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putting on the fair.
I thought, Hey, I've been cheated. But that night, I showed the machine and talked to lots of people—including, I'm sure, the real judges—and it seemed like they really understood how big my project was. I mean, it was great and I knew it and eveiyone knew it. I was able to explain how I'd used logic equations and gates and how I'd combined gates and transistors with binary number (Is and Os) arithmetic to get the whole thing working.
After that, the Air Force gave me its top award for an electronics project for the Bay Area Science Fair, even though I was only in eighth grade and the fair went up to twelfth grade. As part of the award, they gave me a tour of the U.S. Strategic Air Command Facility at Travis Air Force Base. And they gave me a flight in a noncommercial jet, my first-ever flight in any plane. I think I might have caught my love for flying then.
When I look back, that Adder/Subtractor was such a key project in my getting to be the engineer who ended up building the first personal computer. This project was a first step to that. It
was a large project, for one thing, involving more than one hundred transistors, two hundred diodes, and two hundred resistors, plus relays and switches. And it performed a function that was useful: addition and subtraction.
And thanks to all those science projects, I acquired a central ability that was to help me through my entire career: patience. I'm serious. Patience is usually so underrated. I mean, for all those projects, from third grade all the way to eighth grade, I just learned things gradually, figuring out how to put electronic devices together without so much as cracking a book. Sometimes I think, Man, I lucked out. It seems like I was just pointed in such a lucky direction in life, this early learning of how to do things one tiny little step at a time. I learned to not 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.
Not everyone gets this in today's engineering community, you know. Throughout my career at Apple and other places, you always find a lot of geeks who try to reach levels without doing the in-between ones first, and it won't work. It never does. That's just cognitive development, plain and simple. You can't teach somebody two cognitive steps above from where you are—and knowing that helped me with my own children as well as with the fifth graders I taught later on. I kept telling them, like a mantra: One step at a time.

Chapter 3
Learning by Accident
Throughout most of elementary school, I was a little shy, but at least I had a lot of friends and was really athletic. I was the de facto leader of the Electronics Kids because I already knew so much of the stuff we needed to build the things we wanted to build. This was a close group in the neighborhood, and that was great. I loved being able to excel at things, and having people recognize me for that. Not out of ego, really, just a drive to be the best.
I was good at swimming and football and made the All-Stars in Little League, where the other kids told me I was the best pitcher and runner and hitter on my teams. In fifth grade 1 was the smartest student in my class, according to my teachers at least, and I was elected school student body vice president. Do I sound like I'm bragging? I know I do, but I don't mean to. I was just so proud of all that. All these activities built up my self-esteem, and that was an important part of my internal development.
But things changed in sixth grade. I wasn't so popular anymore. In fact, suddenly it was like I was invisible. All of a sudden, other kids didn't recognize me as much for my math and science skills, which really bothered me. I mean, that's what I was best at. This was a time when a lot of students start flirting and engaging
in all kinds of small talk that I didn't relate to. So I wasn't included. My natural shyness just made me bottom out in sixth