What does a frequency meter paint in the history of HP and what did Steve Jobs do with it at the age of 12?

Steve Jobs was already in a hurry even as he entered his teens. At twelve years old, the one who was going to be co-founder and CEO of Apple had the technological concern to mount a frequency meter. But he ran into a problem: he had no parts to be able to do so.

So Steve had an idea: get these parts from someone who knew frequency meters. To a specialist. So he consulted to see who that expert who lived nearby might be and found the perfect guy. and this guy he was the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard.

“No one told me no. I was just asking”

At 12, Steve Jobs learned that you never know what’s going to happen unless you pick up the phone.

He called HP co-founder Bill Hewlett and asked for spare parts.

He got the parts and a summer job on the HP assembly line.

“I was in heaven,” Jobs later said.pic.twitter.com/1rCTYW3giU

— John Ehrlichman (@JonErlichman) January 15, 2023

Few people would have dared to phone Bill Hewlett himself, but Steve found her number in the phone book and jumped on it. The rest is history, as Jobs himself recounts in the video you can see just above:

He answered the phone himself. I said “hi, my name is Steve Jobs, I’m 12, I’m in high school, I’m making a frequency counter and I’m missing some parts, and I was wondering if you have any spares I could use .” He laughed, gave me the parts, and offered me a summer job assembling frequency counters on the HP assembly line. I was in heaven.

I have never met anyone who said “no” to me on the phone. I was just asking. And when people called me, I always tried to be the same to return that gratitude to them.

A lot of people don’t pick up the phone, a lot of people choose not to ask, and that’s what separates people who end up doing things and people who just want to do them. You have to act, and you have to be prepared to fail, to crumble. If you’re afraid of failing, you won’t get anywhere.

This move by Jobs played a role in many parts of Apple’s own history. What started as a hobby of building something at home ended in a job and direct contact with the CEO of a company. He might as well have made a career out of it, although we know Steve’s ambition was higher.

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