Gary Perkinson

Steve Jobs called Bill Hewlett at 12 years old and got a job at HP. Most people never make that call. Jobs wanted to build a frequency counter but lacked the parts. So he looked up Bill Hewlett's number in the Palo Alto phone book and dialed. "Hi, I'm Steve Jobs. I'm 12 years old. I'm a student in high school and I want to build a frequency counter. I was wondering if you had any spare parts I could have." Hewlett laughed. Then he gave Jobs the parts and offered him a summer job at HP, building the very frequency counters he had called about. "I was in heaven." Jobs spent the rest of his life thinking about why that moment was possible. "I've never found anybody that didn't want to help me if I asked them for help. I just asked." The lesson he carried was simple but rare. Throughout history, the people who shaped the world were rarely the most talented or the most connected. They were the ones willing to make the ask that everyone else had already talked themselves out of. "Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask. And that's what separates sometimes the people that do things from the people that just dream about them." "If you're afraid of failing, you won't get very far." The phone book that connected a 12-year-old to a Silicon Valley legend is long gone. The principle behind that call never changed.