First of all, try to have the highest of ethics and to be open and truthful about things, not hiding. If you have to hide something for company reasons, at least explain what you’re doing. Don’t mislead people. Know in your heart that you are a good person with good goals because that will carry over to your own self-confidence and your belief in your engineering abilities. Always seek excellence: make your product better than the average person would.
If you can just quickly whip something out and it’s done, maybe it’s time, once in a while, to think and think and think, “Can I make it better than it is, a little superior?” What it does is not necessarily make the product better in the end, but it brings you closer to the product and your own head understands it better. Your neurons have gone through the code you wrote, or the circuits you designed, have gone through it more times, and it’s just a little more solidly in your head, and once in a while you’ll wake up and say, “…I just realized a bug that’s in there, something I hadn’t thought of.”
Or, if you have to modify something, or add something new, you can do it very quickly when it’s all in your head. You don’t have to pull out the listing and find out where and maybe make a mistake. You don’t make as many mistakes. Just believe that what you have it better than whatever has existed before. We should only move forward in technology and not backwards.
Lack of tools: find a way to do it. If you say, “I have to have a tool, ” and you are a prima donna – “I have to have a certain development system” – if you can’t fitter out a way to test something and get it working, I don’t think you’re the right type of person to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs have to keep adjusting to … everything’s changing, everything’s dynamic, and you get this idea and you get another idea and this doesn’t work out and you have to replace it worth something else. Time is always critical because somebody might beat you to the punch.
– Steve Wozniak, cofounder Apple Computer (taken from Founders at Work)
Is it not Wozniak?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak
You are correct, Rick. My typing error. I updated the title.
Understandable… BTW, I was giving brevity a try on that post (something I am horrible at!), hope it didn’t come across as rude.
@rick No worries. I’m glad you spoke up and saved me the embarrassment. As my high school english teacher used to tell me, “Brevity is the key to clarity.”