25 Bill Gates Lessons Revisited
“Until we’re educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.” – Bill Gates
Bill Gates was my original inspiration for joining Microsoft. Here was a guy with all the money in the world that showed up everyday, and put in more hours than most people I know, to change the world.
He had ruthless focus on empowering people and building a better world.
Technology just happens to be his way.
Related to this, a funny thing happened a few weeks back. I was meeting a colleague I hadn’t seen in a while. While I was waiting, I noticed a poster on his wall.
It was a poster of lessons learned from Bill Gates. It was 25 lessons learned from Bill Gates.
Lesson #18 caught my eye:
Lesson #18. The toughest feedback to hear, is the feedback you need the most.
You get better by listening to your toughest critics. Your greatest source of growth can come from the people that will tell you what you need to hear, not just what you want to hear. Bill says, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” Bill also says, “You’ve got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you’re doing wrong.”
I started to read a few more of the lessons. #25 also caught my eye:
25. Go digital.
Connect people, process, and technology. Create a digital landscape or a virtual world to reduce friction and to create new possibilities. Bill says, “One of the wonderful things about the information highway is that virtual equity is far easier to achieve than real-world equity…We are all created equal in the virtual world and we can use this equality to help address some of the sociological problems that society has yet to solve in the physical world.”
I had to ask my friend where he got the poster from. He told me from my site:
Lessons Learned from Bill Gates
How funny was that?
My friend had formatted the poster so well, I didn’t recognize my original post from long ago.
Anyway, I did a quick formatting sweep of my post, Lessons Learned from Bill Gates.
Hopefully, the lessons are easier to read now, and better emphasize the insight that Gates has shared with the world over his lifetime.
BTW –- if you have any favorite lessons from Bill Gates, feel free to share them.
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