Bill Gates, co-founder and chairman of Microsoft is the richest person in the U.S. and second richest in the world.
During my heyday in the software industry I both admired Bill Gates and disliked him. His vision, courage, steadfastness and an acute eye for opportunities to create or revise/copy software was admirable; while his apparent love of money and power and ruthless pursuit of those was scornful. These days I do admire him for having seen the light of truth early on at the peak of his power and having stepped aside from “money & power making” to put his time and resources into things that matter.
Since 2008, Bill Gates has turned his attention, priority and money towards more fundamental human issues. Together with his wife Melinda they founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and have helped a number of humane causes.
I’d like to share with you here a speech he has given to Stanford University MBA students, in which he “… says that we don’t have enough innovators or great minds to meet the challenges of the future. And the way to draw more people into thinking big and out of the box is to change how we teach students. The founder of Microsoft challenges Stanford University students to take on the world’s difficult problems as a focus of their career or life”.
I highly recommend listening to his speech here on the ABC Radio National Big Ideas program ==> Education for the real world
Hope we can all turn our resources; no matter how modest; into things that matter … “Think differently, act boldly and with great purpose”.
