There are many people who write (and post comments) about how lucky Bill Gates was, being born at the right time, living in the right place, and having priviledged parents. All luck, right?
In his book, Great by Choice, Jim Collins has a good section on this topic:
Why did Bill Gates become a 10Xer, building a truly great software company in the personal computer revolution? Through one lens, you might see Bill Gates as incredibly lucky. He just happened to have been born into an upper-middle-class American family that had the resources to send him to a private school. His family enrolled him at Lakeside School in Seattle, which had obtained a teletype connection to a computer upon which he could learn to program, something unusual for schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He just happened to have been born at the right time, coming of age just as the advancement of microelectronics made the personal computer inevitable; born 10 years later, or even 5 years later, he would have missed the moment. His friend Paul Allen just happened to see a cover story in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics titled “World’s First Microcomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models.” It was about the Altair, designed by a small company in Albuquerque. Gates and Allen had the idea to convert the programming language BASIC into a product that could be used on the Altair, which would put them in position to be the first to sell such a product for a personal computer. Gates went to college at Harvard, which just happened to have a PDP-10 computer upon which he could develop and test his ideas. Wow, Gates was really lucky, right?
Yes, Gates was lucky, but luck is not why Gates became a 10Xer. Consider the following questions:
- Was Gates the only person of his era who grew up in an upper-middle-class American family?
- Was Gates the only person born in the mid-1950s who attended a secondary school with access to computing?
- Was Gates the only person who went to a college with computer resources in the mid-1970s? Was Gates the only person who read the Popular Electronics article?
- Was Gates the only person who knew how to program in BASIC?
No, no, no, no, and no.
Lakeside might have been one of the first schools to have a computer that students could access during those years, but it wasn’t the only such school. Gates might’ve been a math and computer whiz kid at a top college that had computers in 1975, but he wasn’t the only math and computer whiz kid at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, UCLA, Chicago, Georgia Tech, Cornell, Dartmouth, USC, Columbia, Northwestern, Penn, Michigan, or any number of other top colleges with comparable or even better computer resources. Gates wasn’t the only person who knew how to program in BASIC; the language had been developed by professors at Dartmouth a decade earlier, and it was widely known by 1975, used in academics and industry. And what about all the master’s and PhD students in electrical engineering and computer science who had even more computer expertise than Gates on the day the Popular Electronics article appeared? Any of them could have decided to abandon their studies and launch a personal computer–software company, as could have computer experts already working in industry and academia.
But how many of them disrupted their life plans (and cut their sleep to near-zero, inhaling food as fast as possible so as not to let eating interfere with work) to throw themselves into writing BASIC for the Altair? How many of them defied their parents, dropped out of college, and moved to Albuquerque—Albuquerque! New Mexico!—to work with the Altair? How many of them got BASIC for the Altair written, debugged, and ready to ship before anyone else? Thousands of people could have done the exact same thing as Gates, at the exact same time, but they didn’t.
The difference between Bill Gates and similarly advantaged people is not luck. Yes, Gates was lucky to be born at the right time, but many others had this luck. And yes, Gates was lucky to have the chance to learn programming by 1975, but many others had this same luck. Gates did more with his luck, taking a confluence of lucky circumstances and creating a huge return on his luck. And this is the important difference.
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