Transcription
I just finished reading this memoir on Bill Gates, written by Bill Gates, of course, because it's a memoir. And I am just completely amazed by what is in this book. And after reading it, I sort of have an idea of what it is that makes Bill Gates an absolute work machine.
For those who may have been living under a rock for the past 50 years, Bill Gates is the founder of Microsoft, which completely took over the software market, so much so that the government had to go and break it up. He is also the founder of the Gates Foundation, which has given away over a hundred billion dollars. And he is currently working with multiple companies on solutions to end world hunger.
But I think what's so different about Bill Gates, what makes him so different from everyone else, is really in his youth. Even as a kid, this guy was a complete workaholic, constantly spending not days, but full weeks on software. I mean, the guy built one of the most dominant companies in all of human history.
So, what I did was I took this book and I broke it down into 10 principles that define Bill Gates' work ethic. These principles will not just make you work harder, but they will help you understand the amount of focus and effort and attention that it takes to truly succeed at anything, because Bill Gates' work ethic, in some parts of this book, is really just superhuman. So, with that said, let's just get into the first principle.
Okay, so the first thing I realize when you start the book is that from the very beginning, Bill Gates was obsessed with computers. And he writes about his first time coding: "That was probably the first computer program I ever typed in. The elegance of the four lines of code appealed to my sense of order. Its instantaneous answers was like a jolt of electricity. From there, I wrote the first computer program of my own, a game of tic-tac-toe." I love that line. It's like an instantaneous jolt of electricity, because so many of the greats have that same exact story. Arnold Schwarzenegger with the weightlifting, Christopher Nolan with the film camera. These people just talk about their craft as though it's their love. And there's a very specific reason for this. It's because they were obsessed with it.
Conor McGregor actually has this great quote where he's talking about MMA and he says, "I've lost my mind doing this game." Like Vincent Van Gogh, he dedicated his life to his art and lost his mind in the process. That's happened to me. But when that gold belt is around my waist, when my girlfriend has a different car for every day of the week, my kids have anything they ever want, then it will pay. Then I'm happy I lost my mind.
And so the key takeaway here is very simple. You must find that thing that you can just become absolutely obsessed with. An interest where you can just put your head down and work, and hours will go by without you noticing. This type of obsession is exactly what Bill Gates got with computers, and this drove him and his work ethic for his entire life.
But this is exactly the point where Bill Gates is sort of an outlier of outliers. He's almost superhuman in a way, because when you think of an obsessed person, you usually think of someone who's working like 12 hours a day. But Bill Gates was not just working 12 hours a day. During his time at Harvard, when he had a lot of coding and studying to do, he said, "I threw myself into a daily rhythm that worked for me, even if it seemed extreme to my friends. Between studying and programming, I could be awake for 36 hours at a stretch. Whenever exhaustion took over, I'd head back to wig A11, crash for 12 or more hours, often fully clothed, sometimes with my shoes still on, always with my yellow electric blanket over my head to block the daylight. When I woke up, I'd gobble something quick with Jim, Jenkins, or Sam, maybe stop by the suite to see Andy and Jim, and then head back to class, the library, or back to the Aken. I repeated some variation of that routine for months."
This extremity is what a completely obsessed person looks like. It looks like they've lost their mind. Bill Gates was constantly coding, constantly studying, and when he wasn't doing either of those two things, he was sleeping. Truly becoming obsessed with your craft means spending every moment of your waking hour perfecting it. And if you think that's crazy, you're completely right. That is absolutely crazy. But Bill Gates was absolutely crazy. In order to be exceptional, you have to be the exception. And that's exactly what Bill Gates was.
It gets even crazier, though, because after Bill Gates went to Harvard, he still kept up this insane work ethic at Microsoft. He said, "Life that fall was mostly a whirl of writing code for days on end and sleeping only when I had to, and often wherever I happened to be. I'd catnap at the terminal or just crawl onto the floor next to it. Paul would finish his day job at MITs, walk over to our part of the building to put in a few hours on Microsoft, then go home and sleep for a bit before returning at 2 a.m. to find me still at the terminal. By that time, we had also set up a terminal in our living room that you could connect over the phone line to the school district computer. Most days, Rick rolled off the couch and planted himself at the terminal, hammering out the 6800 basic code."
If you're not already starting to see how insane his work ethic is, I just don't know what to say. I mean, there's a whole section in the book about when he was a kid, he would go sneak out of his house to go to a computer to write code and then come back at 2 in the morning. But it's so important to remember that all of this obsession, all of this determination, all of this work ethic came from that first moment, that first line of code that he wrote where he completely fell in love with his craft.
And so to apply this in your own life, if you want to be able to work maniacally hard, you must become obsessed with your craft. That summer, I thought a lot about how a person becomes the very best at something. Norton was such a commanding figure, peerless in his talent and professionalism. I tried to understand what he had that other programmers didn't. What does it take to be 20% better than everyone else? How much of that is just latent talent versus dedicated effort, being relentlessly focused and deliberate about performing better today than you did the day before and then repeating that tomorrow and the next day and the next for years and years.
So throughout the book, Bill Gates is constantly asking this question: What is it that makes the best person that 20% better than every single person in the room? And later in the book, he actually comes to a conclusion. He says, "A lot of successful people I've met have described how after falling in love with their chosen field, they had to put in a period of hard focused work. It's the time in which raw interest is transformed into real skill."
In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell describes the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice it takes to reach a high level skill. Whether it's writing music or playing tennis, he included me as an example in software. The study Bill Gates is referencing is a study that shows 10,000 hours to truly master a field. And that goes for any field, like he said, whether it's writing or music or playing tennis or, in his case, coding software.
Something I noticed right off the bat with this book is that Bill is just completely intense about the amount of hours that he puts into his craft. He tried to squeeze in as many hours as he could to just spend as much time writing his code as possible. I mean, a lot of this video is pretty much just going to be, "Oh, Bill Gates fell asleep on his keyboard. Oh, Bill Gates slept under his desk for an entire week. Oh, Bill Gates drank Tang and barely ate for three days while he was doing a coding sprint."
The simple fact is that because he was constantly coding, he put in these 10,000 hours extremely quickly. And it was this that allowed him to dominate the entire industry. Because he had mastered code before anyone else really did at the time, he was able to sort of surf that wave and become that leader in the market. Pretty much all of the greats were able to put in these 10,000 hours very quickly. Da Vinci with his art, Michael Jordan with basketball, Walt Disney and animation.
And so the takeaway here is once again not easy, but very simple. And that's to put as many hours into your craft as possible. This becomes very easy to see once you see how much 10,000 hours actually is. At 1 hour every day, it would take 27.4 years. At 2 hours, 13.7 years. At 4 hours, 6.8 years. And at 8 hours a day, 3.4 years. To complete 10,000 hours in just 2 years, it would take 13.7 hours every single day.
Bill Gates started coding when he was 13 and he started Microsoft when he was 19. And after reading the book, I am very convinced that he very likely completed the 10,000 hours in those six years. He said, "I spent a huge chunk of my life in that weird, almost magical feedback loop: write, run, fix—a zone in which time seems to stop. I'd sit down at a terminal after dinner and then look up surprised to find that it was 2:00 in the morning."
So part of forming this maniacal work ethic and becoming a master at your craft is to simply put in the hours. At one point in the book, Bill is working on this program for the first ever personal computer. And he said, "For a month, Paul and I lived in that room. I fell asleep at the terminal more times than I can remember, my nose gradually meeting the keys for an hour or two. Then I'd wake up with a start and immediately start coding again. We got so punchy at times, we cried with laughter. I don't remember the specifics of those sleep-deprived nights, but Paul did. In his book, Idea Man, he recounts that we found a random letter X had somehow landed in the lines of our code. A bug. We fell into hysterics, screaming X over and over again, like we'd unmasked our secret nemesis."
Late nights are actually something I see in a lot of biographies, but specifically the tech biographies. One book specifically that talks about late nights is this book called The Founders, which goes over the founding of PayPal, where one of the founders, Max Levchin, says this about them: "I think there's something very special about an all-nighter ethic. There's definitely something about the nocturnal lifestyle for engineers specifically that really opens up the chakras of creativity or code-writing. People get slightly sillier, but also maybe a little more creative. They get tired and some spirit and camaraderie wakes up in these hours. I also think that there's this massive value that you harness when you're doing an all-nighter. When you've gone for presumably 7 or 8 hours of work and you're getting up to a point when something's about to be born, and then you go for eight more hours and instead of stopping to sleep and letting these ideas precipitate, you actually focus on the findings you've made in the last few hours and you just go crazy and do some more of that."
You guys get what I'm talking about with the superhuman work ethic, right? There's just a lot of benefits that you see from the all-nighter work ethic from, like, the start of SpaceX or the start of PayPal or the start of Microsoft. I put this on here because Bill is constantly doing the late nights. He is constantly pulling the all-nighters and he just works until he completely crashes.
So, if you want a good framework for how Bill Gates works, he simply works with a laser focus with an extreme competitiveness until he crashes, sleeps for a long time, and then gets right back to work. Even if you're not an all-nighter person, there's still some key takeaways that you can take from this. One of them is that you have to find this creative state in your day. That point where you've already worked 8 hours and you're just about to go on a breakthrough, and you don't stop the momentum, but instead you keep going. That moment where everyone else is logging off of their work or everyone else is asleep, and it's just you and the work in front of you. It's in those moments where people find their peak state of productivity because you are pushing yourself more than ever. It might not be the most conventional tactic to reach flow state, but it's like Steve Jobs said, "You can't look at the competition and say you're going to do it better. You have to look at the competition and say you're going to do it differently."
This is one of my favorites because it once again shows that there are levels to this game. Bill says, "My severe take was that everyone in that class was the best person they knew in math up to that point. All of us had 800s on our math SAT. All of us entered college thinking we would be the best. And when we weren't, well, we'd been victims of self-deception. We were frauds in my book." Everyone who goes to a place like Harvard is used to being the best of the best. Everyone who gets signed to the UFC is used to being the best of the best. Everyone who's drafted into the NBA is used to being the best of the best. That is until you actually get to that top group.
This is what I call the Harvard effect. And Bill experienced this very heavily at Harvard. He said, "In the bigger pool of Harvard, as obvious as it sounds now, I realized that despite my innate talent, there were people better than me, and two of them were my best friends." Harvard was really the first place where Bill wasn't the best of the best. And so this forced him to work harder.
It is so important to put yourself in situations where you are not the best in the group. You can think of it like this: If you put a goldfish in a small bowl, then it will stay a small goldfish. It won't grow because it has no need to grow. But if you put that same goldfish in the ocean or a pond or something, the fish will grow into a large goldfish simply because of its environment. The lesson is to put yourself in the ocean, the place where everyone is the best at what they do. And this will force you to work insanely hard just to keep up.
This one goes kind of hand-in-hand with the previous section, but we're going to expand on it a little bit more because competition and this competitive drive is sort of one of the things that really defines Bill Gates. I mean, he is one of the most competitive people who I have ever studied, and I study a lot of competitive people. And that's because most of the greats in history were extremely competitive. Jensen Huang, Rockefeller, Sam Walton, all were extremely competitive.
For Bill, he says this started when he was young and he was playing cards with his grandma who would never let him win. And when he finally started beating her, he said, "Eventually, it took about 5 years. I was winning consistently. By that point, I was almost a teenager, naturally competitive. I enjoyed the mental wrestling as well as the deeply satisfying feeling you get from learning a new skill. Card playing taught me that no matter how complex or even mysterious something seems, you often can figure it out."
And for Bill, as he continued to grow older, he just got more and more competitive, including at Harvard, where he took a math class called Math 55, which is apparently a very, very difficult math. And he says, "In our math 55 study sessions, even as we were helping each other, we were subtly keeping score. That was true in our broader circle of math nerds as well. Everyone knew how everyone else was doing. For instance, that Lloyd in Wigby aced a math 21A test, or that Peter, or was it someone else, found an error in math's notes. We all grasped who among us was quicker that day, sharper, the person who got it first and then could lead the rest of us to the answer. Every day you strive to be on top. By the end of the first semester, I realized that my ranking in the hierarchy wasn't what I had hoped. The two top spots in math 55 belonged to Andy and Jim."
And so, it was this competitive spirit that pushed him and drove him to constantly be working harder. When you look to history, so much innovation was driven by competition. It's what led to the making of the atom bomb in World War II and also the making of the first ever computer to decipher German encryption. Also the moon landing during the Cold War. It was all driven by intense competition with a formidable opponent. And for Bill Gates, it was the same thing. He talks about this class actually a lot in this book. And he says that by week three, 75% of people had dropped out, but this still wasn't good enough for him. He wanted to be on top. He says, "Those first months of college, I was like a kid in a candy store. Dazzled by the seemingly limitless access to experts and intellectual stimulation. I was engaged by the camaraderie I found in Math 55 as we struggled through Mathther's notes and pushed one another to improve."
The best thing you can take from this is to find that competition in your life and use it to motivate yourself to be better. Whatever your craft is, whether it's business or art or science, find those people who just completely excel at that craft and surround yourself with them. Immerse yourself completely with those people because competition will naturally arise, and everyone benefits because it pushes everyone to work harder.
Most of the great people in history were driven by some sort of fear. Bill Gates, of course, is no different. He says, "Of the three of us, I had always been the taskmaster, the one who incessantly worried about losing our lead and fearing that if we weren't careful, we'd be sunk. I worried we weren't learning everything else fast enough."
There are always two forces that are constantly motivating you. There is always a pull and there is always a push. For Bill Gates, the pull was obviously winning. He wanted to win and gain victory over all of his competitors. You can see it very clearly in Math 55, and you can also see it very clearly at Microsoft. But there is also always a push. And for Bill, this would be the fear of falling behind. Throughout the book, he is constantly talking about how he can't fall behind his competitors. And this actually seems to be a very similar mindset to a lot of the tech CEOs, because tech moves so fast. If you don't have this fear or the sense of urgency that allows you to beat all the competition, then you'll fall behind.
I'm not saying that you have to be completely driven by fear, but I'm simply showing that there are always two motivational forces, and you should always pay attention to those to work harder. Here's a quick little exercise to help you figure it out. Take a notebook and just draw an arrow. On one end, write out your dream life, and on the other, write down what your life would be like if you imagine yourself at your absolute worst. From there, it's very easy to see the life that pulls you versus the life that you don't want that pushes you towards the life that you do want.
Okay, so if you've been watching me for a while, you know that I'm obsessed with Richard Feynman. And that's why I got so excited when Bill Gates also started talking about Richard Feynman. Feynman was a special case, a genius with a singular breadth and depth of understanding of the world and an ability to reason his way through puzzles in an array of fields. But he articulates so well the feeling that took root in me as a kid when I started building mental models that helped me visualize how the pieces of the world fit together. As I accumulated more knowledge, the models grew more sophisticated.
This is so beautifully said, and mental models is huge. Bill is talking about how he builds mental models throughout his life. And this is something that I think everyone should adopt. A mental model is sort of like a framework for how the world works. So, for example, take the concept of a normal distribution. At first, it just seems like an idea from mathematics. But you can take that idea from mathematics and apply it to all different walks of life. Normal distribution is how wealth is distributed. It's how personality traits are distributed. Even people's weights are normally distributed. And so, you have this one mental model, this one concept that you can then take and apply to all these different fields.
Bill Gates was obsessed with these mental models, but his favorites were in mathematics. And that leads to the next point. In his terrific book, How to Not 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 reinforce the sense that the correct answer was always out there. I just needed to find it.
And so, he was constantly taking these mathematical principles and applying them to all these different fields. I mean, he was obsessed with math. He even talked about his time at Harvard and how there were different sort of rankings for math. He said that theoretical math was like the true art form, the highest of the high, the best of the best, and then applied math was sort of those second ranks who couldn't quite get to theoretical physics.
Going back to the Math 55 class, he said, "Jim and Andy's third-floor suite became our clubhouse. And while the rest of the dorm was partying over garbage cans of Zarrex, fruit punch, and vodka, we puzzled through math problems, hung out, and drew one another into debates or questions that tested our thinking skills or trivia knowledge. As the night wound on, members of the group would peel off to their own rooms to sleep. Usually Jim, Andy, and I stayed working until after midnight. We'd push on until 2, 3, sometimes 4:00 in the morning, then grab a few hours of sleep before rushing to class at 11:00 to hand in our answers." He did love math, but this wasn't just because he loved math, but it's because these were useful to him. They were mental models.
To him, math was just logic, and he saw the real world in a very logical way as well. He even hired people based on their mathematical skills. And about this one hire, he said, "I figured he had to be strong in math. And since math demanded logical thinking and sharp problem-solving, I reasoned that he, and by extension I, could pick up whatever skills and knowledge were needed. Linear algebra, topology, and the rest of Math 55 tested my limits."
Now, I know a lot of people will skip this point and move to the next one, but honestly, this point is super important. Math is one of the best skills that you can develop. Not because it's just a bunch of problems on a piece of paper, but because those problems are a way of thinking about the world, a purely logical and rational way of thinking about the world. At least until you get into, like, the super advanced math where some of the numbers break down and you get into, like, Plato's world of mathematics where it's just a huge mess. But for the most part, math teaches you how to think. It teaches you how to use logic and reason to come to a conclusion. And it's actually a common trait that many of the greats right now were obsessed with math. Elon was a physics major in college, constantly taking hard math classes. Jeff Bezos also talks about very similar stories about solving math hard equations with his roommates. And overall, it's a bit of a status symbol at these Ivy League schools based on how good you are at math. The people who can do the most difficult math problems have the highest status because it's a way of thinking and reasoning in the world. And that type of thinking and reasoning applies directly to real life. And that's why Bill Gates was so obsessed with math.
I was so incredibly optimistic, maybe overly so. I was confident about the trajectory of the personal computer business. I felt that we were close to landing some deals, and we didn't have any significant competitors as of yet. This is once again something all of the greats had, and they all had this sort of incredible optimism about the world. You need to be incredibly optimistic because otherwise you won't be able to deal with the hardship that comes with the work.
All of the wise people told Henry Ford that the car would never have its own market. Everyone told Elon that reusable rockets were unachievable in the near future. All the movie directors at the time told Walt Disney that no one wants a full-length animated feature film. It was literally the exact same thing for Bill Gates. He said, "Software companies didn't exist, or at least the kind of software company Paul and I wanted to build didn't exist, and our product was something our potential customers thought should be free, but we had our one customer and faith that we could build from there."
All of it started with a bit of naive optimism about the future of the market. And I mean, just imagine if he went to the numbers and he did some in-depth market analysis on whether there was a market there or not and found that there was no market. Imagine what the world would be like if he did that. Imagine if any of these people did that. There would be no cars, no animated movies, no reusable rockets, and maybe even no software market. All it takes is a little bit of optimism along with a relentless work ethic. And that's exactly what Bill Gates did.
I prided myself on writing code fast in long stretches of intense work. I can only imagine what the seasoned professional programmers at Bonville thought of the kid working like a maniac late into every night, burning out code and eating Tang powder drink mix straight from the jar until his tongue turned orange. I broke my record for sustained work that spring, once not leaving the time tunnel underground for nearly 100 hours straight. That meant not showering and hardly eating for nearly 4 days. 100 hours straight.
This is the perfect section to end the video with because if there's one thing, if you could boil down all of Bill Gates' success into one word, it would be focus. Bill Gates was able to maniacally sit down at a desk and focus on his work for hours until he just became completely exhausted and couldn't focus anymore, at which point he fell asleep. I mean, when you read this book, there is just story after story after story of Bill Gates falling asleep on a couch or at his computer or under his desk with his clothes on and everything. It was just insane for how long and how hard Bill Gates was able to focus.
Warren Buffett once said, "The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything." And that perfectly describes Bill Gates. Bill Gates had a clear vision of what he thought the future of the computer industry was going to be, and he said no to everything else. He was always completely focused on the work that was in front of him. And over the long term, this was what brought him this insane amount of success.
And just to keep pushing about this maniacal focus, he said, "It was clear to me by the end of 1976 that the ambition to be the first to get there, to be the fastest to build the best bridge to the other side, was stronger in me than it was in him. Like one of those watertight hatches on a submarine, I could shut out the rest of the world." Driven by a sense of responsibility I felt for Microsoft, I had closed the hatch door and locked the wheel. No girlfriend, no hobbies. My social life centered around Paul, Rick, and the people we worked with. It was the one way we knew to stay ahead. And I expected similar dedication from others. We had this huge opportunity in front of us. Why wouldn't you work 80 hours a week in pursuit of it? Yes, it was exhausting, but it was also exhilarating.
I think that is a great way to end the video. Thank you so much for watching. If you like this video, you might like this video, which goes over the insane work ethic of Jensen Huang, who is currently pioneering everything that has to do with AI. He is insane. And if you are someone who wants to work insanely hard and have these insane levels of productivity, I do offer coaching services. You can check them out at my website, nicknunos.com, or you can check out the link in the description. That's it. See you.