People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line.
I do not want to waste any time. And if you are not working on important things, you are wasting time.
As a kid, I was less interested in the physical tinkering than thinking about what we would now call the physics, as opposed to the engineering.
If people ridicule you, look them in the eye and say, 'Yeah, I may have failed, but at least I tried,' and get on with it.
I've never regretted anything I've done, even the things that I've failed at. I've often regretted not trying something really big, because you'll never know.
I started realizing that I wasn't so dumb; rather, most people simply didn't know the answers to the questions that I was interested in-or they didn't care.