Bill Gates has revealed how he was "disruptive" as a teenager, forcing his parents to send him to a psychologist
Bill Gates: My parents took me to a child psychologist
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has revealed how he was
"disruptive" as a teenager, forcing his parents to send him to a
psychologist.
PUBLISHED: January 31, 2016 12:10 am
Speaking on Desert Island Discs Gates said his parents
taught him the value of "giving back" to society, a lesson developed
into a philanthropic philosophy culminating in he and his wife Melinda setting
aside much of their vast fortune to help the world's poor.
The 60 year old also opened up to presenter Kirsty Young
on the BBC Radio 4 show about how "fanatical" he was in the early
days of Microsoft, and the relationship he had with Apple founder Steve Jobs
that was both competitive and mutually supportive.
Talking about his relationship with his parents - his
father was a successful lawyer, his mother a teacher who sat on a number of
corporate boards - he said: "They set a very good example of being engaged
in giving back."
Explaining why they sent him to see a child psychologist
when he was 12, he said: "I was a bit disruptive. I started early on
questioning were their rules logical and always to be followed, so there was
kind of a bit of tension there as I was pushing back."
As a child he devoured books, especially biographies, and
considered a future as a lawyer or scientist so he could "work on hard
problems".
Computing became and obsession and he would spend five
hours a day learning programming, skipping gym classes to further his
knowledge.
Gates met Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen at school - the
pair managed to rig the school's schedule so Gates could sit near near the
"nice girls" in class - and he eventually dropped out of Harvard to
set up the company when he was just 19.
By 1979, at 23, Microsoft was grossing 2.5 million
dollars a year.
He said: "I was quite fanatical about work. I worked
weekends, I didn't really believe in vacations ... I had to be a little careful
not to try and apply my standards to how hard they (his employees) worked.
"I knew everybody's licence plate so I could look
out in the parking lot and see when did people come in, when were they leaving.
Eventually I had to loosen up as the company got to a reasonable size."
Gates also spoke of his relationship with Apple founder
Steve Jobs.
He said: "For some periods (we) were complete allies
working together - I wrote the original software on Apple 2. Sometimes he would
be tough on you, sometimes he would be very encouraging. And he got really
great work out of people."
Talking about when he saw Jobs a few months before he
died in 2011, Gates said: "I n the early years the intensity had always
been about the project, and so when Steve got sick it was far more mellow in
terms of talking about our lives and our kids.
"He and I gave a joint interview together and I
talked about how I envied his incredible design skills. Steve was an incredible
genius and I was more of an engineer than he was.
"It was fun that it was more of a friendship that
reflective, although tragically then he couldn't overcome the cancer and
died."
Gates also explained how he thinks it's important that
"big institutions are criticised", and discussed the foundation he
runs with his wife which has spent 34 billion dollars on projects around the
world.
He said: "When you see the cost of the diseases or
even the malnutrition where the kids who survive don't grow up to achieve their
full potential, it does bother you that there's not more generosity or there's
not more creativity, that we are not drawing in the best scientists."
Gates picked Under Pressure, by Queen and David Bowie,
Willie Nelson's Blue Skies, and The Two Of Us by The Beatles among his tracks.
He also selected copies of the world's great lectures on
DVD as his luxury item, and chose to take Steven Pi nker's The Better Angels Of
Our Nature as his book.
Desert Island Discs is broadcast on January 31 at 11.15am
on BBC Radio 4.
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