Steve Jobs on Failure

Now 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 them for help.

I always call them up. I called up, um, this will date me, but I called up Bill Huet when I was 12 years old. 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'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 gave me the spare parts to build this frequency counter. He also 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.

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 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've got to 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.