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The Secret That So Many People Don't Do Enough Of To Get Ahead


I was scrolling around Yahoo.com a couple of months ago and I came across a Business Insider article that caught my attention. A former Goldman Sachs employee who currently works at a Venture Capital firm and is a university professor created a class on Udemy.  What sold me on this class were three things:  (1) The headline in the article reading "condensed an entire MBA into one online course", (2) the teacher has real life experience which he explains he's trying to bring to this online course as opposed to actual MBA classes which focus too much on theory and not reality, and (3) the price was only $19.


I signed up and got through the first couple videos and I am a big fan.  In one video I just watched the instructor, Chris Haroun, strongly advised me to go to Youtube.com and search "Steve Jobs Ask", which I did.  I came across a video of Steve Jobs responding to an interview question about how he got ahead so much.  The reason he got ahead was because HE JUST PICKED UP THE PHONE AND ASKED.  He asked for advise and he asked for help.


Chris Haroun knows that the phone isn't used as much in the internet world that we live in today, so he suggests using LinkedIn as a resource to connect with people by writing people an InMessage to their inbox to meet up in person and talk.


What got me started on this blog post today is the actual Youtube video that showed Steve Jobs talking about not being afraid to ask.  I created a transcript of this video below.  You can also watch the 2 minute video by scrolling to the bottom of this page.

All text below is what Steve Jobs said in the interview:


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


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, this will date me, but I called 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.


Yes? [said Bill Hewlett] 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 can have.  And he laughed and he gave me the spare parts to build a frequency counter. 


And he gave me a job that summer at Hewlett Packard working on the assembly line putting nuts and bolts together on a frequency counter.  He got me a job at 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 gratitude back.


Most people never pick up the phone and call, most people never ask, and that’s what separates sometimes the people who do things from the people that just dream about them.


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


If you are afraid of failing, you won’t get very far.”



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