How Did Bill Gates Become Successful?

Forbes

17-04-2025

Microsoft boss Bill Gates mugshot from December 13, 1977. (Photo courtesy Oklahoma County Sheriff's ...)
In his memoir Source Code, Bill Gates explains a great deal about his early years. In doing so, we have a window into his unique characteristics and fortuitous circumstances that would lead to his eventual success. Without a doubt, Gates is an unusual person who had remarkable talent, drive, focus, ambition, and willingness to work that led to his achievements. And yet, he also explains how he had an unusually supportive family with unique skills—such as a father who was a seasoned lawyer, and a mother who structured his social development, which also provided a platform for that success to even be a possibility. Here I've pulled out some quotes that highlight how Gates was clearly a mathematically precocious youth who had a strong interest in coding, the ability to hyperfocus, exhibited extraordinary personal energy, had the willingness to be different and take charge, and possessed the dedication and desire to work crazy hours to be the best.
In the introduction of his book, Gates notes: 'The logic, focus, and stamina needed to write long, complicated programs came naturally to me.' Gates also always loved to read. When he was around 9, he read through every volume of the World Book, A through Z. 'A summer reading program at our library was only me and girls.'
And he was among the best at math early on: 'It wasn't long before I realized I was finishing each problem faster than everyone else.' At Lakeside school he took a test for the math team. 'I did exceptionally well, scoring higher than nearly everyone on the math team, which put me, an eighth-grader, among the best high school math students in the region.'
As Gates argues: '[T]he logic and rational thinking demanded by math were skills that could be used to master any subject. There was a hierarchy of intelligence: however good you were at math, that's how good you could be at other subjects.'
His interest in business was present early. He drafted a school report on a fictitious company he called Gatesway 'that made a coronary care system which I invented. My report detailed factors of production, and how I hoped to raise capital from investors in order to build my products.'
He had the early ambition to be someone. With his friend Kent, he 'read through a stack of biographies of famous people, leaders like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Douglas MacArthur. We spent hours on the phone dissecting their lives. We analyzed the paths they followed to success with the same teenage intensity that other kids at that time spent deciphering 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.''
He had intense interest in coding. When he and Paul Allen found out that the company that had given them some free computer time in exchange for them troubleshooting the system had brought in some top programmers—they found some 'source code' by looking through the dumpster to get a glimpse of what those programmers were working on. 'What we found was cryptic, just lines of code that we'd need to reverse engineer to figure out what they did. But that crumpled and coffee-stained paper was the most exciting thing we'd ever seen.'
After he and some of his older friends like Paul Allen had gotten a job to try to make a program to automate payroll services, at first the older guys thought they didn't need Bill. But then they realized they did. So Bill took charge. 'I would need to be in charge. And if I was in charge, I would decide who got what portion of the free computer time [their compensation]
Out on a long hike with his friends, he was cold and miserable, but 'I retreated into my own thoughts. I pictured computer code.' During all that time on his hike, he was able to pare down long messy code into something more succinct. 'On that long day I slimmed it down more, like whittling little pieces off a stick to sharpen the point.'
'Alone in my cave [his room] I'd read or just sit and think. I could lie on the bed endlessly working through some question.' Gates also wrote: 'I'd always possessed the ability to hyperfocus…If I truly concentrated on a subject, taking in the facts and theorems, dates and names and ideas and whatever else, my mind automatically sorted the information within a framework that was structured and logical.'
When starting up Microsoft, he explained: 'Like one of those watertight hatches on a submarine, I could shut out the rest of the world,' and this meant 'No girlfriend, no hobbies.' He reasoned: 'It was the one way I knew to stay ahead. And I expected similar dedication from the others. We had this huge opportunity in front of us. Why wouldn't you work eighty hours a week in pursuit of it?'
'My other notable early trait might be described as excess energy.' Later, when he was building Microsoft, a friend told him to meet Steve Ballmer. Gates reflected: 'By then I could instantly recognize other people…who emitted my kind of excess energy. Steve Ballmer had it beyond anyone I had ever known.'
At Harvard, Gates reflected on his less than perfect performance in Math 55 [the highly accelerated math class]: 'All of us had 800s on our math SAT,' and 'Up until then, I had experienced only a few situations in which I felt someone was hands-down better than I was in some intellectual endeavor that mattered to me, and in those cases I soaked up what they could teach me.' He noted a realization, 'This time was different, I was recognizing that while I had an excellent math brain, I didn't have the gift of insight that sets apart the best mathematicians. I had talent but not the ability to make fundamental discoveries.'
On the complementary work styles between himself and Paul Allen, Gates writes: 'My approach was rapid-fire, in your face. I prided myself on my processing speed—that I could come up with the right answer, the best answer, on the spot. Impatient real-time thinking. And I could work and work and work, for days on end, rarely stopping.'
On privilege: 'to be born in the rich United States is a big part of a winning birth lottery ticket, as is being born white and male in a society that advantages white men.'
On good timing and building on the work of others: 'I was a rebellious toddler at Acorn Academy when engineers figured out how to integrate tiny circuits on a piece of silicon,' and 'I was shelving books in Mrs. Caffiere's library when another engineer predicted those circuits would grow smaller and smaller at an exponential rate for years into the future. By the time I started programming at age thirteen, chips were storing data inside the large computers to which we had uncommon access, and by the time I got my driver's license, the main functions of an entire computer could be fit onto a single chip.'
On support from family: His grandmother Gami 'beyond her card-table acuity, was valedictorian of her high school class, a gifted basketball player, widely read…' His mother provided opportunities to socialize, connect with, and learn from a skilled community: 'When I look back on my childhood, it fit a pattern of pushing my sisters and me into situations that would force us to socialize, particularly with adults.'
When starting up the company that would become Microsoft: 'That summer would turn out to be the last time I lived in my parents' house. When I think about it now, I have much greater appreciation for the role my family played during that early period of Micro-Soft. As proudly independent as I imagined myself, in truth my family supported me in ways both practical and emotional. Throughout the year I regularly retreated to Gami's place on Hood Canal for much-needed periods of reflection.' And, 'My father was always at the ready to help me work out some legal issue.'
On the teachers who helped challenge him: 'One day Mrs. Carlson led me down to the hall to the library where she told the librarian that I needed a challenge.' The librarian, Mrs. Caffiere gave Gates a shelving task, and 'would draw me out with questions about what I was reading or found interesting. Here too she offered an affirmation, suggesting books that were a level of reading above what I knew, biographies of famous people and ideas that hadn't occurred to me.'
'My Lakeside teachers gave me the gifted of an altered perspective: To question what you know—what you think is true—is how the world advances.'
On his supportive friends: When his close friend Kent passed away, Gates noted: 'When we met, I was a thirteen-year-old kid with raw IQ and a competitive streak, but little aim other than to win whatever game I was playing. Kent helped give me direction, setting me on the course of defining who I wanted to become.'
On experienced mentors, like John Norton, who were willing to fix his code and challenge him to be better: 'Up to that point I had spent more time thinking about code and syntax than probably any other teenager alive. But Norton opened a completely new level to me. With his firm tutoring, I got a lesson not just in writing better code but about my self-perception. I remember thinking: Why am I so arrogant about this programming stuff? How do I even know that I'm that good? I started to consider what near-perfect computer code would look like.'
On having the great good fortune to get computer time when very few in the world could: After gaining access to computer time, instead of sleeping at night he would sneak out of his house and catch a bus over to the place where he could work on his programming. He talks about the 10,000 hour or roughly 10 year rule regarding the development of expertise—coined by Anders Ericsson—and how 'without that lucky break of free computer time—call it my first 500 hours—the next 9,500 hours might not have happened at all.'