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Steve Wozniak

It’s going to be one of the most important days of your life that you’ll never forget. Same is true for me. This is one of the most important days of my life to be here. You have no idea what this campus means to me, but for all these years—I’ve spoken for over 50 years—it’s the most beautiful campus in the world. I tell everyone about (me). I feel sorry for one of my three kids that didn’t go here, but the other two did. And when I was here...I mean, they told me to be brief and entertaining, so I put this robe over my briefs. And today is special for me. It’s our anniversary, me and my beloved wife, Janet. Yeah, we love each other so much, we celebrate an anniversary every single day. And this is day 5,753. 

My first trip ever out of California was from San Jose, when the airport had two gates, to Denver, to get to Boulder to look over the campus with two friends from high school. It snowed that night. I’d never been in snow before. Out there in our underwear, throwing snowballs and making snowmen. I was definitely a candidate for schools like MIT and all that. I taught myself to design computers when there were no books or courses or anything on it. And I had all the 800s on the SATs for math and science. But that snow affected me so much. I love the cold. To this day, everyone says, “You’re a cold person. You go out when it’s freezing with short sleeves and shorts.” And I love the cold. To me it means freshness, the freshness of Colorado. So I told my parents I would only apply to this one school, none of the others. And my parents told me they only had enough money for one year of out-of-state tuition here. That was a sad thing.

And I did get here my freshman year, 1968, when you had to walk a mile to get to the town of Boulder. I came to love the look of everything and all that. It was a different place. Fewer buildings back then. Anyway, my parents let me follow my heart. When you really want something, love something, it’s your passion, you should have your parents just supporting you going in your direction, not telling you, “No, you should study this, you should go to this school.” So I treated that the same way with my own kids. My parents didn’t force their values on me. They treated education as the brain. You know about different types of people and the way they think, the way they act, what they do. The only thing universal was you should be honest. And they let me choose for myself, so I was careful to be that way with my own children, that their choice was the most important. They’re not being directed into something. You’ve all been educated to be leaders, not followers. Don’t do what everyone else tells you. Don’t do what everyone else does. Think for yourself and decide what’s right and wrong.

My yearbook from that year, 1968 to ’69, shows a lot of soldiers on this campus with assault rifles. This was just during the Vietnam War, and the protests were much huger than protests today. That’s what I grew up in. It helps cement your values.

You know what? Instead of being praised here for some really good scientific programs I wrote—we had one big, huge, massive computer for the whole campus down in the basement—instead of getting praised for my programs, I got demeaned because I ran our class five times over budget, I wrote so many programs. I thought you were in a class to program, and you got to program! I didn’t realize it boiled down to money and bureaucracy and that kind of stuff. But that happened to me a few other times in life, where I did really great things, but instead of praise, they weren’t the normal things to do. They were thinking different. The year that I was here, I decided one thing during that year. I knew computers by heart. My first course, it was a graduate-level course, and I was a freshman. I got an A-plus. Introduction to Computers was a graduate-level course. They didn’t have a computer science department. Just electrical engineering here way back then. And I decided I wanted a computer of my own someday that I could decide what to do with it. And when my dad said it costs as much as a house, I told him, I paused, and I said, “I’ll live in an apartment.”

Sometimes you make a promise to yourself, a vow to yourself. You can’t break a vow to yourself inside. This is something you’re going to follow for life. I also decided I wanted to be a fifth grade teacher, which eventually I did. Education department! Thank you. And I did it for eight years of my life, fifth through eighth grades. No press allowed. I wouldn’t allow press near students. Boy, did I teach them well. And part of that was making sure it was fun. I always believed in fun in everything in life. And anyway, I wanted a computer [of] my own. When it came later on, it was time I could actually build one with zero money. I wanted to help other human beings do more with their life than they could do without the computer. And not to rely on million-dollar mainframes that companies and universities could afford, but to actually be able to afford their own. I thought about it and thought about it and finally, the things were right for—the cost was the main thing. And I never did any of these particular things that I was doing to start an industry, never did them before. But I was smart, smart enough to go down to the basics of how electrons flowed through wires and create these things. I read an article about a guy named Sumner Redstone, who was the CEO of a big media company, Viacom. And he was flying around to one city to sell a company for a billion of today’s dollars, and then flying to another one to sell one for a billion dollars. I thought, wow, to have that kind of money, that kind of power, that wealth and power, would you want that when you die? And I thought back and I was laughing at a prank that I had played with friends and I said, “No, I want to die remembering my pranks and the fun I had and funny jokes.”

So I my life, I decided life, for me—this was my decision—was not about accomplishment, it was about happiness. How do you define happiness? Well, for me it was a formula. H equals S minus F. Happiness equals smiles—comedy, music, whatever—minus frowns. Minus F, frowns. How do you avoid frowns? Things go wrong. They just go wrong. Ah, get in the mindset if something goes wrong, I’m not going to blame why it went wrong. I’m going to do the constructive step. If my car got dented. I’m going to go take it to a body shop and get it fixed. Be constructive. Also, don’t argue. I found that any time you argue, you’ve got a line of reasoning, somebody else has a line of reasoning. You both have good brains that believe in following lines of reasoning. You’re both good people. Dave Mason once sang in a song, “There ain’t no good guy, there ain’t no bad guy. There’s only you and me. And we just disagree.” Think about relationships. Bob Dylan said other lines like, “You were right from your side. I was right from mine. We’re both just one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind.” By the way, I really discovered Bob Dylan strongly when I was here at campus. Went to my first concert, first concert ever, which was actually Simon and Garfunkel at CSU. A lot of good experiences you can read about in my book, “iWoz.” And the day that I met Steve Jobs, he was 16 years old, had no albums. I brought him in my home and showed him all the liner notes and interviews and lyrics of Bob Dylan albums that were out at the time.

Anyway, I found, of course, that college, for me, was the most fun four years of your life. You want to be around other people with similar personalities. Four years of your life, or six, or eight, depending on how much fun you have. We started Apple with this intent of equalizing things for the disadvantaged. We wanted to make blind people equal to sighted people. Steve Jobs and I talked about that and look how successful we’ve been. Everywhere you go, look at the sidewalk, and everybody’s walking around oblivious to where they are. The big technology word today is AI. I get asked about that a lot. I don’t have time to get into it now, but I believe in the A, but not the I. Because after Apple was successful, I returned to college for my final year of college. And I was very famous by then, so I used a fake name at Berkeley. And I took the psychology courses for psychology majors. I was a psychology major. I wanted to bring me closer to education. I still wanted to teach. But even with AI, we can’t build a machine that equals the brain of an ant. And you all have AI, each one of you: actual intelligence. Many of us in the tech field, we keep trying to create chips and all to make thinking machines that really think like a human. Well, I was at a company where the engineers figured out how to make a brain. Takes nine months.

Passion, you have passion for certain things in your life, you already have it, I had it before I even came here. And that’s what you’re going to do for regardless of reasons and logic, anything else. This is what’s going to drive you into what you want to be in life. And that’s how I lived, including coming to CU after seeing snow. And, of course, I loved the new field of upcoming digital technology. There were no courses on that back in high school. No textbooks, nothing you could buy to learn how to design computers. But I spent all my free time on it. And I was a student at a university, and I could wash dishes for 35 cents an hour in a girls dorm and have money to buy a couple of extra manuals in the bookstore here. That kind of independence, intellectual freedom, and energy to stay up late at night solving problems. I also loved, one of my other passions was typing. For some reason I loved typing well. And I even beat the girls in high school in typing, too, which was so popular back then because one of the big careers for girls then was to become a secretary and a typist. So, I would type term papers for strangers in college. I would type it from midnight, from their handwriting cursive writing, I would type it from midnight till 6 in the morning. But I charged money, 5 cents. I loved doing it. To me, it had to be for five cents. Later on, five years leading up to Apple, I was designing projects for people all over California, including somebody who wanted to put movies into hotels. It had never been done; I got to design it. My charge was always 5 cents. I tutored students in inferential statistics later on, difficult part of experimental research. And I charged 5 cents per session. Another time a couple people came out from the University of Colorado that had started a company, and it was the start of the internet, and I wasn’t quite connected to it yet. And they told me, I figured out how to set up an internet server in my office in Los Gatos. Los Gatos, home of the pet rock. Los Gatos, where Netflix is. Los Gatos, where Atari founded the arcade industry. It’s really a good city in Silicon Valley. And they told me I had to get this this domain, Woz.com. So, I applied for it and got it! Just domains weren’t even super popular then. You could get anything you went after almost. But, you know, I decided not to use it. “.com” meant commercial, commerce, companies. And I’d been on a lot of nonprofit boards by then, and they always used “.org” for nonprofits. I saw myself as a nonprofit person, not after money. I wasn’t after starting an industry or starting a company as much as I wanted engineers to say, “Wow, how did he ever design this stuff?” So, I used woz.org instead of woz.com; I have them both. I have gotten praised by engineers.

When you’re young, you have that capacity to do a lot more in your life than you will later on. And, of course, you’ll have to get a job to pay your apartment rental. But you know what, if you have a lot of free time and you have one of these internal passions, you want to go in a certain direction in life, create a certain type of company maybe, you have a lot of free time when you’re young, and don’t throw it away. Anyway, stay honest, keep smiling, and pay your own successes forward by helping others, mentoring and teaching. And you’ll forget a lot of your class material over time, but one thing you’ll remember is the people you had experiences with, and your time here at CU, and today. Go, Buffs!