught up with "The Woz" at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA on Thursday, when the museum debuted its $19 million exhibit, "Revolution: The First 2,000 Years of Computing."
Standing in front of a display that held relics (some of which Wozniak himself designed) from the early days of personal computing, he revealed that the secret to innovation starts with a goal. The innovator doesn't necessarily start with a roadmap of how to get there, he said. "If you know the direction in advance, it's probably not a good enough goal," he added.
He suggested that the best route to achieving your goal is the route you plot for yourself. "Be an artist," he said. "Write the book yourself [...] Just believe in yourself."
Wozniak also told kids to go after things that pique their interest, both in and out of the classroom. The innovator is a curious being, according to Wozniak.
Even as a child, Wozniak loved experimenting and inventing. "In elementary school, Woz started toying with transistors, building tic tac toe games. He taught himself to design the minicomputers of the day and was eventually able to design a computer in a couple of days," writes VentureBeat. In the mid-1970s, Wozniak helped usher in the age of personal computing. His 1977 device, the Apple II, has been called "The Machine That Changed Everything" by PCWorld.
Check out the full video (below), in which Wozniak also shares his soft spot for computer artifacts and the history of computing.