On February 17th, 2017, Bill Gates came to speak at my university, TU Munich.
1,000 people attended the live panel. 500 of the tickets were raffled away to students. Over 10,000 applied.
Sadly, I didn’t get a ticket. Luckily, they streamed the event live.
Next to the moderator and the Federal Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, they included a student ambassador who carried forward the most commonly asked questions by students.
At the very end, he asked one that must have been submitted at least a couple hundred times…
Nicki Weber: If you had the possibility to talk to the 20-year-old Bill Gates, what advice would you give him?
Bill Gates: Well, I wouldn’t wanna toy with success. I wouldn’t wanna try and change anything, who knows…it’d be like one of those time machine paradoxes. I would not say a word.
Now, you might think: “Easy for him to say, he’s the richest man on the planet.” But that’s not the lesson. If Bill Gates was the 14,248th richest man on the planet, he’d have said the same thing.
The message, I think, is this:
If you like where you are right now, don’t worry about what you could’ve done better.
You never know which tiny change or event bent the trajectory of your life in the direction you ended up in.
- Maybe it would have been better if I wasn’t so shy in high school.
- Maybe it would have been better if I’d done the internship I was supposed to, instead of adding another semester at my exchange school in US.
- Maybe it would have been better if I hadn’t taken a two year break after getting my Bachelor’s degree and started grad school right away.
That’s a lot of maybes. For every one thing that would be better, I can think of another one that’d be worse.
I like where I am in my life. I like the people I’m around. The work I do. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
So if I could tell my younger self one thing, I’d go with what Bill Gates said: I wouldn’t say a word.
PS: A picture is worth a thousand words. I think Gary Vaynerchuk sums it up perfectly in this one.
