So, What Do You Do?
What a scrawny, psychedelic-consuming, Harvard dropout from the 70s taught me.
I think one of the best ways to learn is to study the people who already made it in their field, then figure out how to apply what they did to your own life, in your own way. So that’s what I do. I study them.
Not in some creepy, watch-people-from-across-the-coffee-shop way. I’m weird, but not like that.
I mean biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, video essays, essays, podcasts - anything that lets me climb inside how someone built their life’s work. I’ve had this infatuation since I was a preteen. I was the kid at my parents’ gatherings walking up to their friends and asking, “So, John - what do you do for work?”
That question still gets me. It’s probably why I’ve always been so mission-driven, but that’s a different conversation.
Many years later, I’m still asking it. Today, I asked it of Bill Gates.
I know. He’s not the most beloved guy on earth, and he’s not my favorite person either - he’s done some shady stuff, and I’m not here to defend it. But he made it about as far as a person can make it in his field, and I wanted to know what actually made him tick. So I read Source Code, his memoir about the years before he was Bill Gates, back when he was a scrawny, defiant kid in Seattle just trying to fit in.
Here’s what I found, and here’s the part that surprised me.
The advantages were real
Let me get this out of the way, because it would be dishonest to skip: Gates started at an "easier spawn point," so to say, than almost anyone reading this.
And to his credit, he says so himself, more bluntly than I would have:
“It’s impossible to overstate the unearned privilege I enjoyed: to be born in the rich United States is a big part of a winning birth lottery ticket, as is being born white and male in a society that advantages white men.”
- Bill Gates, Source Code: My Beginnings
The rest of the ledger backs him up. His parents were well off. His father was a prominent lawyer. His mother was a teacher, a businesswoman, and sat on corporate boards. That’s not a small thing - that’s a solid foundation to take enormous risks from. When you drop out of Harvard to bet on an industry that doesn’t exist yet, it helps to know that if the whole thing craters, there’s a family and a safety net that won’t let you hit the ground. Most people don’t have that. It’s a massive advantage, and I don’t have any interest in pretending otherwise.
He was also just scary intelligent. I mean his private school allowed him to skip regular math classes to focus on independent computing and computer science projects at age 12. And at age 13 he wrote his first computer software program, blending high-level math logic with early programming languages. The dude also took and passed Harvard’s famous Math 55 course (Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra, taught by the renowned mathematician John Mather).
And then there’s the environment, which is the part I keep chewing on.
Gates didn’t grow up around average. He grew up surrounded by intelligent, ambitious, driven people - a card-playing grandmother who sharpened his mind, parents who pushed, and a small circle of friends who were every bit as sharp and obsessed as he was. I mean, the kids snuck into the computer center at midnight. When your peer group is operating at that level, “normal” recalibrates. The bar for what’s expected of you moves up without anyone announcing it. You don’t just learn from people like that - you get pulled by them. Their standard becomes your baseline.
Chief among that circle was Paul Allen - the friend who’d eventually co-found Microsoft with him. Allen shaped Gates in every direction, not just the productive ones. He’s the one who pulled Gates toward the midnight coding sessions, and he’s also the one who introduced him to sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll - Jimi Hendrix on the record player, the occasional tab of acid going around. Gates dropped acid a handful of times as a teenager, mostly, by his own admission, to seem cool. It didn’t work. The friend who convinces you that you can build a company at nineteen is usually the same one convincing you to do things your parents would lose their minds over. It comes as a package.
And that’s the part of being a product of your environment that nobody likes to say out loud: it’s not just what you’re taught, it’s what you come to consider ordinary. Gates thought nothing of being up at 2 a.m. buried in a problem, because everyone around him was doing the same. The environment didn’t just hand him knowledge - it handed him a warped, elevated sense of what a normal amount of effort even looks like. And once that’s your baseline, you’re already ahead of almost everyone, and you don’t even feel like you’re trying hard.
I think about that a lot, because it’s the one advantage on this list that isn’t purely luck. You can’t choose your parents or your IQ. You can, to some degree, choose who you surround yourself with. You can raise your own baseline by standing next to people whose ordinary is higher than yours. That one’s available to all of us, and most of us waste it.
But none of that is the thing
This is where it gets interesting, and here’s the problem with the advantages.
Plenty of kids had rich, connected parents. Plenty of kids were brilliant. Plenty of kids grew up around other brilliant, driven kids. The 1970s were full of privileged geniuses with firm ground under their feet and sharp friends around them. Almost none of them out-coded an entire emerging industry.
The advantages were nice to have. They were not sufficient. They got Gates to the starting line with better shoes than everyone else - but they don’t explain why he won the race.
The thing that explains it is the obsession.
This dude was obsessed in a way that’s hard to comprehend. It didn’t matter what he was working on - he would lock in onto a problem and grind it until it was solved. In the book he describes coding stints where he’d work for thirty-six hours straight, stagger back to his dorm, crash for twelve to sixteen hours, eat something, and go right back to the machine. He was skipping nearly all his Harvard classes through a loophole - the courses only had one exam at the end, so he’d cram at the last second and pour every other waking hour into code. And I am not saying that he did this for a week or so. I am talking about months of this cadence.
That’s not discipline in the way we usually mean it. That’s a guy who couldn’t physically make himself stop.
And that obsession is the entire ballgame. When the microcomputer (the Altair 8800) showed up and the window opened for whoever could write the software fastest, Gates didn’t beat the field because he was richer or smarter or better connected. He beat them on raw hours. He out-worked every other programmer chasing the same opening, by a margin no one could close, while they slept.
Bug or Feature
Now, I have to be honest about something the book itself is honest about, because skipping it would make this a cleaner story than it deserves to be.
Gates writes in the epilogue that if he were a kid today, he’s almost certain he’d be diagnosed on the autism spectrum - that some brains are simply wired to process the world differently, and that wasn’t understood when he was young. And that complicates my tidy little lesson. It means his obsession wasn’t entirely a choice he made, the kind you or I could just decide to copy. Some of it was wiring - a brain that locked onto problems whether he wanted it to or not.
And I don’t think that makes his success less impressive. If anything it flips it. The same wiring that made him a misfit kid who clashed with everyone was the wiring that let him disappear into a problem for thirty-six hours and come out the other side with something nobody else could build. The thing that made him hard to be around was inseparable from the thing that made him great. That’s not a bug he overcame. It’s the feature.
So the lesson isn't as simple as "be obsessed." It's something I had to ponder a bit longer.
What I’m actually taking from it
Where it lands for me is this.
I can’t choose my parents or my raw intelligence. I can’t rewire my brain into Gates’s. But I can choose my environment - I can deliberately stand next to people whose ordinary is higher than mine and let it drag my baseline up. And I can choose where I point whatever obsessive capacity I do have, because I know I have some. Everyone reading this has something they lose hours to without noticing. A problem they can’t put down. The question isn’t whether you can manufacture Gates-level obsession out of nothing. It’s whether you’re aiming the obsession you already have at something that matters, or letting it drain into things that don’t.
Gates got obscenely lucky in his wiring and his circumstances. Fine. But he also did the one thing that was actually his to do: he took the obsession he was handed and he pointed all of it, relentlessly, at a single target until he’d buried the competition in hours.
That part I can learn from. That part is mine to copy.
I’m the guy who walks up to strangers and asks what they do, who can’t stop reading about other people’s life’s work, who’s been mission-driven since before I understood the word. That’s my version of the gear. The lesson from Gates isn’t “work thirty-six hours straight.” It’s “find the thing you’d work thirty-six hours straight on, and then have the nerve to actually do it.”
I’m still figuring out exactly what mine is. But now I know what winning it will cost.
“The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out.”
-Richard P. Feynman