Here's the Gutsy Way 12-Year-Old Steve Jobs Landed a Summer Job at HP

By Rachel Sugar

Cold calling usually gets you nowhere. Unless you happen to have the pluck of pre-teen Steve Jobs, and a copy of the Palo Alto phone book, in which case, cold calling will get you everywhere.

Case in point: At 12, Jobs wanted to build a frequency counter, but he didn't have the parts. Ever sensible, he suspected that Bill Hewlett, then the CEO of HP, might have some extras. And so, with the bizarre confidence of an 8th grader, he found Hewlett's number in the telephone book and called it.