Bill Gates and Success
Computer Programmer uses 10,000 Hours to Create the Biggest Software Company on the Planet
By: Bryce Kunkle | Computer Science Major
Bill Gates, a teenager with no other passion but programming, centralizes his focus on a DEC minicomputer that is owned by a local computer company by the name of C-Cubed. As only high school students, Gates and his partner Paul Allen don’t have the type of information on the computer as the employee’s of C-Cubed, and this frustrates them. Gate’s lack of knowledge on the minicomputer gives him the devious idea of trying to obtain any information he can, any way possible. Later that night, Allen had smaller Gates boosted up to the C-Cubed dumpster. Gates scrounged through the trash and found a printout of the company’s source code unlocking secret information (Paul Allen, Idea Man 56).
No one would think a nerdy programming kid would be so devious, but this “go get it” behavior applied to everything he did in his life. In a biography written by Entrepreneur, Bill Gates was admitted to Harvard in 1973, and only one year after, he dropped out to create Microsoft. Gates moved the company to downtown Seattle in 1979, and that’s when he and Microsoft went big time. Gates found that IBM was having trouble with their operating system for their new pc, so he developed a system for IBM while still retaining the right to license it to other computer makers, which made it the standard operating system of the industry (Biography: Bill Gates).
When Windows of Microsoft was released in 1985, it didn’t have the exact breakthrough that Gates expected. Entrepreneur writes, “Gates worked tremendously hard on Windows, and in 1993 it was selling at a rate of 1 million copies per month and was estimated to be running on nearly 85 percent of the world’s computers.” (Biography: Bill Gates) However, as Malcolm Gladwell writes in Outliers: Story of Success, “If you work hard enough, assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires” (Gladwell 151). Bill Gates sealed the deal with Microsoft’s success in the mid-1990s by persuading the leading computer makers to preload his software on every computer they sold. Bill Gates mirrors Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers ideas of 10,000 hours, special opportunity, and grit that led him to billionaire status success.
In the book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell writes about the successes of Bill Gates. These successes are rooted in many hours of hard work that started with Bill Gates attending a high school with a fellow student that happened to have a mom who founded a firm called C-Cubed at the University of Washington. This was Gate’s chance to test out and experience professional software programs. After school, Gates took the bus to the C-Cubed offices and programmed long into the evening. After C-Cubed went bankrupt, Gates and his friends began hanging around the computer center at the University of Washington. They soon got latched onto an outfit called ISI, which agreed to let them have free computer time in exchange for working on a piece of software that could be used to automate company payrolls (Gladwell 51).
The ability to obtain 10,000 hours was standing right in front of Gates. He took those hours and ran with them. Gates had a passion for programming, and he knew the only way to tackle this passion and become the greatest he possibly could be was by practice. Gates received the opportunity to work as many hours as he pleased when he had the chance to program at the University of Washington. “It was my passion,” Gates says in an interview, “I skipped athletics. I went up there at night (University of Washington). We were programming on weekends, it would be a rare week that we didn’t get twenty to thirty hours in.” Gates ran up 1,575 hours of computer time which averages out to be about eight hours a day, every day (Gladwell 51).
One day, a founder of ISI, Bud Pembroke, received a call from a technology company named TWR who had just signed a contract to set up a computer system at a ginormous power station in southern Washington State. TWR desperately needed programmers who were exceptionally familiar with the particular software the power station used. In these years, programmers who had this type of programming experience were very hard to come by. However, Pembroke knew exactly who to call, Gates and his fellow high school friends. Gates then managed to convince his teacher that he was under the guise of an independent study project. Gates spent his spring TWR writing code with a mentor that taught him more than he could know about programming (Gladwell 53).
In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, she says that her biggest frustration with the young people of today is that, “they think that success is supposed to happen instantly. They think that there is no process to it. They think that they are supposed to come out of college and have their brand.” Instead, she says it takes time to develop this process (Why Oprah Loves Gladwellian Ideas). Gates understood this process and connected it with his love and passion for programming, which blossomed like a butterfly when given the opportunity to practice. By the time Gates was out of his first year of college, he was way past 10,000 hours. Gates said, “If there were fifty teenagers in the world that had the kind of experience that I had when I was a teenager, I would be stunned” (Gladwell 55). Gates had better exposure to software development at a young age than anyone else in that period of time, all because of special opportunities of practice that he took and ran with.
Bill Gates was a child that was easily bored by his studies, so in seventh grade, Gates was taken out of public school and sent to a private school called Lakeside that catered to Seattle’s elite families. Half a year later, they started a computer club. This computer club was funded heavily by the Mothers’ Club, starting the club off with a fund of three thousand dollars. “This was an amazing thing because this was 1968,” Gates said. Most colleges didn’t even have computer clubs, let alone the computer that the Mothers’ Club bought for the Lakeside computer club. This wasn’t just any ole’ computer, this was an ASR-33 Teletype which was a time-sharing terminal with a direct link to a mainframe computer in downtown Seattle. Bill Gates had an extraordinary opportunity to do real-time programming as an eighth grader in 1968 (Gladwell 54).
Malcolm Gladwell writes in Outliers, “extraordinary achievement is less about talent and more about special opportunity.” Gates had the special opportunities of a lifetime, starting out with being placed at Lakeside by his parents. This gave him the opportunity to be around successful people and be introduced to a computer club that was very rare, especially to a middle school. Second, this computer club that he was introduced to was privileged more than imaginable by the Mothers’ Club. This club had the funds to buy technology that nobody had, giving Gates a huge leap of opportunity to learn programming with the best of the best systems.
Bill Gates didn’t just get his 10,000 hours by being a hard worker, although it helped tremendously, he was presented with an extraordinary series of opportunity which set him apart from everyone else. Almost everything in his path went right for him, all he had to do was embrace what had been given to him through his special opportunities. Gates had what nearly no one else had, and he realized that. All of these opportunities had one thing in common, they all gave Gates a lot of time to practice, adding to his 10,000 hours. Gates was blessed with the exposure to the highest technology, and with the ability to practice as much as he wanted, all as a middle schooler.
In 1975, Gates read an article about popular electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800 microcomputer. Gates contacted MITS, the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and his partner Paul Allen were working on a basic programming system for the platform. Gates and Allen did not have any written code, they wanted to test the interest of MITS. After non-stop work for three weeks, they met with the MITS president and had developed an Altair program to demonstrate on a minicomputer. Gates and Allen nailed it on the head with the demonstration which leads to a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. The two named their partnership Microsoft (Biography: Bill Gates).
Lisa Quast writes about a hypothetical party where you run into a lot of people from high school that you hadn’t seen in years. During a conversation over food and drinks, you could feel the friendly competition heating up while comparing career accomplishments. You were shocked to learn that the genius kid with a crazy good IQ that was thought to be spectacularly successful, had struggled with his career. “How could this be”, you wondered. “This was the person everyone thought would invent something that would change the world.” It turns out that intelligence might not be the best indicator of future success, according to psychologist Angela Duckworth. Instead, it’s a special blend of persistence and passion that she calls “grit.” After years of studying, what she found surprised even her. It wasn’t SAT scores, it wasn’t IQ scores, it wasn’t even a degree from a top-ranking school that turned into success. “It was this combination of passion and perseverance that made high achievers special,” Duckworth said. “In a word, grit” (Why Grit Is More Important Than IQ When You’re Trying To Become Successful).
Yet Gates was a very smart individual, he didn’t just rely on this characteristic of himself to become successful, he used his grit. Being gritty is about being unusually resilient and hardworking, so much that you’re willing to continue on in the face of difficulties. For example, when Bill Gates first launched Microsoft, it wasn’t the breakthrough Gates had quite expected, even Apple was upset about it, so they sued Microsoft because they looked at it as a rip off version of their own software (Biography: Bill Gates). Grit is about being constantly driven to improve (Why Grit Is More Important Than IQ When You’re Trying To Be Successful). So no matter what, Gates found a way to be successful, even if that meant lying about code that he hadn’t even written to draw attention to his skills. Bill Gates exudes grit and is convinced that determination and persistence are the most important determinants of the most successful people he has known (Jim Yong Kim, What I Learned From Bill Gates).
Bill Gates loved to stay up all night working for hours in his office, on no sleep at all. On Monday morning, a new secretary came into the office and found what looked like an unconscious Gates, but really he had been up all weekend and was taking a quick catnap (Idea Man, 57). In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes, “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich” (Gladwell 238). Gates chose to work his tail off for three hundred sixty days a year, and thank God he did, where would technology be without him?
Works Cited
Allen, Paul. Idea Man. A Perigee Book, 2011.
Clifford, Catherine. “Bill Gates has a brilliant but simple strategy for success — flip your thinking like this.” cnbc, CNBC, 28 September 2018, cnbc.com/2018/09/28/bill-gates-gave-daily-shows-trevor-noah-a-simple-tip-about-perception.html. Accessed 5 October 2018.
Meah, Asad. “Bill Gates Success Story.” awakenthegreatnesswithin, Awaken The Greatness Within, awakenthegreatnesswithin.com/bill-gates-success-story/. Accessed 4 November 2018.
— -. “Bill Gates.” Entrepreneur, Entrepreneur, 8 Oct. 2008, entrepreneur.com/article/197526. Accessed 24 October 2018.
Yong Kim, Jim. “What I learned from Bill Gates.” washingtonpost, Washington Post, washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/what-i-learned-from-bill-gates. Accessed 4 November 2018.
Mejia, Zameena. “Why Oprah Winfrey loves Malcolm Gladwell’s idea that putting in 10,000 hours ins key to success.” cnbc, CNBC, cnbc.com/2018/07/09/oprah-winfrey-loves-the-malcolm-gladwell-10000-hours-rule.html. Accessed 24 October 2018.
Quast, Lisa. “Why Grit Is More Important Than IQ When You’re Trying To Become Successful.” forbes, Forbes, 6 March 2017, forbes.com/sites/lisaquast/2017/03/06/why-grit-is-more-important-than-iq-when-youre-trying-to-become-successful/#1b82ff517e45. Accessed 24 October 2018.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. Little, Brown and Company, 2008.
About the author: BRYCE KUNKLE
Bryce Kunkle, a freshman computer science major from Yuba City, California, seeks a career as a cyber security engineer. Kunkle enjoys playing football, hanging out with family, and eating as much as possible.
What I’ve Learned:
Hours upon Hours of Work is the only actual way to tackle your passions.
Don’t Be Afraid to go out of your comfort zone.
Find Your Passion, and fight for it with everything you have.
What is Right for you, isn’t always what everyone else thinks is right for you.
When Bad Times Occur, stick to your base and fight on.
Assert Yourself, and you can shape the world to your desires.
When Bad Things Happen, drop it and think “What’s next?”
When Good Things Happen, drop it and think “What’s next?”
There is a Process to Success, and it takes time to develop this process.
Special Opportunity Outweighs Talent in the process of extraordinary achievement.
Embrace what has been given to you.
Intelligence is not always an indicator for future success, it’s a combination of passion and perseverance.
Get Your Work Done Early, it makes life not so bad, trust me, staying up till 3 am on a paper has never required more coffee.
