What did you do when you were 12? Maybe you spent your days playing video games or kicking a footsie with your mates after school. We don’t know what your life was like, but we do know one thing for sure: at the age of 12, when most teenagers are stressing about their maths test or pop quizzes, Steve Jobs wanted to build a heart rate monitor. Real geek stuff: a frequency meter is an electronic device used to precisely measure the frequency of an electrical signal. In other words, it determines how many times per second (number of cycles or oscillations) a wave or signal repeats itself, with the measurement expressed in Hertz (Hz).
All this to say that little Steve had a problem: he was missing some crucial parts to complete his project. Rather than give up, Jobs, true to the cheeky spirit that would make his legend, picked up the yellow pages and dialled the personal number of Bill Hewlett, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard. Yes, the founder of HP, no more, no less. And do you know what else? Bill Hewlett picks up the phone.
Steve Jobs told the story himself. Here are the words of the creator of Apple: “It was Bill Hewlett who picked up the phone himself. I said to him: ‘Hi, my name is Steve Jobs, I’m 12 years old, I’m at school, and I’m building a frequency meter but I’m missing some parts. Do you happen to have any spare parts I could borrow? He laughed, gave me what I asked for and even offered me a summer job on the assembly line at HP. I was in heaven.
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hat day, Steve Jobs learned a fundamental lesson that would stay with him for the rest of his life: dare to ask. “I’ve never met anyone who refuses to help when you simply ask,” he confides in this famous 1994 interview, archived by the Silicon Valley Historical Association. It was thanks to his audacity that young Steve found himself propelled into the world of tech at a very early age.
“I simply asked. And later, when someone else called me, I always tried to behave the same way, out of gratitude. A lot of people never dare pick up the phone, never ask questions, and that’s exactly what separates those who end up doing great things from those who only dream of achieving them. You have to act, even if you risk failing miserably. If you’re afraid of failing, you’ll never get anywhere.” The funny thing is that this philosophy continues to this day at Apple: Steve Jobs and Tim Cook have always made it a point of honour to answer their emails personally, whether they were Apple users or not.
Most of the stories told by Silicon Valley billionaires sound the same. They are, of course, well-crafted little stories, designed to conjure up the American dream. Bill Gates, for example, recounts how he was full of daring right out of childhood. He tells of running away from home at night when he was 13, heading for the Computer Center Corp. in Seattle, where he spent hours programming on the sly. At the time, computers were a luxury that very few could afford. By fixing computer bugs on a voluntary basis, Gates earned the “privilege” of spending 500 hours coding for free. In his autobiography, Gates says that these 500 hours forged him and that “without them, the next 9,500 might never have happened”. The same is true of Warren Buffett, the “business and financial genius”, who was already selling chewing gum in his neighbourhood at the age of six. By the age of 13, he was distributing newspapers by bicycle and even deducted the purchase of his bicycle from his first tax return!
These seemingly extraordinary stories all tell the same story. They’re about kids with a lot of nerve, of course, but above all they’re about daring young people who didn’t wait for luck to fall from the sky. They picked up the phone, asked questions, took risks. It’s all about shining a light on the myth of the self-made man and the good old American meritocracy.
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