Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to start Microsoft with Paul Allen, built one of the most valuable companies in history, and spent the following decades as one of the most recognised people alive. He also, by his own account, could not comfortably walk into a party. That detail, from his memoir Source Code, got a second airing this month from the person who eventually fixed it: his youngest daughter.
What Phoebe said
Phoebe Gates, 22, told the podcast Call Her Daddy that her father “wasn’t naturally social” and would avoid gatherings when he could. So she made him go. She took him to dances, walked him up to other fathers and daughters and made him hold a conversation; he would, she said, get nervous and try to leave, and she would bring him back. Over years it worked. Family members have said that without Phoebe’s campaign Gates’s life outside work would have stayed much narrower than it is now.
The pattern behind the anecdote
The story is charming because it is unexpected, but it should not be. Gates describes himself in Source Code as a shy, socially awkward boy who preferred a terminal to a crowd — a description that fits an enormous share of the people who built the software industry. The traits that made him a prodigious programmer at 13 (obsessive focus, comfort with solitude, indifference to what the room thought) are the same ones that made a dance floor at 60 a hostile environment. In business he was never shy: colleagues describe him as blunt to the point of rudeness in a technical argument. Shyness is not a lack of confidence. It is a lack of ease in a particular kind of room.
For the kid in the computer lab
There is a Bangladeshi version of this story in every university programming club: the student who can solve any problem on the screen and cannot introduce themselves to the person at the next desk. The Gates anecdote is mildly reassuring on two counts. The awkwardness did not stop him; and it did get better, late, because someone made him practise. Gates, now retired from Microsoft, keeps up with scientific research around the world and reads enormously — the solitary habits never went away. He just added the other thing.
Source: Times of India, via Prothom Alo.
