Are you successful if you achieve your dreams? People would say that a boy who dreams of playing football for England and later fulfills that goal is successful, but what if you dream of becoming a fireman, or Burger King manager? Do other people define your success, or is it an internal metric?
I think the point is that you either have it (nurtured from youth) or you work really hard to learn to have it (indeterminate amount of therapy), or you fake it.
I disagree about the computer skills and their relevance. The 2 key factors are:
- He licensed rather than sold DOS (after purchasing it) to IBM
- Later was able to squash competition by writing contracts with OEM’s such that competitors products couldn’t be pre-loaded.
I think you are correct that his computer skills were better than the business people he was dealing with, but the most important thing is that his business skills were better than those he dealt with and better than his competitors (with the possible exception of Larry Ellison who appears to be made from the same mold).
Little mention of risk taking here, you can’t steal second when your foots still on first.
Also most successful people have little use for material possessions early in their careers. While the rest of us are buying homes, cars, and tv’s they’re sleeping on friends couch’s with only the clothes on there back. (Read Motley Crues bio ‘The Dirt’ sometime)
I agree. But I think a person is in a fortunate position if they are able to fail repeatedly and learn from it. Bill Gates could afford to drop out of college because he knew he wasn’t going to starve, go homeless, or bankrupt his family. Even if his ideas had failed spectacularly, he still wouldn’t have been reduced to poverty. However, if he had carried the burden of the first college educated of a working class family, perhaps he would have felt he had too much to lose by dropping out and starting a risky business venture.
Another fact is that both of these historical figures weren’t brought up in poverty. Given the standards of their days, they were comfortably middle class. So even they started off with some degree of luck on their side. As Sam Stone said, they deserve credit for not squandoring their good fortune. But I don’t think they would have reached the same heights if they had started off in abject poverty.
Bill Gates is an exceptional man. Most people and companies try to keep doing what they do and peddling what they have, Bill Gates, on the other hand has applied full rudder and given Microsoft a sharp new course when it was needed. Most people cannot do that because they are too immersed in what they are already doing. One thing he did was to see that the future of computing was not the command line but the graphical interface. Another was to see the future of computing was not your computing on your individual computer but communications, the Internet. There are many such decisions where rather than trying to convince the market to buy his product he has focused on a new product which he thought was what the market wanted. This takes a special clairvoyance and detachment.
Maybe you should tell me why you don’t see flexibility as being a key component of success. Your response here has nothing to do with my contribution to the thread.
In my view, success is measured by the amount of constructive impact a person makes in others’ lives.
He is brilliant at understanding human purchase patterns and playing and manipulating that to his advantage. Ever watch Pirates of the Silicon Valley?
He wasn’t above stealing a good idea or pushing competitors out by bundling his own version of their superior program into windows. Just business I guess.
A wonderfully succinct way of putting it.
Like others have said, we probably ought to define “succeed” or “successful” before we can accurately identify traits that would cause one to be successful.
By that I mean, is the 32 year old guy who drinks like a fish, doesn’t hold down meaningful relationships, works constantly, has no hobbies, but makes half a million a year as a director in a consulting firm successful?
Is the guy who worked for the water department who went to ALL of both of his sons’ football, baseball and basketball games as well as all their track meets, who has been a loving husband for 40 years, who gives money to charities such as the USO, whose sons and daughter-in-law love him dearly and who never really made more than about 50k per year successful?
What about the partner at a mid-sized law firm who probably makes a million a year, but who works 70 hour weeks, avoids his family, alienates his co-workers, and is generally considered kind of an idiot?
There are a lot of different kinds of success. Success in the corporate world is one kind, but at least in my experience, to really succeed in that, it has to be your ONE goal, and everything else- hobbies, family, personal interests have to be subordinate to it. That’s why there’s such attrition among new law school grads- most of them don’t want to be lawyers anymore because it sucks, regardless of the pay.
He came in for a lot of praise for the way he so successfully turned Microsoft on a dime to embrace the Internet.
To give credit where due, he actually came to this view rather late in the game. Steve Jobs was the one who first saw the potential of the graphical user interface in order to make computers viable for the average citizen, though he appropriated the idea from a precursor GUI he was shown at Xerox PARC. Jobs later sued Microsoft for their GUI, claiming Microsoft stole it from Apple. Gates’ rejoinder was that it was more like they both had a big, rich neighbor named Xerox and that he (Gates) had broken in to steal their television only to find out that Jobs had stolen it first. Gates also said, with regard to his initial reluctance to abandon the command-line interface, that the graphical user interface turned out to be such an obvious solution that “it’s hard to keep a straight face”.
Having said that, Gates is indeed a most exceptional person. There’s a very interesting Charlie Rose interview with him at Stanford University (link), in which he talks about a wide range of topics, including Microsoft, the future of America as a financial power, and his charitable efforts and the difficulties involved in trying to get help to people in other countries around the world.
Well, if you did define it as something like being happy and having an impact on others… it must be something special, because not everyone can actually do this. Seriously. Let’s say we use that definition, how many people can you honestly say are happy and impacting lives positively? I’m not talking about people simply holding doors open for those behind them, but something more concrete…
Thank you. My point exactly Vox has a very materialistic definition of success. I know plenty of wealthy people who are miserable pieces of shit, and far more people of modest means who inspire others to be the best person they can be. You can say that both types are successful, but one type is more far-reaching than the other. The flexibility to see other options, to be able to switch gears in mid-stream in order to achieve a goal, the knowledge that things don’t always work out as we plan, people who know that most successful endeavors comprise the efforts of a number of people…people with these qualities are far more likely to succeed in a way that is meaningful to many.
And if Gates wasn’t ruthless enough to rip off someone elses operating system and package it to IBM, he would not have made it either.
The three best ways to make masive amounts of money:
Inherit it.
Find a great expensive product and find a way to make it cheaper and thus available to the masses (Ford & Gates)
Create something massively entertaining and keep control over the rights to it (Spielberg, Lucas, Lloyd Webber)
Persistance, passion, and the courage to stand up for what one believes in. - Jess.
Greetings!
For many of us, success doesn’t necessarily have a $ sign in front of it. It’s a nice perk, but for most ‘successful’ people it’s exactly that.
Walt Disney declared full bankruptcy seven times before he ‘made it.’ The man didn’t care about the money, he had a goal, a vision, and persisted until he attained it. Several of my closest friends are what one would call ‘household names,’ and not one of them cared any more than I do about the monetary aspect of what they do while they were climbing the proverbial ladder. They’d have done it for free - and most of us did for a while. LOL! - Jesse.
Success is subjective. For some great success may not even affect another person directly, let alone millions.
To reach the ends that a person wishes for often requires doing many things that they dislike. To that end, in order to succeed a person must have discipline.
Which might also be interpreted as the confidence to overlook your own incompetence.
Any time I think about changing jobs or promotions, I can think of so many reasons why I don’t deserve it long before the application has been posted. In clear opposition, was an idiotic co-worker, whose incompetance outpaced mine, who simply believed she was overqualified for everything. She reasoned aloud in front of us one day how she felt that a secretarial course permitted her to apply for jobs that required a degree qualification :dubious: