There are so many things that might have happened but for one key decision. You can't spend the rest of your life wondering "what if?"<p>But it can be tempting!<p>In my case, I had the opportunity to be the first programmer at Apple. I told the story on Reddit a few years ago:<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/h4n5w/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/h4n5w/</a><p>As you can imagine, I have wondered "what if?" more than a few times. :-)<p>But "what if?" can work both ways. I could have become a billionaire and one of the most famous people in Silicon Valley. Or Steve could have driven me from the mild depression I'd occasionally experienced into full-blown mental illness, as happened with one of Apple's earliest employees. You just don't know which way it could have turned out.<p>The other story on the front page today about Regis McKenna reminds me of one of the more remarkable coincidences I've encountered.<p>As I told in the Reddit story, when I walked out of Apple's answering service in 1976 I thought to myself, "Those guys are flakes! They're never going to make it."<p>It was one of those things that sticks in your mind. I remember vividly to this day exactly where I was walking and the exact words that were in my head.<p>A couple of years ago I was reading Michael Moritz's <i>Return to the Little Kingdom</i> and ran across this:<p><i>At first there was great uncertainty at the Regis McKenna Agency about Apple's prospects. The account executive, Frank Burge, explained, "People who knew Markkula and Apple wondered whether they would make it. We kept saying 'These guys are flakes. They’re never going to make it.'"</i><p>Other than "these" vs. "those", it's the <i>exact same words</i> I was thinking.<p>It was definitely a strange feeling to run across that quote!