Hey everyone, this is Ben Wilson with a big announcement. How to take over the world is going to be coming to you a little more often. So we've been having a problem, which is that I'm losing contact with some of my listeners. There are actually some podcast feeds that after I haven't posted for a couple months mark my feed inactive.

And unsubscribe some of my followers. And other people just assume, after I haven't posted for a couple months, that, you know, I've stopped doing it. And so they stop paying attention and looking for new episodes.  So I wanted to post a little bit more often. But I also don't just want to pump out episodes.

I don't want to lower the quality that you've come to expect here at How to Take Over the World. So how do I do those two things? How do I post more often without reducing the quality? Well, what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be posting normal episodes at about the same amount. Once every month, once every couple of months, once every six months, I don't know, you know, that it can be variable and it takes time sometimes.

But in between those big posts, I'm going to be posting short, three minute, in between isodes, and those will be coming to you on weeks when I don't post big episodes. These in between isodes will contain short reflections on, or lessons from, a historical incident or character. Sometimes, they will include information that I had to cut from one of the larger episodes.

It's just something short to give you something to think about.  I hope you like this new format, but I really do want to know. This is kind of an experiment. So please email me at ben at httotw. com. Let me know what you think of this new type of episode. Having said all that, without further ado, here is the first short inbetweenisode.

When Steve Jobs was only 12, he called Bill Hewlett and asked him for an electronics part. Steve was a member of something called the Explorers Club, a club for young computer aficionados to get together and learn to build their own homebrew electronics and computers. He had hit a dead end on one of his projects.

There was one part that he just couldn't find anywhere, a component manufactured by Hewlett Packard.  So Steve looked up the company's CEO, Bill Hewlett, in the phone book and called him at home, just spoken to the receiver and said, Hello, Mr. Hewlett, and asked for the part that he needed. Hewlett Packard was one of the world's largest technology companies at the time, and Bill Hewlett was a multi millionaire with a packed CEO schedule.

But, amused by this 12 year old, he said yes. And if he expected gratitude, he was soon surprised, because the boy responded, I'd also like a summer job. And Bill Hewlett agreed to that as well. Several years later, a man named Al Alcorn had a similar experience. Al was the chief engineer at Atari, the first video game company, and one of the coolest technology companies in the world at the time.

He was sitting in his office when a secretary burst in. We got a hippie kid in the lobby, she said. He says he's not going to leave until we hire him. Should we call the cops or let him in? That hippie kid was Steve Jobs. Al let him in. Steve walked into his office, looked Al in the eyes, and said, I'd like the game designer job I saw advertised in the paper.

Al gave him the job.  Only a few years after that, a man named Regis McKenna also had almost the same experience. When Steve was first starting Apple, he realized they needed a publicist. And he didn't want the second best publicist in the world. He wanted the best. And he considered Regis McKenna to be the best publicist in the world.

The problem was, Regis was way too busy and expensive to work for a couple hippies in a garage. And So he said no, but then Steve called him again,  and Regis said no again, but Steve called again, and again, and again every day for two weeks until Regis finally said yes. And by the way, Regis McKenna was the guy who designed the famous Apple logo, hired their first CEO, and got them their first funding.

Apple as we know it would not exist without Regis McKenna. Apple as we know it would not exist if Steve Jobs hadn't asked for exactly what he wanted for two weeks straight.  Steve Jobs had many characteristics that are difficult to copy. He was charismatic and intelligent in a way that few of us can match, but there is something he did that any of us can copy.

He asked for exactly what he wanted, not what he thought he could get, not what it would be nice to have if you had time please sir, but what he wanted. It seems simple enough, anyone is free to ask for what they want, and yet almost none of us ever actually do this. You can tell this by the fact that people were always taken aback when Steve did it.

They were startled by the way he stared them in the eyes and just asked.  But it wasn't some superpower, and if it was, it wasn't a great superpower because people told him no all the time. But he just kept asking.  I won't give you a moral of this story, I'll just leave you with something Steve himself said.

He said, you've got to be willing to crash and burn. With people on the phone, with starting a company, with whatever, if you're afraid of failing, you  And that's it for this episode. Thanks for tuning in to How to Take Over the World. We'll be coming to you in the next couple weeks with a full length episode on Catherine the Great.

Hope you'll tune in then. Thanks

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