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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."
https://xkcd.com/1827/
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
scruples didn't hurt. He had little problem with raiding others ideas and pushing them out of the market. Many of the things he did to get on top of the pile would be actionable today.
Step 1 to being like BG has nothing to do with his exact circumstances. It has to do with making use of YOUR special circumstances effectively. Capitalizing on each situatiin and conpunding the gains
The Misconception: You should focus on the successful if you wish to become successful.
The Truth: When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure and success may also become invisible.
Survivorship Bias; You Are Not So Smart
So I shouldn't have a extremely wealthy family, who is well connected, and further take vast sums of money to start a business - and if it fails just take even more money to try again? I'm pretty sure that is possibly the single most consistent detail of the success stories of the super wealthy.
I was very active in startups between 1995 and 2000. Many entrepreneurs made a lot of money, and many lost the money again, because after the trick that earned them the cash, they thought they were pretty smart and wanted to replicate the success by investing in newer startups. Then they found out the hard way it wasn't how smart or special they are that made them successful at first, but that they were at the right place at the right time.
Are the keys to success. College dropouts who succeed are outliers, as the vast majority of successful people, are people who were able to combine a stronger education with hard work.
I have always wondered about connections between Bill Gates and William Gates/Robert Gates.....
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
To get rich you need three things.
Hard work - Don't discount this. Yes, connections and money make things easier, but it still takes work. A lot of it.
Intelligence - Hardest work on the planet won't always get you further.
Sheer flat out luck - Being the hardest working smart person doesn't help if you get a crippling illness or just at the wrong time. Being born wealthy or with connections is genetic lottery.
You pretty much need a lot of all three to get super wealthy. Two will get you into a decent place and you'll do fine.
How about being like Steve Jobs? Or like Larry Ellison? Or like Sergey Brin? How about the millions of tech millionaires that came to the US as immigrants, often growing up poor? The real "privilege" that Bill Gates had was that he came from an intact, high IQ, two parent family that valued education and hard work. It probably also helped that he got out of the soul crushing US public education system early.
The real reason that you shouldn't try to be like Bill Gates is simply that trying to become a billionaire requires taking lots of risky bets. But becoming a multimillionaire is something pretty much any family can prepare their children for, provided the parents make the right choices early on.
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.
It's like 1-800-flowers.
They are the 4th largest company in the USA doing this. It started in 2006 I think. He said he'd never be able to do the same startup today. He struck early enough that he could enter the market. Today it is saturated. Timing is a big part of it.
Imagine Warren Buffett if he were born on an island where hunting skill was valuable. He'd be poor. The best hunter would be the wealthy one. Don't ignore the place you live.
It is true that there are a lot of people that claim that since monopolists are successful and charge high prices for poor products, you can become successful by charging high prices for a poor product. That generally doesn't work for non-monopolists. On the other hand, the emphasis on Bill G's parents does ignore the fact that IBM offered the same opportunity to Digital Research, which turned them down. And IBM offered a word processor of its own - can't have more advantages than that - and it failed in the marketplace. It also offered an OS - what happened to that? Maybe it was higher quality than Windows, but it was 10 times as expensive and the only print driver it came with was for a single dot-matrix printer.
Don't imitate the dropping out of college part.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
It was Microsoft BASIC that was shipping in most brands of home computers that attracted IBM's attention. He didn't even approach IBM about DOS, it was IBM that approached him leaving him to fib and scramble to purchase the rights.
I really doubt it was his mother's social connections when he was already an established player in an industry that IBM was trying to enter/overthrow.
Bill Gates did have a bit of luck. But that accounts for the difference between being a billionaire, and being the richest man in the world.
He has certain personality traits that make him successful in business. You see this amongst a lot of successful people. A lot of it comes down to arrogance, competitiveness, and aggression, as well as a a certain level of intelligence, and low aversion to risk. You'll see this in other people who are successful too. Not just other silicon valley millionaires, like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg but people like Richard Branson, and Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad. It's a mentality thing.
Again, playing the lottery has higher success rates than that.
This is basically what's wrong in the country today. Until not so long ago, you could actually get to a comfortable life by being productive, working hard, giving something useful to the community. Not rich, mind you, that still took a lot of luck, that special "right place at the right time" kind of luck. But you could actually get somewhere. A single working person in a family of 4 could sustain them. Buy a house, have a car, see your kids grow up right, all that stuff. That actually worked out.
Somewhere in the last 40ish years that changed. Today, both parents HAVE TO work just to make ends meet. And you're not getting anywhere, it doesn't improve, you work your ass off and it's not going anywhere. You rent a tiny apartment because buying a house is simply out of the question. Where you used to progress slowly but steadily, you now struggle just to stay afloat.
The american dream is dead. Or rather, it changed. It went from "work, innovate, become your own boss and you too can one day be rich" to "screw that, play the lottery and hope for the best".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Choose your parents well.
I can jump a chair
Task Mangler
Gates wrote one of the original BASICs and remained one of the top coders at Microsoft throughout his career up past the $100million point.
success isn't a game "most people" win. Success doesn't care if everyone gets it or no one gets it. The story is about the possibility of success occurring again, not probability.
"...NCR assigned Watson to run the struggling NCR agency in Rochester, New York. As an agent, he got 35% commission and reported directly to Hugh Chalmers, the second-in-command at NCR. In four years Watson made Rochester effectively an NCR monopoly by using the technique of knocking the main competitor, Hallwood, out of business, sometimes resorting to sabotage of the competitor's machines.[6] As a reward he was called to the NCR head office in Dayton, Ohio.[4]
"In 1912, the company was found guilty of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. Patterson, Watson, and 26 other NCR executives and managers were convicted for illegal anti-competitive sales practices and were sentenced to one year of imprisonment".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Yes, emulate Watson by all means. But make sure you have some good lawyers - and, above all, invest in some legislators.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Depends what your definition of "success" is.
Owning a house, a car and being able to sustain your immediate family by yourself is now falling very much into the definition of "successful". 40 years ago it was "standard"; nowadays it's "successful".
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Once you get to middle class status, which in the US you can do on two college level salaries, you are less willing to "risk it all" to get 10x wealthier.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Yes the thing is most success is simply based on luck and also with how much money your parents give you and their connections. But mostly it is being at the right time at the right place with the right product. For every successful businessman there are million of others who failed, but not necessarly because they where bad but because they just where at the wrong time. If being successfull was only based on how much you where willing to work hard there would millions of Bill Gates running around.
...unless you live in a hole in Botswana you have education readily available. If you want to know something "innately", just pay attention in school...
WTF are you talking about? That's a big, crowded hole. 57 million children isn't a huge piece of the population, but it's a hell of a lot more than a "hole in Botswana".
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Watson basically came clean out of that because he gave a lot to a local charity when there was some sort of natural disaster. I think he never served his sentence.
What about those of us who want to imitate Bill Gates' life?!
I want to start with being born a son of the richest banking family in the state of Washington. After all, being born rich is a good way to tweak the odds of success in life.
The problem with my plan is Doc forgot the flux capacitor and so the time machine won't work...
No, no, you don't want to disrupt the narrative that Bill Gates was the most evil man in human history that engaged in the most brutal of business practices right out of the Joe Stalin playbook. Really folks, I would never say the guy was a saint but there was a lot of market forces at play that tend to go unacknowledged in the PC story, and Gates may have played a little hardball, but he was hardly the Mafia Don that he is often portrayed as. ( As for that Anti Trust suite in the 90s I heard some of the stupidest technical discussions ever about the "browser market" as if it was a platonic entity that necessarily existed, and that by giving away IE MS was doing something evil. Really.) Now Gates is giving away Billions after Billions in Charitable causes and urging other successful billionaires to to the same. Bad Bill.
OK, how do I become charismatic? I do well enough. I have a wife and son I love very much, and I have some very good friends. I'm not inspirational. I can't read people enough to feed them what they want. (There was a time, before I was married, when I would have loved to have women throw their bodies at me.) If I can't learn to be charismatic, then knowing where charisma can get me does me no good.
Since I don't have much charisma, and can't catch the flying bodies and put them to work for me, I don't see how I'm going to get a nonprofit going that will catapult me into the big time.
Unless you're unusually smart (I am), anything you can learn, lots of other people can learn also. This puts you in a competitive market without a significant advantage, and you're not going to get rich that way.
Most people aren't rich. If you are rich, there's one or more reasons for that. The reasons could be that you were born upper-class, that you're really lucky, or that you had exceptional (not ordinary) ability.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
(from the grandparent post)
They were forced, forced, I tell you. They would have much preferred to use a console version of JCL, but nooooo! They had to learn PC-DOS/MS-DOS.
Yeah, yeah, Slashdot blah blah Unix (Linux didn't yet exist). DOS was pretty much a clone of TOPS-10 or any of a number of Digital Equipment Corporation OS's from the standpoint of the commands. The story was that young Mr. Gates stole online time on a PDP-10 timesharing service to become proficient in coding.
I used PDP-8, PDP-11 and PDP-10 computers in school as well as my first engineering job out of school, and DOS was a very easy transition once I hacked that drive letter thing. Unix/Linux, not so much.
never ask for forgiveness.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Gates would have done well for himself in any case, once he founded Microsoft. We'd remember him as a computer pioneer. He was very smart, worked hard, had no problem capitalizing a business, and got into the right school to drop out of. We'd remember his name like we remember other pioneers of personal computing, but he would never have had a billion dollars without having lucky breaks and being ruthless enough to exploit them.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Did IBM offer the same deal to Digital Research, or did Gates get a better deal than they would have?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I find people who have a life goal of "being rich" pitiable.
I really need to know all of the other things I shouldn't do if I want to become rich.
Gates started out ahead of most people (not his fault) and was very successful. His "success" continued through shady (at best) business practices. There are lots of other rich people out there who have done similar things. He's super-rich, to the point that a million dollars is like $10 to you and me.
I really would like to have enough money to not have to worry about it - but I am not about to resort to what it would take to maybe get it. Whether it is working 80 hour weeks, taking huge financial risks, foregoing seeing my kids grow up, being ruthlessly greedy, or being unethical. Sure, some people get rich without doing those things, but the only other one I have seen is what has been mentioned - being in the right place at the right time. I used to work for a guy who sold his internet company during the dot-com boom, and he made about $54MM. He started the company that I worked for, and he was a total ass. It eventually failed, but he is still doing just fine. He had so much cushion that the success or failure didn't really matter to him. His family was also extremely wealthy. I've also known people who struggled with startups and failed. The only difference between them was maybe timing and having a huge safety net to fall back on. So even if he hadn't sold his startup at the right time, he would be fine.
I don't chase money. Instead, I focus on trying to be happy. Money might make me happier, but I don't need to be rich. All of the people I've known who were wealthy, or wanted to be wealthy, were pretty much assholes.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Microsoft was selling customized microcomputer BASICs to Fortune 500 clients in the mid seventies. MBASIC was the first product for the micro to reach a million dollars in sales. By 1980, Microsoft was offering a full suite of programming languages for CP/M and was moving into operating systems before being approached by IBM. The notion that Microsoft was am insignificant or invisible player in the industry before the IBM PC is just plain nonsense.
What Gates offered IBM was a serviceable and perhaps more importantly a uniquely affordable 16 Bit CP/M clone + MBASIC, etc., in time for the scheduled launch of the IBM PC. I doubt that the IBM PC team gave a damn how Gates sourced or developed the package so long as it was ready on time.
Watson basically came clean out of that because he gave a lot to a local charity when there was some sort of natural disaster. I think he never served his sentence.
That sounds like Gates too.
There's a whole series of articles on this at Naked Capitalism:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.co...
Uber Has Operating Losses of $2 Billion a Year, More Than Any Startup in History
Gary Kildall of Digital Research was well-known within the industry for his CP/M operating system at the time and CP/M was the obvious first choice for IBM PC's. Seatle Computer Products was also shipping boards with their own QDOS developed internally by Tim Paterson. IBM would have known of both these operating systems since they were available in the computer hobbyist marketplace. It is believed IBM was negotiating for CP/M before it felt the need to seek out a second source for its operating system. It is unclear why IBM let Gates negotiate for QDOS instead of directly negotiating for the operating system. IBM offered CP/M along with Gates' version of QDOS (MS-DOS) with its initial PC's. IBM priced CP/M at $240 and MS-DOS at $40. It appears that IBM was willing to pay per unit sales royalties to both companies. It is believed that CP/M's higher price was based on Kildall's demand for much a higher unit royalty payment than Gates demanded. Gates became rich because IBM offered royalty payments instead of buying all rights to the software. IBM also produced a computer that could be made by third parties such as, Compaq, Dell, Gateway and many others, which allowed for increase MS-DOS sales and later increased Windows and Office sales. Kildall did not have the privileged background that Gates did. Easier and quicker negotiations at a lower unit price by Kildall with IBM would have prevented Gates' early PC operating system success. Even without IBM's use of MS-DOS, Gates may still have achieved his wealth since it was Windows and Word (and the Office suite) which were the products that may him very wealthy and not MS-DOS.
BillWG didn't care about dropping out of school and starting M$ as his old man made millions stealing from people pensions. It has been fashionable for wealthy tech types to embrace the lowly startup in a garage thing even if it is far from the truth. It is nice that Bill & Melinda Gate Foundation is helping people. Bill probably needs the write-off and maybe the whole "more evil than Satan himself" thing struck a nerve.
I can't believe nobody is stating the other obvious here: you shouldn't try to get rich by imitating Bill Gates because it's illegal.
You can see details of Digital Research losing out to MS/DOS here:
http://www.digitalresearch.biz...
and it is clear that DR had plenty of "opportunity".
Just like Ed Roberts.
Malcom Gladwell pointed this out in his book tipping point several years ago. Bill Joy of Sun fame and Steve Jobs were similarly situated and owe a great deal of their success to their starting position on the chess board.
I think you are thinking of "Outliers".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Your cite claims that the IBM-DR negotiations probably failed for "good old boy" reasons, which suggests that Gates' mom's involvement in charity with an IBM exec probably was important.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
What was remarkable about NT? It was a logical progression. So was adding a database to form a full stack. There's a difference between foreseeing something and following a progression.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Which source was the one brought up by someone disagreeing with me. I like it when I can argue against someone based on their cites to some extent, but it doesn't teach me as much as well-reasoned opposition.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes