How Bill Gates Revolutionized Computing | Top 10 Rules in 20 Minutes

Bill Gates is a co-founder of Microsoft Corporation who changed the world by revolutionizing the way we use computers. He went from dropping out of Harvard in order to start Microsoft to becoming one of the richest men on the planet and one of the world's biggest philanthropists with a net worth of over $104 billion. Need motivation?

Watch Top 10 with Believe Nation.

If you've been here before, drop a hashtag #believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in a future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time. Okay, let's kick it off with rule number 1, love the work you do.

I think for Microsoft to be successful, even though we were the first, we, and we had a broader concept of software than the other companies, we needed to be what I would call hardcore. And, you know, in that case, the work is what I want to do. It's not like, oh God, you know, I've gotta earn a little bit more money. You know, this is the thing that throughout my childhood I was so lucky, you know, because of my parents and some early friends, school I went to, I had these exposures to computers that were very rare. And so I had, you know, all these thousands of hours of programming experience and great feedback on, okay, how do you do it better from the very best adults? I got to see what was coming and the idea of being part of making that real I woke up and said, okay, I'd love to get to work. My younger self could stay in days at a time. I don't do that now, but then it was just in no way a hardship because I felt we were part of something that would be very empowering. And competitively, I wanted us to be the ones to make it happen.

Rule number 2, set your ambitions high.

Often when you see people who, are, you know, high achievers, there's some, you know, something they're trying to prove. In my case, you really don't have that. I mean, the only negative thing that happens to me in my childhood is one of my friends, Kent Evans, died when I was 16 and he was 17. But, you know, I was already, you know, my energy and ambition had already been set, so I don't, you know, wouldn't say that was connected. So it is, I think some people are surprised, you know, where did I get this desire in my 20s to be, you know, compared to everybody else who was starting software companies. I mean, by my standards, they were quite lazy.

Rule number 3, be motivated.

The key is motivation. If you have a kid who's super motivated, then yes, going to, the Khan website and doing, you know, hours of math problems, that's great. But in a way, that takes the kid who's in that top 20% and makes him even more intimidating to the other ones. And, you know, people can come in, and if a kid in 8th grade says, is math a subject you have any confidence in? If they answer no to that, they're 5 times more likely to drop out. And so we do lose kids, and it's more out of motivation. And so most of the stuff we've done on the computer is about, okay, if you are motivated, we'll help you out, and not so much about how you make it feel relevant to them and give them a sense of success. And maybe this time around with these AI personal tutors, we'll get that right. But kids check out of, no, I'm not one of those kids who's good at math, even though for a lot of professions and, you know, for college courses, we require Algebra II tests to be passed in order to go on and, you know, even be a nurse or a policeman. So we have, we have work to do. Yeah. But more on, on the motivational side.

Number 4, choose what you concentrate on.

For me, the, the ability to concentrate to get fascinated with something and really dig into it, which as I got older, I could choose what I concentrated on. And when I was in high school, I was OK at it. But I remember being down in my room thinking, OK, I'm going to work on my homework and do really well this year. But then there were these Tarzan books that were so interesting. And then by the time I got to Harvard, where I would do this thing that I didn't go to class and try to do the work at the end, —then I could every time when it came to it, I did manage to not read the Tarzan book equivalent of that time, but really work on that course. So I think being a kind of student who can take, say, a 400-page book about a new topic and really spend the time, take notes, admit to yourself, OK, I'm confused about this. I don't understand this. To be a really concentrated student, I think it's super valuable. And so, you know, the mix of things that I got by almost certainly being on the spectrum, you know, late social skills, very fidgety, you know, I rock sometimes. That bothers some of the people around me. Because I don't even know what I'm doing it, but apparently it's not that attractive. So I'm at age 70 now. I'm going to— I turned 70 this year, so that's part of my resolution is to give up rocking. We'll see.

Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it. I'll see you there. Rule number 5 is be curious.

Some teachers would say this kid should be skipped ahead 1 or 2 grades. Some teachers would say this kid should be held back, you know. So that kind of is what, you know, make up your mind. You know, I had one experience where I worked on a, a report about the state of Delaware, and I ended up doing this 200-page report with the great wood cover while the other kids turned in, you know, 5 or 10-page reports. And it was very embarrassing that I thought, wow, did I I would kind of overdo this thing. And yet, that ability to concentrate would hold me in good stead in terms of reading long books and applying that concentration and curiosity first to cards, then to math, and then finally to software and how would software change the world. But they never were quite sure what to do. And sending me to a therapist actually ended up being brilliant, and sending me to a very nice private school where the classes were a bit smaller and I could get, I always got an unfair share of attention from the teachers. We'd have like 15 people in the class, but almost 20% of the teacher's time in terms of telling me what to read or marking my writing up, I got an unfair share, partly 'cause my curiosity or energy level did mark me out. In both positive and negative ways. Rule number 6 is think ahead. The idea of, you know, thinking ahead. Okay, what, what are you going to do? How you make money? How do businesses make money? I had my dad would share about his law firm, so I sort of got the economics there and the kind of business disputes that came up. And then a friend of mine Kent Evans, he was very much thinking about what career to go into. He could have told you what the salary of a professor was, an ambassador. And that was kind of eye-opening to me. He was the one who got me reading Fortune magazine and, you know, really trying to think, okay, how do these companies work? The company we admired the most was Digital Equipment because although their computers were still like $20,000 even for a PDP-8, you know, they were the ones who were bringing the cost of computing down. It wasn't just the mainframe, which was, you know, 20 times more expensive. But no, doing businesses, that was strange.

Rule number 7 is use technology to your advantage.

Historically, the newspapers or the, the media We're very responsible about not letting untruths about vaccine safety get out there. Now, you know, you don't want to get rid of the good thing, which is that anybody can publish. The barriers to entry, the diversity of voices is so phenomenal compared to traditional publishing. Right. I feel like— and you have a bit of a YouTube presence, so you're able to share information about things through social media. It's kind of a social media age, so I feel like that ideally helps your cause more than it hurts it. Yeah, my audience probably isn't deep with the vaccine doubters. Yeah, you know, I, in a creative way, trying to get positive messages to be interesting, and we have work to do on that. You know, I would have thought using experts and scientific knowledge that all the internet would just make it so much easier to learn about things. And yet in some ways, you know, people aren't seeking out complex information, particularly if it disagrees with some preconceived notion that they have. So, you know, how can social media get out there and be a little bit of a, force for education, particularly on climate, where without a consensus we won't do the, the hard things that will save things for the next generation.

Number 8 is trust your instincts.

There were a small group of people who saw what personal computing would become. You know, the slogan of Microsoft was a computer on every desk and in every home. Running Microsoft software. And sometimes we dropped that last part because it seemed a little commercial. And the West Coast Computer Fair got going here. The first kit computer, the Altair, which actually didn't ship until the summer of 1975, but it's on the COVID of Popular Electronics magazine at the end of 1974. That's the thing that gets me to drop out. You know, my friend Paul Allen, who was 2 years older than me, I had helped him get a job at Honeywell so he could be there and bug me. And then this is the COVID And, you know, Paul had been saying to me, okay, it's Moore's Law, it's exponential improvement. And I'd been saying to him, okay, this is unbelievable. Computing will be free. If it improves exponentially, it goes from being super scarce to super free. And then, you know, okay, what are you going to do with it? Ken Olsen, who ran Digital, famously said, nobody wants a personal computer. And we were— unlike your RAM quote, he did say that. He did say that. He actually did say that. But there was a small group, and some of them were fairly counterculture. There was a thing called the People's Computer Company. There was Bob Albrecht and various people. Computer Company represent— he here at the back. Maybe grandchildren. And it had kind of this great feel that we were in on something. And it was almost like, OK, the big companies have the big computers. We've got the personal computers. We're going to change things. Even though those early machines were so limited in terms of what they could actually do, then as we get disks and we connect them together and the memory size gets to be decent, you know, then the sky's the limit.

Number 9 is build good friendships.

When your mother first said, I'd like you to come and have dinner with me and Warren Buffett will be here, you should meet him, you didn't seem that interested. Why was that? Well, Warren, I thought of as somebody who bought and sold securities, which is a very zero-sum thing. That's not curing disease or a cool piece of software. And the idea of, you know, kind of looking at volume curves and it doesn't invent anything. And so I thought my way of looking at the world, what I wanted to figure out and do and what he looked at, that there wouldn't be much intersection. And that's why it was so shocking when I met him. He was the first person to really ask me about software and software pricing and why wasn't IBM with all of their strength able to overwhelm Microsoft and what was gonna happen in terms of how software would change the world. And he let me ask him about, okay, well, why do you invest in certain industries and why are some banks more profitable than others? And he was clearly a broad systems thinker. And so it started a conversation that has been fun and enriching and an incredible friendship that was completely unexpected. And number 10, the last one before a very special bonus clip, is understand what counts. Education is essentially a social construct. It's not that the universities have secret knowledge that only they have available. I took— these numbers won't make any sense anymore, but the hardest freshman math class was called Math 55. I assume it's not called that anymore. But it was a group of 80 people whose personal positioning was they were the best person at math that they had ever met. So there were 79 frauds, one person who really was the best at math. I ended up, the guy who came in first in the class is a lawyer in New York now. The guy who came in second is a professor of chaos theory at Princeton. And then I came in third. So I knew, okay, math, geez, that's interesting. Anyway, I didn't take Physics 55, but I read the Feynman book. And so if you're motivated, seriously, you don't have to take a course. The Feynman book, if you're hardcore, just read the Feynman book, do the problems. You wanna learn to do software? Read The Art of Computer Programming. Good luck doing the problems. But anyone that's rated 30 or harder is like super hard to do. And so a MOOC, in a sense, doesn't change what counts. It's always been in the textbook. But the percentage of students who just buy textbooks and read them and know the subject is vanishingly small. You kind of have to have this thing where a bunch of kids all come at the same time. And, you know, if you don't study, you're gonna get a bad grade, and your parents may not like that. You have to create all these social things in order for people to get into this mode of hyperconcentrating and actually understanding why should I concentrate. You know, if I'm a high school student, they put Xs and Ys up on the board. How does that relate to my life? Now, if you understood that being good at math lets you get a good job, travel the world, You might say, okay, it does relate to me, but that's a very indirect thing, and the kind of discipline to care about that, to concentrate, that's what's missing. And so MOOCs, to the degree that it's easier to take a MOOC than it is to read a textbook, yeah, that's nice. It's a little bit interactive, there's a video. That's partly why I like The Learning Company, like all their economics. There's a guy named Timothy Taylor who has 5 courses on economics, I super recommend. And you learn to like him and his way of explaining things. So a MOOC is a slightly more digestible form of learning, but it doesn't take, particularly for somebody at a young age, it in no way changes this question of why should people engage in that learning and how do you create the environment and the sense of achievement and the sense of capability that sitting in there and, you know, looking at X's and Y's and manipulating them seems like a smart thing to do. If you ask people across the United States, is the future going to be better than the past? Most say no, my kids will be worse off than I am. They think innovation won't make the world better for them or their children. So who's right? The people who say innovation will create new possibilities and make the world better, or the people who see a trend toward inequality and a decline in opportunity and don't think innovation will change that? The pessimists are wrong, in my view, but they're not crazy. If innovation is purely market-driven, and we don't focus on the big inequities, then we could have amazing advances and inventions that leave the world even more divided. We won't improve public schools. We won't cure malaria. We won't end poverty. We won't develop the innovations poor farmers need to grow food in a changing climate. If our optimism doesn't address the problems that affect so many of our fellow human beings, then our optimism needs more empathy. If empathy channels our optimism, we will see the poverty and the disease and the poor schools. We will answer with our innovations, and we will surprise the pessimists. Over the next generation, You Stanford graduates will lead a new wave of innovation. Which problems will you decide to solve? If your world is wide, you can create the future we all want. If your world is narrow, you may create the future the pessimists fear. I started learning in Suedo that if we're going to make our optimism matter to everyone and empower people everywhere, we have to see the lives of those most in need. If we have optimism without empathy, then it doesn't matter how much we master the secrets of science. We're not really solving problems, we're just working on puzzles. I think most of you have a broader worldview than I had at your age. You can do better at this than I did. If you put your hearts and minds to it, you can surprise the pessimists. We're eager to see it.

And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. For 10 more amazing rules from Larry Ellison, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

I let my parents know, in fact, I wasn't, wasn't going to do that. I was going to take this car trip out to Silicon Valley and try my hand at engineering rather than medicine.