Source Code - by Bill Gates
Published:
Source Code - by Bill Gates
Read: 2025-02-22
Recommend: 8/10
I am pleased to explore the early childhood of Bill Gates, during which his parents played a significant role in guiding him with patience and love. The commitment of his mother to community service is both inspiring and commendable.
Notes
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out. —Richard P. Feynman
I got the sense that my parents were in close touch with my teachers, more than other parents were. Did other families have their kids’ teachers over for dinner at the start of the school year? I didn’t think they did. To my parents this was only natural, a sign of their commitment to our education. To Kristi and me it was nothing but embarrassing. It felt unnatural to see your teacher eating at your dining room table. Over the years, only one teacher declined the invitation, fearing that being plied with tuna casserole was a conflict of interest. (She waited until school ended before accepting.)
My parents didn’t hound us about grades. Their expectations were communicated mainly in how my mom talked about other families. If the son or daughter of a family friend wasn’t doing well in school, or got in trouble for one thing or another, my mom would speculate about the disappointment her friends must feel. She never said, don’t be like those kids. But given her tragic tone in relaying the story, we understood the unspoken message: Don’t goof off. Excel. Don’t let us down. They also subscribed to a rewards system: the going rate for an A was a quarter; all As earned you dinner at the restaurant of your choice, which was usually six hundred feet in the air at the Eye of the Needle, the spinning dining room at the top of the shiny new Space Needle. It was always Kristi’s grades that got us there, but as her brother I got to tag along no matter my performance.
If my parents sound a little virtuous and resolute about volunteering, giving back, and all that, I can’t help it. That’s really who they were. They spent a lot of their waking hours planning and meeting, calling and campaigning, and whatever else was needed to help their community.
the adults wrote the name of each family on a piece of paper and had each kid draw one name out of a little blue box. Whatever name you got—Baugh, Berg, Capeloto, Merritt, or one of the others—you had to go to that family’s cottage and eat dinner with the parents. Their kids, meanwhile, went to dinner with the parents of whatever name they drew. My mother came up with this scheme. 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. To my mom, her friends were role models, the type of people that she hoped we would become. All went to college. All were ambitious. The men had management jobs in insurance and finance and timber companies.
Japanese automakers are known for kaizen, the philosophy of continuous improvement they followed after the Second World War to up the quality of their cars year after year. Toyota had nothing on my mom, at least when it came to the holidays. Take Christmas, which started in the early fall in our household. That’s when my mom read her notes from the previous year’s holiday to review what went wrong the last year and improve upon it.
Even if my father had rejected organized religion in high school, my mom wanted her kids to have exposure to the moral teachings of religion. It was one of their compromises.
Reading in the back of the car—or anywhere for that matter—was my default state. When I read, hours flew by. I tuned out the world, only dimly aware of my family moving through life around me, my mother asking me to set the table, my sister playing with her friends. I was in my own head, with my door closed, or in the back of the car, at a barbecue, at church—anywhere I could steal time to dive between the covers of a book, where I could explore and soak up new facts, all on my own, without anyone else.
Books were the one thing my parents never questioned spending money on. One of our greatest treasures was our 1962 set of the World Book Encyclopedia. It amazed me how much was in those twenty red-and-blue volumes with their slick pages and bright illustrations, particularly the neat see-though plastic pages of bones, muscles, and organs that lay on top of each other to compose a complete human body.
the combination of high grade/low effort honestly made the most sense to me.
It wasn’t long before I realized that I was finishing each problem faster than everyone else. I’d write an answer, look up, and see most of the rest of the class still scribbling. Some kids were even falling behind, calling, “Wait, I’m not done,” when the guy on the record moved on to the next problem. This was the first time I felt I was better at something than my peers. To me, math was easy, even fun. I liked its ironclad certainty. Math followed basic rules; all you had to do was remember them. It was confusing to me why some other students couldn’t seem to figure that out. Four times four always equaled sixteen.
Math appealed to my growing sense that much of the world was a rational place. I started to understand that many complex questions—about bridges, card games, the human body, whatever—had answers, answers that I could find if I applied my brain to them. I can’t say it was an awakening. I had always been a thinker and searcher of new information. But now I had growing confidence in the power of my own intellect. With this confidence also came a feeling that the intellectual divide between adults and me had collapsed.
This was the mid-1960s, two or three years after Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique argued that women needed more than housework but before American women started climbing rungs on the corporate ladder. My mother wanted both. Later my sisters and I would talk about the pride we felt in how she balanced her own ambitions with being a mom—frenetic as it was.
As I saw it, I had one differentiator: humor. In my old school I had discovered that the class clown held a niche position among other kids. Raising your hand to crack a joke won more popularity points than raising it with the right answer. People laughed. Hoping for the same response from a new audience, I actively carved out the joker position at Laurelhurst Elementary. I pretended I didn’t care about school. I’d wallow in my messy desk and do my homework at the last minute. I’d ham it up when we had to read something aloud; I’d laugh inappropriately while the teacher was talking. If I worked hard on something, I hid my effort behind humor. Our teacher, Mrs. Hopkins, assigned a one-page essay on any topic we chose. I don’t remember my topic, but I do remember taking the time to craft it using only a single continuous sentence that ran all forty lines of the page. I silently gloated when Mrs. Hopkins called me out in class for the feat, noting that my snake-long sentence, though annoying, had perfect punctuation.
The upshot of these sessions was the speech counselor recommended that my parents hold me back a year—repeat the fifth grade. I think she said I was “retarded,” now a dated and offensive word, but back then a term applied to kids who didn’t seem to fit in the classroom. Fortunately, my parents didn’t follow her advice. Her verdict came a year after another educator recommended that I skip ahead a year. I thought, If these supposed experts don’t know what to do with me, why should I care about their opinions?
There were times that he spanked me. Those were rare and I could tell that it hurt him to do it. I think too that he didn’t always agree with my mom’s disciplinarian approach. But they were partners in the venture of child raising, so he always stood by her. Usually he’d give me a talk. He didn’t have to say much to have an effect. His presence, his careful choice of words, his deep voice was enough to get me to sit up straight and listen. He was intimidating but not in a physical way, despite his towering stature. It was more his intrinsically rational mind. “Son, your mother says that you talked back to her when she was on the phone. In our house, as you know, we don’t do things like that. I think it’s fair that you go upstairs now and apologize,” he might say, with an emotional distance that showed he was serious, and that I better listen. It was no wonder that we all thought his true legal calling was as a judge.
Through our talks, I started to see that he was right: I was destined to win my imagined war with my parents. With each year my independence would grow. In time I would be on my own. All the while—then and into the future—my mother and father would love me. How great was that? Win the war and never lose their love. Without being prescriptive, Dr. Cressey helped me see that (A) my parents loved me; (B) I wouldn’t be under their roof forever; (C) they were actually my allies in terms of what really counted; (D) it was absurd to think that they had done anything wrong. Rather than wasting energy fighting my parents, I should focus my energies on gaining the skills I would need out in the world.
I watched the film Ordinary People when it came out in the theater. I’ve seen it many times since, and nearly every time I get choked up. It’s a great movie, nearly perfect.
I was the kind of kid who wanted to win every game I played, yet I had no particular aim beyond victory. I was raw intelligence, an information omnivore, but I wasn’t thinking about the long-term direction of my life.
To this day I’m not sure my parents noticed that they paid double. My plan was to leave one copy at home and one at school. This was less about the inconvenience of carrying books back and forth than it was about appearing as if I didn’t need to study at home. I’d turn myself into one of the scholarly elite—but I wasn’t ready to let go of my smart-aleck, devil-may-care façade. While everyone else groaned under the weight of their heavy textbooks, I went home each day conspicuously empty-handed. At night, holed up in my bedroom with my duplicate textbooks, I solved and re-solved every quadratic equation, I memorized Latin declensions and reviewed names, dates, history of all those Greek wars and battles and gods and goddesses. The next day, I’d arrive at school fortified with all that I had learned but no indication that I had studied. I doubt anyone noticed or cared, but in my mind, they were marveling: No books! How does he do it? He must be really smart! Such were my lingering insecurities. I’d always possessed the ability to hyperfocus. Now I was becoming aware of how I could harness that ability to my advantage at school. 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. And with that framework came a sense of control: I knew precisely where to access facts and how to synthesize what I had stored. I could instantly recognize patterns and ask better questions; any new data that came along, I could easily slot into the existing scaffolding. As goofy as it sounds, it felt like the revelation of a superpower. At the same time, my powers weren’t fully developed. I was fourteen years old and didn’t always have the discipline to put off reading yet another Tarzan book instead of trying to interpret the assigned history lesson.
I was the kid who was more comfortable speaking with adults than with my peers, conversant in what I thought of as adult knowledge. It was a role I played: Trey Gates the fast reader, the math whiz, the brainy kid able to converse about stocks and patents, the advent of the minicomputer or the invention of nylon. Wrapped up in that was my confidence that I was intellectually fearless, curious about everything, and ready to learn if you could teach me.
My inability to do better in that class forced me to reconsider how I thought of myself. I so deeply identified with being the smartest, the best. That status was a shield behind which I hid my insecurities. 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. 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. I saw a vision of myself in ten years: teaching in a university but not good enough to do groundbreaking work. I wasn’t going to be a John Mather, operating in the zone where math touches the deep secrets of the universe.
Like most versions of BASIC, the one we wrote for the Altair was a particular kind of programming language called an interpreter. In the same way the interpreters who stand next to American and Chinese presidents translate one idea at a time, a BASIC interpreter converts one line of code at a time into instructions the computer can easily understand. One of the advantages of an interpreter is that it can work using less memory than other types of programs. Computer memory back then was precious because it was pricey.
On that walk, I convinced myself that I could both run a company and be a full-time student. All that time I had put into my baseball program was time I could now dedicate to Micro-Soft. I also felt that everything I was learning at Harvard was still foundational to who I was becoming; in particular, I had started to develop a rapport with several computer science professors and thought I could learn a lot more from them—and gain knowledge that would help Micro-soft. Plus, I loved college—loved the frenetic learning pace, the late-night talks with people who knew things that I didn’t. Despite my tough freshman adjustment period, I had settled into a good rhythm my second year. Looking back now with the knowledge of how the Micro-Soft story would play out, it seems obvious that I should have just quit school at that point. But I wasn’t ready. And, of course, neither were my parents. I went home for Christmas and all the usual Gates traditions, including my mom’s homemade card, one that veiled her worries about me with a corny rhyme: “Trey took time off this fall in old Albuquerque; His own software business—we hope not a turkey. (The profits are murky.)”
I bought the property and in the coming years we built a set of cottages. That family compound, which my mom dubbed “Gateaway,” became my refuge through the ups and downs—though mostly ups—of Microsoft’s early years. I got in the habit of setting aside a block of time for myself at Hood Canal that I called Think Week. Once or twice a year I’d drive or take a seaplane taxi out to spend seven uninterrupted days poring over books, articles, and papers—a crash course in whatever I felt I needed to learn. Then I would write long strategy memos about how Microsoft could stay in the lead in areas like internet security and natural language processing. And just as Gami and my mom had hoped, Gateaway became the base for our extended family to meet every July Fourth and Thanksgiving, and for other get-togethers throughout the year. As our family expanded, it became a place where my children and their cousins carried on the spirit of Cheerio.
I’m not prone to nostalgia, but there are days when I’d like to be thirteen again, making that bargain with the world that if you just go forward, learn more, understand better, you can make something truly useful and new. Often success stories reduce people to stock characters: the boy wonder, the genius engineer, the iconoclastic designer, the paradoxical tycoon. In my case, I’m struck by the set of unique circumstances—mostly out of my control—that shaped both my character and my career. It’s impossible to overstate the unearned privilege I enjoyed: 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.
Realizing early on that I had a head for math was a critical step in my story. In his terrific book How Not to Be Wrong, mathematician Jordan Ellenberg observes that “knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X-ray specs that reveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world.” Those X-ray specs helped me identify the order underlying the chaos, and reinforced my sense that the correct answer was always out there—I just needed to find it. That insight came at one of the most formative times of a kid’s life, when the brain is transforming into a more specialized and efficient tool. Facility with numbers gave me confidence, and even a sense of security.
Curiosity can’t be satisfied in a vacuum, of course. It requires nurturing, resources, guidance, support. When Dr. Cressey told me I was a lucky kid, I’ve no doubt that he was primarily thinking of my good fortune in being born to Bill and Mary Gates—parents who struggled with their complicated son but ultimately seemed to intuitively understand how to guide him. If I were growing up today, I probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum. In the time of my childhood, the fact that some people’s brains process information differently from others wasn’t widely understood. (The term “neurodivergent” wouldn’t be coined until the 1990s.) My parents had no guideposts or textbooks to help them grasp why their son became so obsessed with certain projects (tiny Delaware), missed social cues, and could be rude or inappropriate without seeming to notice his effect on others. There’s no way for me to know if this was something Dr. Cressey recognized or mentioned. What I do know is that my parents afforded me the precise blend of support and pressure I needed: they gave me room to grow emotionally, and they created opportunities for me to develop my social skills. Instead of allowing me to turn inward, they pushed me out into the world—to the baseball team, the Cub Scouts, and other Cheerio families’ dinner tables. And they gave me constant exposure to adults, immersing me in the language and ideas of their friends and colleagues, which fed my curiosity about the world beyond school. Even with their influence, my social side would be slow to develop, as would my awareness of the impact I can have on other people. But that has come with age, with experience, with kids, and I’m better for it. I wish it had come sooner, even if I wouldn’t trade the brain I was given for anything.
In my emerging worldview, I had formed a hierarchy of intelligence: however good you were at math, that’s how good you’d be at other subjects—biology, chemistry, history, or even languages. After graduation from Lakeside, I was convinced that my path would be mathematics. Harvard was my next step toward that future.
My mother expected me to meet her very high standards but also did all she could to support and encourage me, sometimes by example, as with her work with the United Way of America, which appointed her to their board in 1980. With wealth comes the responsibility to give it away, she would say. I regret that she didn’t live long enough to see how fully I’ve tried to meet that expectation.