Time & Perspective Quote by Steve Wozniak

Wozniak’s line has the plainspoken confidence of a builder looking back at a lifetime of tinkering and saying: I didn’t fluke my way here. The power isn’t in bragging about outcomes; it’s in defending the internal logic of decisions made under uncertainty. “My reasons at the time were right” is a quietly radical standard in a culture that grades choices almost entirely by results. It’s also an engineer’s ethic: you test, you iterate, you make the best call with the data you have, and you accept that reality will still throw noise into the system.

The subtext is a preemptive rebuttal to the mythology that congeals around Apple’s origin story. Wozniak is often cast as the gentle genius who got sidelined by bigger personalities and bigger business instincts. This sentence pushes back without theatrics. He’s not litigating who won the corporate chess match; he’s insisting that the motives and constraints of the moment matter. That’s both self-protective and clarifying: history loves to retroactively assign “obvious” paths, then punish anyone who didn’t take them.

Context does the rest of the work. Wozniak built for elegance and joy, not domination. He’s spoken about open sharing, about giving away designs, about being more interested in the machine than the market. The quote frames that temperament as principled rather than naive. It’s a small manifesto for process over hindsight, and for moral consistency over victory laps: judge me by the reasons, not the scoreboard.