Melinda French Gates is a woman who seemingly leaves little to chance. From girlhood she would write down goals for herself to reach, and she was just as driven at college and in her early career at Microsoft, where she famously met and married its billionaire co-founder Bill Gates. The couple divorced in 2021.
There is a small, sad moment in her memoir The Next Day where she writes of happily gaining weight in pregnancy because it was the first time she’d felt so free “from perfectionism … the crushing relentless societal pressure to look a certain way”. Only well into middle age, when a friend gently questions her constant self-improvement projects, does she wonder whether in her conscientiousness she had “missed opportunities to embrace spontaneity, lean into the unexpected”.
