Why You Shouldn't Imitate Bill Gates If You Want To Be Rich (bbc.com)

dryriver writes: BBC Capital has an article that debunks the idea of "simply doing what highly successful people have done to get rich," because many of those "outliers" got rich under special circumstances that are not possible to replicate. An excerpt: "Even if you could imitate everything Gates did, you would not be able to replicate his initial good fortune. For example, Gates's upper-class background and private education enabled him to gain extra programming experience when less than 0.01% of his generation then had access to computers. His mother's social connection with IBM's chairman enabled him to gain a contract from the then-leading PC company that was crucial for establishing his software empire. This is important because most customers who used IBM computers were forced to learn how to use Microsoft's software that came along with it. This created an inertia in Microsoft's favor. The next software these customers chose was more likely to be Microsoft's, not because their software was necessarily the best, but because most people were too busy to learn how to use anything else. Microsoft's success and marketshare may differ from the rest by several orders of magnitude but the difference was really enabled by Gate's early fortune, reinforced by a strong success-breeds-success dynamic."

Comments

If you just work hard enough you can do it too

[bravecanadian]

You'll be super rich and successful too, honest. Just listen to all the successful people who believe this...

Sure, hard work is part of it, but as this article points out it is only part of it. Coming from the correct womb and happening to be in the right place at the right time seems to have a lot more to do with it.

There are plenty of people who work their asses off and get no where.

Re:Let me see here

[LaminatorX]

| What was it that Steve Jobs did that you did not?

Grew up in Silicon Valley at exactly the right time.

Marketed Steve Wozniak's brilliance, repeatedly.

Figured out that how people interact with a machine is as important as the capabilities of the machine itself.

Re:Very simply expressed in xkcd..

[msauve]

"We're told the Bill Gates got a lucky break when his mother had contacts with IBM. "

Which really isn't the case. Rather, IBM went to Gary Kildall and Digital Research, which had the CP/M operating system, to see if they'd rewrite it for the forthcoming IBM PC. Kildall wasn't around when IBM showed up, so IBM went to Microsoft, who they were already dealing with for languages like BASIC.

That's the short. Here's a more complete story.