Hey guys, I’m Money Matters and today I want to talk about a legendary Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his luck and loss in creating Microsoft. (This comes from The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel) As well as how those odds can work both against and with us in the most unpredictable and profound ways.
“If there had been no Lakeside, there would have been no Microsoft” - Bill Gates
What in the world does this mean?
Let’s take a stroll back to 1968 and meet Bill Douglas. A World War 2 Navy Pilot and curious science and math teacher at Lakeside School in Seattle Washington, he had a pretty crazy idea and that was to bring the Teletype Model 30 Computer to his students.
At this point in time, these computers were so hard to find University Graduate students didn’t have one or couldn’t get one. Just to illustrate that at 13 years old these boys were pretty lucky.
How lucky though?
Well… According to the UN in 1968 there were 303 million high school-aged students in the world.
~18 million lived in the United States
~270k lived in Washington
100k in Seattle
300 At Lakeside School
303,000,000 → 300 = 1 in a Million odds
Bill Gates was Bill Gates, and that is not to take credit away from all of his success and hard work that went into creating Microsoft. But It’s also not to say that Bill wasn’t incredibly lucky to have gone to a school with a computer and the critical forward-thinking Lakeside School had.
One of the first projects the school had their computer prodigies work on was a program that would collect everyone’s class schedules and organize them without conflicting or overlapping classes. It was an ambitious task for the time, but the students accomplished it and changed the way schools would operate forever.
Bill and Paul also had a friend named Kent Evans. He was a part of the computer prodigies at Lakeside. He would have been a founding member of Microsoft alongside the two. But before Kent Graduated, he died in a tragic mountaineering accident.
The odds of being killed on a mountain in high school are roughly → One in a Million
Bill Gates and Paul Allen experienced amazing luck by being born near Lakeside and having gone to school there. Kent Evans encountered the same odds. Both are One in a million. Both life-altering.
What can we take away from this story?
Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems. When observing and studying anything or anyone in life we should take a step back and realize that there are incredible forces at work we cannot see and that we have no control over. Even Bill Gates said there would be no Microsoft without Lakeside. That goes to show that even you might be incredibly lucky right now and you don’t even know it.
How can we use this story to make more money?
Well, the way I see it,
We will never know if the choices we’re making today will have the impact we want in the future and things will never quite work out exactly as you plan. That being said it has to mean don’t try. It means you should buy shares of that company you love or a property that could make you passive income. You never know where it can lead.
Mental Take Away
You should always be kind and pause before placing judgment on anyone. Luck & Risk plays a major part in every one of our lives
That wraps it up for today. Thanks for reading guys and I hope you enjoyed this short story. Be sure to check out The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel and share this post with your friends if you feel like it. :)