Success Quote by Steve Wozniak

Wozniak’s line flips the Hollywood image of hacking as lone-wolf genius and replaces it with something more unsettling: hacking as theater, persuasion, and social leverage. The key phrase isn’t “hacking,” it’s “playing with other people” - a verb choice that feels almost childlike, even mischievous, until you hear what follows: “getting them to do strange things.” That’s the tell. He’s pointing at the oldest vulnerability in any system: humans will comply, improvise, and rationalize if you push the right buttons.

The intent reads like a knowing correction from someone who actually built things. Woz came up in a moment when “hacking” still meant exploratory tinkering, not just credential theft and ransomware. Yet he’s also acknowledging the continuum between playful curiosity and manipulation. The subtext is moral ambiguity: the same skill that lets you coax a computer into unexpected behavior can let you coax a person. The quote doesn’t condemn; it shrugs, as if to say this is simply how the game is played.

Context matters: coming from a co-founder of Apple, it’s a reminder that tech culture often treats cleverness as an ethic unto itself. “Strange things” lands as a euphemism that protects the speaker and indicts the listener. Fill in the blank: divulging a password, bypassing a rule, trusting a caller, clicking a link. Wozniak makes the uncomfortable point that security isn’t just code; it’s psychology, and the real exploit is often consent disguised as convenience.