Source Code by Bill Gates

Field	Label
Date	2025-05-17
Time	10:00 AM

In Source Code, Bill Gates details the origins of who he is by extensively covering his childhood, adolescent life, and early adulthood before Microsoft became the giant it is now.

In short, he was destined through sheer force of will, peternatural ability, dedicated study, top class familial support, along with encouraging peers, to make transformative changes in the world.

Having finish the book, my secondary conclusion is that not a single idea or product defined Microsoft. Yes, at the start, supporting the programming language Basic was key to their survival. But if it were anyone else of lesser ability, I don't think they too could have made Microsoft.

Furthermore, while chance had a massive role in the success of Microsoft, entirely dismissing the difficult work Bill and the early Microsoft team undertook is too easy to make.

Bill, in his efforts, did not come away from Microsoft without incurring some personal cost. While he had time to learn and socialize, eventually the company took up most of his free time and headspace. Perhaps those gripped in the throes of passion care less about that loss. Perhaps they see it as a gain and learn to continue seeing it in that way.

Most of us are on some spectrum on that passion scale. I imagine most of us have momentarily felt the way Bill did, where from waking to sleeping, all he did was for what consumed him at the time. Maybe we wouldn't be as effective but that feeling isn't so alien. It normally doesn't posses us the way it did him and it did for many successful people.

Some could take away from the book that his opportunities are what made him entirely successful. That is true in the universal way that it is true for all our endevours, but to readers seeking lessons, it is not a helpful thought. Most, will not have the same background Bill had but that's no reason to not start now or even try.

We are more advantaged than Bill was in some ways. We do not have to memorize the Dewey Decimal System to find books on topics we want to learn about. Nowadays we can use some search engine. We don't have spend 5hrs on each iteration loop, nor do we need to print out our code. We don't need to read extensive manuals to get bare functionality up.

In this world of abstractions, we are by output more effective than a Bill stuck in the 1970s.

In raw brain power and skill I don't think most can match up to Bill. Only if from childhood were a social and intellectual growth fostered would ordinary people stand a chance. However, to throw our hands in the air, and to not try, well that's no way to live.

Change doesn't stop at adulthood. Our skills and thought habits are always progressing and regressing.

I come away from reading the book, being more grateful to the background my parents and community supported for me. I didn't have parties being thrown to socially engineer my ability to discuss complex topics with leaders of commerce. Instead, I did have a safe home to sleep in and some friends to hang out and enjoy life with. Bill had those too but I, and I imagine many others, aren't so deprived.

I didn't go to a selective private school. I went to a mostly public school where my curiousity was allowed to be explored as much as I wanted it to be. It could have been more rigorous and intense but it was at a sufficient level to allow me a basic skill in writing, reading, and speaking.

In these later years, I feel a more voracious appetite to understand more of the world and make some transformative impact. Not at the scale of Microsoft, but something somewhere worth being in the world.