Last night I watched the first episode of Inside Bill’s Brain on Netflix. I thought it was pretty great. The series is an extended interview with Bill Gates and those who know him best, with the occasional excerpt from a keynote somewhere around the world.
Davis Guggenheim, the director and interviewer, does his best to frame Gates as an extraordinary superhuman who is somehow different from the rest of us. Gates is certainly different in his access to resources and his ability to read with full comprehension at a rate of ~150 pages an hour (wow!). However, my strongest impression of Gates is that one of his greatest assets is his disregard for social pressure. He’s a great leader because he confidently does what he thinks is important – regardless of what others think – and then gets others on board as he proves out his thesis. He did this with Microsoft (wait, you’re dropping out of Harvard?) and has done that – in partnership with his wife Melinda – with the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation’s initially unpopular focus on sanitation (wait, your encore to Microsoft is treating human waste?). Perhaps this confidence or disregard for social pressure is somehow inherent in his biological makeup. Perhaps it’s a by-product of his profound practice of deep learning that surely builds confidence through subject-matter expertise.
There are a lot of smart people in the world who don’t end up leading like Bill Gates has led. It’s this willingness to step up and stand alone, even if only for a brief time until people begin to follow you, that I think really sets Bill Gates apart.
