Bill Gates Speech at Harvard
But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer to drop out of business school. I�m a bad influence. That�s why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today. One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, when I made a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that had begun making the world�s first personal computers. I offered to sell them software. I worried that they would realize I was just a student in a dorm and hang up on me. Instead they said: �We�re not quite ready, come see us in a month,� which was a good thing, because we hadn�t written the software yet. From that moment, I worked day and night on this little extra credit project that marked the end of my college education and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft. But humanity�s greatest advances are not in its discoveries � but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity� reducing inequity is the highest human achievement. You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the world�s inequities than the classes that came before. In your years here, I hope you�ve had a chance to think about how � in this age of accelerating technology � we can finally take on these inequities, and we can solve them. We were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of children were dying and they could be saved, the world would make it a priority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But it did not. For under a dollar, there were interventions that could save lives that just weren�t being delivered. I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics who claim there is no hope. They say: �Inequity has been with us since the beginning, and will be with us till the end � because people just � don�t � care.� I completely disagree. I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with. All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen human tragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing � not because we didn�t care, but because we didn�t know what to do. If we had known how to help, we would have acted. If we can really see a problem, which is the first step, we come to the second step: cutting through the complexity to find a solution. Finding solutions is essential if we want to make the most of our caring. If we have clear and proven answers anytime an organization or individual asks �How can I help?,� then we can get action � and we can make sure that none of the caring in the world is wasted. But complexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone who cares � and that makes it hard for their caring to matter. Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have � whether it�s something sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet. Pursuing that goal starts the four-step cycle again. This is the pattern. The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working � and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century � which is to surrender to complexity and quit. The final step � after seeing the problem and finding an approach � is to measure the impact of your work and share your successes and failures so that others learn from your efforts. You have to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able to show that a program is vaccinating millions more children. You have to be able to show a decline in the number of children dying from these diseases. This is essential not just to improve the program, but also to help draw more investment from business and government. But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the work � so people can feel what saving a life means to the families affected. Sixty years ago, George Marshall came to this commencement and announced a plan to assist the nations of post-war Europe. He said: �I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. At the same time, for every person in the world who has access to this technology, five people don�t. That means many creative minds are left out of this discussion � smart people with practical intelligence and relevant experience who don�t have the technology to hone their talents or contribute their ideas to the world. We need as many people as possible to have access to this technology, because these advances are triggering a revolution in what human beings can do for one another. They are making it possible not just for national governments, but for universities, corporations, smaller organizations, and even individuals to see problems, see approaches, and measure the impact of their efforts to address the hunger, poverty, and desperation George Marshall spoke of 60 years ago. My mother, who was filled with pride the day I was admitted here � never stopped pressing me to do more for others. A few days before my wedding, she hosted a bridal event, at which she read aloud a letter about marriage that she had written to Melinda. My mother was very ill with cancer at the time, but she saw one more opportunity to deliver her message, and at the close of the letter she said: �From those to whom much is given, much is expected.� In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue � a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of your career, that would be phenomenal. But you don�t have to do that to make an impact. For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the same interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them. Read the full article