Philanthropist, COVID prepper, harbinger of doom in Ted Talks, and founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates is wishing that he had kicked up his feet and just chilled out a bit more. In his recent commencement speech to the forestry and engineering graduates of Northern Arizona University, the icon of the Gen X '90s looked kindly on slacking but admitted that he drove himself and his colleagues really hard back in early days of the web, all while outlining the five things he wishes he’d heard before he didn’t graduate. Gates famously dropped out of college to pursue his Microsoft dream, which many might say worked out fine for him, if fine means earning billions of dollars.
Hindsight is 20/20, especially after becoming wealthy, and it appears as if Gates has his own ghost of Christmas past visiting him. The self-professed most important piece of advice Gates gave the crowd of fellow engineers was, “You are not a slacker if you cut yourself some slack.” Acknowledging that it took a long time to let that lesson sink in for himself, Gates joined the many exposing the benefits of greater work-life balance. These days, after chipping away at his $125 billion dollar fortune via his many philanthropic efforts—including finding that alcohol just doesn’t have any health benefits after all—one of the world’s richest men is reassessing how intense he needed to be to get to the top.
“When I was your age, I didn’t believe in vacations,” Gates notes, in remarks posted to his blog, Gates notes. He told the crowd that when he was 22 years old, he thought he would be working at Microsoft forever. “I didn’t believe in weekends. I pushed everyone around me to work very long hours. In the early days of Microsoft, my office overlooked the parking lot—and I would keep track of who was leaving early and staying late.” Looking at it now, he encouraged the new graduates to learn from his mistakes. “Take a break when you need to. Take it easy on the people around you when they need it, too.”
This isn’t Gates’ first time publicly mulling over his past ways. When he sat down a few weeks ago with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak he fielded, for some reason, questions generated by A.I. chatbot ChatGPT, and one was the incredibly basic question of the best advice ever received. Gates responded with wise words from fellow philanthropist Warren Buffett about the importance of friendship. He said his previous intensity may have rubbed others the wrong way, and his attitude “meant that there were a lot of people who probably could’ve helped me that just didn’t fit in because I had this very narrow view of working style.”
As Gates’ personal life has changed, his rigidity towards his professional goals has shifted as well. Getting older and becoming a father made him realize “there is more to life than work,” he explains to recent grads. Indeed, developments in Gates’ family have further spurned his desire to grow in other areas than just work. He described in a December 2022 letter that the news of his daughter expecting a child made him more inspired to build a future for other people’s children and grandchildren.
As Gates told it, slacking might mean taking more time to look back and cherish one’s own success, bounce back from difficulties, and develop relationships, all seemingly difficult to do while patrolling a software company's employees’ cars going and coming. He cautions the foresters to not “wait as long as I did to learn this lesson.” After noting that new graduates survived many Tequila Sunrises, he encouraged them to do what he didn’t and “take a moment and have some fun.”
They might as well unwind given that Gates has some high expectations for their cohort, noting that he believes the Class of 2023 will “be the ones to solve the climate crisis and reduce the gap between the rich and poor.” Hopefully, they’ll get to relax too along the way.
