Influential Individuals - Bill Gates: The Life, Lessons & Rules For Success

Bill Gates

The Life, Lessons & Rules For Success

Influential Individuals

Copyright 2017 Influential Individuals

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Early Life

B ill Gates is the most influential and recognizable name in the technology industry to date. A business magnate, avid investor, heavy philanthropist, and author of multiple books. Gates and his partner, Paul Allen, together co-founded the technology mogul Microsoft, which quickly grew into the globes largest PC software company. Gates held different positions at Microsoft over the years, from chief software architect to chairperson and CEO. Up until May 2014, he was also the largest shareholder of the company.

If that is not impressive enough, Gates is currently the richest person in the world with a net worth of over $87 billion. One of his most notable ventures in the latter years of his business ventures has been the partnership he took on with Warren Buffett when they founded The Giving Pledge. This was a cause that encouraged billionaires around the globe to make a pledge promising they would eventually give at least half their entire wealth to philanthropy.

Born in Seattle, Washington to a father who was a very prominent lawyer in the community and a mother who regularly served on the Board of Directors for both United Way and First Interstate BancSystem. Growing up, his parents dream for him was to practice law like his father. Many people who knew the Gates family a similar view: they were incredibly competitive. Those who grew up and lived alongside the family have always said, no matter what, there was a reward for winning and a penalty for losing. It did not matter if the kids were playing pinball or competing in sports. The only thing that mattered was for every win, there was a reward, and for every loss, a consequence.

This explains a lot behind Gates eventual wealth and success. He was raised in an environment that outwardly rewarded or penalized every action he made. This makes a child very aware of the decisions they are making and prompts them to learn how to reason and project possible futures based on the current scenario as well as actions taken. This is a skill that he would hone and develop as he grew older, and is argued to be the greatest driving force behind his current success as an adult.

When he was 13, he officially enrolled into his first private prep school. He would end up exploring his first piece of technology that was paid for by the proceeds from a rummage sale the Mothers Club was throwing. They ended up utilizing the profits to purchase a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal as well as a block of computer time on a General Electric computer. This was to benefit the entire student body as a whole, but obviously certain students took more of an interest than others. Gates was hooked and invested in learning how to program the system. His thirst for knowledge was so great that his math teachers would excuse him from class simply to allow him go and learn the system.

This would be the machine he would write his first piece of code on. The code was an electronic implementation of the traditional tic-tac-toe game that could enable people who used the computer to play against it. Gates would play at every opportunity he got; his school friends soon became entranced with the game. As he watched his fellow student reap the joy from the game he had programmed and loaded onto the computer, he became more and more fascinated with what this piece of technology was capable of doing. He loved how it could always execute the software he programmed perfectly, and he reflects upon this learning experience with only four words: this machine was neat.

This love of technology would soon lead into his first-ever reprimand on a piece of technology: after the Mothers Club donations had been financially exhausted, Gates and some other students who had struck up similar interests within the piece of technology went to go find alternative time solutions on various systems and minicomputers. Gates and four friends would eventually be banned for an entire summer from the Computer Center Corporation because they were caught finding and exploiting bugs within the main operating systems in order to garner themselves more free computer time.

Eventually CCC finally smartened up and offered the kids an offer they couldnt refuse: they told the children they could have more computer time in exchange for finding bugs within the operating systems and software that CCCs computers utilized. Jumping at the opportunity, Gates found himself going to the CCCs offices and studying their base source codes in order to familiarize himself with back-end knowledge as to how all of their systems worked. The boys would continue to be under this agreement until 1970, when the company went under.

They would not be out of work for long. Information Sciences, Inc. would end up hiring these same four students after hearing of their previous arrangement and technology prowess. Their task? To write a payroll program in a specific coding language. The compensation was not just computer time, however. This time they were also offered royalties, and this would be the first time that Gates would find monetary compensation for his new found passion.

Pretty soon, the administrators above Gates all became aware of his programming capabilities. They would get him to program his own schools electronic classroom assignment software, whereby students could be electronically scheduled for classes they signed up for. Being the young man he was, he ended up utilizing this to his advantage by placing himself in classes that had a vastly large number of interesting girls within them.

Gates ended up graduating from his Lakeside Preparatory School in 1973 as a National Merit Scholar, and he ended up only being 10 points underneath a perfect 1600 score when he took the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) required for enrolling into college. In the fall of that graduating year, Gates would enroll into Harvard College and choose pre-law as his major, much to the delight of his parents. He would also end up overloading his schedule to take challenging and time-consuming mathematical classes as well as graduate-level computer science courses, much to the shock of his professors.

During his college years at Harvard, Gates took on a series of unsolved problems, given to his class taught by Harry Lewis. It was a combinatorics class, and the algorithm that Gates devised for pancake sorting was not only correct, but it provided the fastest sorting solution to the problem for over three decades. It was so fast, in fact, that when the successor of the challenge beat Gates sorting speed solution, it was faster by a mere 1%!

Even though his major was pre-law, Gates really did not know what he wanted to do with his study plan at Harvard. He spent a great deal of time with the schools computers, and it was during these pre-law college years that him and Paul Allen would begin their own infamous software company.