In a 1994 interview, Steve Jobs told how he got a summer job at Hewlett-Packard. At 12 he wanted to build a frequency counter, and he needed parts. So he looked up the number of Bill Hewlett, a co-founder of the company, and called him. “I called up Bill Hewlett when I was 12 years old,” Jobs said.
Hewlett laughed and gave him the parts. He also gave him a job that summer on the assembly line where the counters were built. “I was in heaven,” Jobs said. He drew a lesson from it: “I’ve never found anybody that didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help.”