Ramblings

Tim Ferriss has an excerpt from a new book called The Leap, covering Bill Gates' early years, which he says demonstrates that you don't have to take big gambles to achieve incredible success:

His family’s money and position provided cover for his youthful computing hijinks and helped assure that he would have the best education available. As for the famous Harvard dropout story, he didn’t really. Rather, he took a formal “leave of absence,” a kind of emotional umbilical cord that kept him tied to Harvard long after he had vacated the campus, just in case things didn’t work out. But by then, he had already turned the odds in his favor. After half a decade of dancing with the opportunity, beginning early in high school, he had already covered most of his downside risks. He knew, for example, that he loved the work, and the early Micro-Soft had projects in the pipeline.

Outliers explained that Bill Gates was at the perfect place at the perfect time to allow himself to take advantage of the computer revolution. All these little details of the early years just reinforces the notion that Bill Gates got hooked up by circumstances outside of his own control - his dad got him access to the computer at the local University, his mom got him in contact with IBM executives that led to the MS-DOS deal that put Microsoft on the map.

But if you read this excerpt, it's pretty clear that he had that perfect combination of marketing savvy and technical skills to go and make his own success. And that's pretty much how I view the world now - opportunities are mostly luck, but you still own your own success.

I'll have to try to remember this as I start looking towards the next phase of my career.