"I never took a day off in my twenties" (Bill Gates) quote is a misnomer because what Bill Gates considers a day-off is something where you are just lying around doing nothing, such as lying on the beach. A two week sojourn into a set of books that interested him were not considered "days off". He did such activities yearly.
Bill Gates wasn't in the office working a 7 day schedule for his entire 20s. So that is not the impression we should get from the quote at all. His productive time away has merit, and I have followed that attitude to reading myself, and recommend it to others.
It would have been better if he had said "I never wasted a day in my twenties" which I think would be more accurate.
As someone in their early twenties struggling with burnout post startup failure, these bullshit hustle tropes NEED to end (like the Bill Gates quote).
I'm going to go against everything I was told and say: don't work hard in your early twenties, don't kill yourself over your work, don't fill your life with anxiety.
Phrases like "I wish I was like you in my youth" or keeping young people rolling in their hamster wheels just encourage the worst kind of personality damage in these developing years.
It is bullshit, it is harmful. Stop encouraging the young towards handing away their lives in a silver platter.
PG has turned a good profit selling the same pile of bullshit to two generations of CS grads and wannabe entrepeneurs now. I always thought the subtext was "and if you're really lucky, I can be your mentor/investor/boss and tell you why you're not trying hard enough." Nice to see he's still hustling too.
It always struck me as selfish, pompous and sanctimonious all at the same time.
He silently banned me from this site in 2012 for saying roughly the same thing - basically just made anything I posted invisible to 99% of others, so, yeah. Work harder, slaves!
[edit/addendum] The ban was never told to me. It was a hell ban apparently decided without consultation b/c he felt insulted. So for years I would post stuff and not know why almost no one saw it. Sneaky. As a sysadmin I wouldn't do that. Meanwhile, all his pseudo-self-help motivational speeches added up to one thing: Gaining authority and power over kids who were desperate to get a tiny bit of backing for a great idea. Money played a big role and everyone supposedly knew what they signed up for, but the personal power dynamic and control issues have always been near the surface. PG fronted as the ultimate "angel", but his interest in making money let alone helping anyone always appeared to take a backseat to having power to manipulate children's emotions and form a cult of personality to pander to him and sing his praises. All HN is essentially an outgrown version of his ego.
You have it right. Don't fall for this crap. It's just another iteration of the old company line, retreaded for the renter/gig generation - work hard til you retire, hope for a cash injection, then die early please. Nothing wrong with hard work, but you're right, it's better to spend your 20s living life. And question the source. [/edit /rant]
Every time we read or hear that quote, we have to remember that Gates also lose and win a lot of money playing poker in university, so there was also time for non-work related tasks :-)
Poker can be considered work. If you actually truly learn to play it, it teaches you a lot about people, emotions, thinking ahead several steps, probability, and risk and reward.
He's not going to claim that his success was the result of a few bets that paid off in spectacular fashion, strongarming OEMs and mommy being buddies with the CEO of IBM.
It's going to be hard work, spectacular insight, old fashioned grit, persistence in the face of adversity, etc. - all the things Hollywood slavishly worships with either a clichéd montage or a poignant scene. It's how our culture frames laudable and justified success - of course it's how he will tell his story.
Bill Gates more than most billionaires really wants to be seen as the hero, as a good guy. His charitable giving demonstrates just how much.
There is widespread statistical evidence that wealth is gained through luck. I imagine though that every billionaire thinks they are the one that got there through hard work.
Well, who doesn’t want to be seen as the hero in their own story?
What I suspect is that it’s a case of “all of the above”. Yes, gates got lucky, but he was also talented, and he worked hard. To be an outlier you have to defy the odds, and luck, talent and grit are different ways of defying.
Repeatedly you see "influencers" be overly generous with their own retelling of history. The problem with this style of retelling is there's generally not very much humbleness or self reflection involved - they want you to _believe_ this is how it was, even if it wasn't. You can't really fix it, I don't think. Famous influencers are going to tell their narrative however they want, lots of people are going to say "Well, that's not really true...", and lots of other people are going to just aimlessly believe the influencer in question.
There are plenty of examples, even in this thread. Nobody is saying PG and other various influencers didn't work hard - but the virtue signaling of scale is usually way off. "We worked 100 hours a week at hour desks to launch ___", when in reality they "worked" maybe a half of that, extremely hard, and spent the remaining half thinking about work and/or stressing and/or recovering. If everyone was able to count "Thinking or stressing about work" as "work", I don't think this would be a problem, but people usually omit those parts.
People lie all the time and in the direction that can make them virtuous and a bit contrarian. How come that they all love their wife and family is important thing they have (although work is important along with their sacred responsibility of producing jobs and wealth) and then we find out they either treat their partners as inferiors in the relationship, have affairs, have been living in separate houses for years if not decades?
To me it is all fine since except in case of abuse, people can all choose how to live our life as they please. But isn't all of that taking advantage of credulous people, like entrepreneurial wannabes when the gospel is not "love your kids", but "work hard"?
Looking back I worked quite hard, as I see it, or very hard, as others might see it, at various stages of my life, but I would not write a propagandistic essay about "working hard". And you know why? Because I see life as full of ambiguities, because I have nothing to sell and I have not a public persona that I am trying to build, defend or that I use to generate views.
When I hear or read "work hard", "hard work", "work ethic", "never give up" and similar memorabilia, I immediately judge the speaker and writer negatively. Maybe it is just me, but I don't like to be sold personas.
If you're in a position where you benefit financially from the extra labor of others, you would probably be incentivized to proselytize the value of "hard work".
I think he has money for multiple generations of do-nothing at this point. But I also think he likes to be at the center of attention and a north star for ambitious nerds, and that's whey he proposes essays that are clearly propagandistic (but not for money). That's fine, I like people rooting for themselves.
The problem is the outsized reward relative to the effort.
It shows a broken system and should not be celebrated, if for no other reason than the opportunity cost of elevating such a small percentage of humanity to such wealthy heights while letting 1/3 of humanity live crippled lives with no access to clean water.
Whereas Bezos goes the other way. He wants to claim that he was lucky at Amazon, not that he foresaw the chokehold he would be able to put suppliers in, built a company that encouraged people to burn out and ruthlessly pushed employees and partners.
There's always a blend of work, intelligence and luck that goes into success, so it's nice to have anyone emphasizing luck. But it's definitely supposed to distract from how he kept long term deferring returns on investment to go all tentacley into every business line.
(I should point out that however hard he pushed his employees, he seems to compensate them for it. If you worked in one of his warehouses from the jump his RSU-distributions would have netted you enough for a downpayment.)
Bill Gates wasn't in the office working a 7 day schedule for his entire 20s. So that is not the impression we should get from the quote at all. His productive time away has merit, and I have followed that attitude to reading myself, and recommend it to others.
It would have been better if he had said "I never wasted a day in my twenties" which I think would be more accurate.