Famous Failure – Bill Gates

Born on 28 October 1955, Bill Gates by no means needs any introduction. Contrary to the beliefs, Gates never had a rough childhood, as he belonged to an affluent upper-middle-class family. Gates’ family intended for him to become a renowned lawyer and follow in the footsteps of his father William H. Gates.

However, Bill had other aspirations and he was destined for something bigger. No one knew his passion would revolutionize the whole world and nearly every home or office would use one of his products in the future.

When he was 17, he formed a company called Traf-O-Data with his childhood friend ‘Paul Allen’. The company’s primary focus is to help traffic engineers by analyzing raw traffic information from traffic counters and giving helpful data to the officials. Their efforts were to reduce the manual work as much as possible and let the software do the task in a better and more efficient way, thus saving a lot of time to focus on better things.

However, success wasn’t easy for Gates to grab. When a supervisor from the County of Seattle’s traffic department came to see the software, it failed to work and needless to say, he was less than impressed by the work of Gates and his company.

The business failed eventually, but giving valuable lessons, helped Gates to lay a solid foundation for his future.

“It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”

Gates enrolled in Harvard University with an impeccable score of 1590/1600, which is considered a near-perfect score to date by academic peers. However, to much surprise, Gates decided to drop out of the university the following year to start a company with his friend Paul Allen. After much discussion with his family, his parents gave him the signal to follow his pursuit of happiness.

On 4 April 1975, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States, Bill Gates co-founded ‘Microsoft’, a software company that transformed the digital world for humans, with a vision that every home should have a computer and undoubtedly, he almost achieved his dreams.

When most Americans used typewriters, Microsoft was making computer software. Bill became the then-youngest billionaire at the age of 31.

For consecutive years, Bill Gates remained the world’s richest man. In 2014, Bill Gates stepped down from the role of CEO of Microsoft to carry on his philanthropist endeavours along with his wife Melinda Gates under the name Gates Foundation, donating around $36 billion to social, health, and educational developments. There’s a school called  Gates Cambridge Scholarships at Cambridge University.

“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”

Leave a comment