The phone call that changed Steve Jobs’ life

An episode that shaped his entire career.

What were you doing with your days at 12? At that age, Steve Jobs took it upon himself to contact the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Hewlett Packard (HP), Bill Hewlett. One phone call that changed his life for ever.

Steve Jobs’ masterstroke

Still only a young teenager, the future entrepreneur decided to build a frequency meter. The snag was that making such a device required specific parts that were clearly beyond his reach at the time. Without hesitating, young Steve managed to find HP’s boss’s telephone number in the phone book and rang him to ask for help.

Caught off guard by the child’s nerve, Bill Hewlett said it made him laugh. He then gave it some thought and, impressed both by what Steve Jobs had just done and by his drive, he chose to send him the spare parts-and even offered him a summer placement at the company, working on frequency counters.

“He got me a job where they made them, and I was over the moon,” Steve Jobs said about it. It was the start of a very long story that would eventually lead the young boy to co-found one of the most profitable companies in the world.

Steve Jobs is not the only Tech leader known for being fearless, either. Fortune reports that Bill Gates used to sneak out of his home at 13 to practise coding all night at a Seattle-based company, Computer Center Corp.

The advice Steve Jobs always gave

As a reminder, Steve Jobs regularly shared a piece of valuable advice with young people. In his view, one of the key qualities for success is boldness. Elaborating on that point, he said in 1994:

I’ve always found something to be very true, which is that most people don’t have these experiences because they never ask for them. I never found anybody who didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help.

And the boss added: “You have to be willing to mess up and to get burned-whether that’s with people on the phone, starting a company, or anything else. If you’re afraid of failing, you won’t get very far.” To find out more on this, feel free to reread our article on the subject here.