Steve Jobs on Failure

No , I've actually always found something to be very true , which is , um , most people don't get those experiences because they never ask .

Uh , I've never found anybody that didn't want to help me if I asked him for help .

I always call them up .

I called up , um , this will date me , but I called up Bill Hewlett when I was 12 years old and he lived in Palo Alto .

His number was still in the phone book and he answered the phone himself .

He said , yes , he said hi , I'm Steve Jobs .

I'm 12 years old .

I , I'm a student in high school and I want to build a frequency counter and I was wondering if you had any spare parts I could have .

And he laughed and he , he gave me the spare parts to build this frequency counter .

And he gave me a job that summer in Hewlett Packard working on the assembly line , putting nuts and bolts together on frequency counters .

He got me a job in the place that built them and I was in heaven and I've never found anyone who said no or hung up the phone when I called , I just asked .

And when people ask me , I try to be as responsive , you know , to pay that , that debt of gratitude back .

Um 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 .

You gotta , you gotta act and you've got to be uh willing to um fail .

You've got to be willing to crash and burn , you know , with people on the phone , with starting a company with whatever .

If you're afraid of failing , uh , you won't get very far .