[0xpgm]

I'm just speculating, I do not 'know'. I look up to them as well. But reading about them, things that seems to stand out is that they are/were:

1) very prolific in the engineering sense. writing lots of code or producing lots of hardware designs (in the case of wozniak). When you do that a lot on hard problems you quickly learn from mistakes and get good.

2) very persistent, bordering to stubborn (at least in the case of torvalds and wozniak). keeping at it even to unreasonable levels.

So maybe it's just about having a strong drive and sustaining it, and also a bit of luck by having the correct tools, knowledge and community available to you