The computer software company Microsoft was founded by childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975, at a time when the majority of Americans were using typewriters.
When Microsoft went public in 1986, Gates became the world’s youngest billionaire at the age of 31.
However, Gates seldom took a vacation to establish the enormously profitable corporation that currently has a market valuation of $3.179 trillion.
In 2023, Bill Gates addressed the graduating class of Northern Arizona University and stated that, during the early days of Microsoft, he truly didn’t believe in taking breaks.
“When I was your age, I didn’t believe in vacations. I didn’t even believe in weekends. I pushed everyone around me to work very long hours,” he said, as per a report in Fortune.
He also remembers watching the Microsoft parking lot every day to “keep track of who is leaving early and who is staying late.”
Gates needed several decades to realise that this kind of scrutiny wasn’t acceptable or long-term.
“As I got older—and especially once I became a father—I realized that both in terms of doing your best work and having a great life, that intensity was not always appropriate. Don’t wait as long as I did to learn this lesson.”
Bill Gates emphasised the need to be easy on oneself, saying that if you’ve cut yourself some slack, you’re not a “slacker.”
He went on to say that it took him quite a while to understand that.
In his blog, Gates Notes, which he started a little over ten years ago, he talks about the people he meets, the books he reads and the things he learns.
However, he has also offered some more life and success advice over the years.
Here are Gates’ three best life and success lessons:
According to Gates, you need to ask yourself these two questions before you can begin to solve problems: Has anyone handled this issue effectively? And what can they teach us?
In a 2020 blog post, Gates stated that he had approached every significant emerging problem in the same manner since he was a teenager: by posing the said two questions first.
He continued by saying that he still employed this method when working at Microsoft.
According to Bill Gates, he learned efficient time management from Warren Buffett. Buffett is unquestionably one of the wealthiest and most influential individuals in business, but he is quite lax with his schedule.
In a 2017 interview with Charlie Rose, Gates recalled Warren giving him his calendar. “There’s nothing on it.”
Bill Gates, on the other hand, formerly believed it was the only way to accomplish tasks and had “every minute packed” on his schedule.
However, Buffett showed him the importance of setting aside time to just reflect.
As Gates put it, “You control your time.”
Considering that a typical CEO has a lot of demands and feels compelled to visit everyone, sitting and contemplating might be a far higher priority than that, he said.
Furthermore, according to Gates, being able to cross every minute off your calendar doesn’t improve your leadership skills in the workplace.
“It’s not a proxy of your seriousness that you fill every minute in your schedule,” he said.
As an industry leader, Gates asserted that “patience is a key element of success” because, when faced with tough choices, those around you depend on you to remain composed and kind.
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