One Thing Young Bill Gates Wasn't Worried About
As a tech business trailblazer and the richest man in the world (at least whenever Jeff Bezos isn't topping the charts), Bill Gates has lived a life few of us can even picture in our heads. His perennially rumpled presence hides a razor-sharp intellect and a seemingly genuine desire to make the world a better place — along with his wife Melinda and fellow super-billionaire Warren Buffett, Gates is the driving force behind the Giving Pledge, an agreement by many of the world's richest people to "give the majority of their wealth to philanthropy."
But hey, the guy is not just a one-percenter — he's the one literally standing on top of the entire world's money mountain. Of course it's easy to be generous and self-assured when you have the kind of wealth that enables you to do virtually anything. Was Gates as confident back when he was still a young up-and-comer?
Young Bill Gates wasn't worried about burning out young
Yes, he was! As CNBC tells us, Bill Gates was pretty certain about himself when he was younger, at least when it came to one thing. Hard-working as he was, back when he was 28 Gates was not at all worried about the possibility that he would become one of those guys who work themselves to the ground and burn out by the age of 30.
The outside observer might certainly have expected something like that. After all, Gates started his tech career by becoming a self-taught programmer at 13, dropping out of Harvard and founding Microsoft at 19, getting his first major contract at 21 and was about to take Microsoft to over $100 million in annual revenue when he gave his confident statement in 1984. Here's why Gates felt burnout wasn't an issue for him: "We go into our offices and think up new programs, we get together in meetings, we go out and see end users, we talk to customers. There's so much variety and there's always new things going on. And I don't think there'll ever come a time when that would be boring."
While people who are less into computers might be inclined to disagree about the variety and interest factor of building a company like Microsoft, this approach certainly worked for Gates. He plowed right past his 30th birthday entirely burnout-free, and kept on working his way to become history's youngest billionaire at 31.