Is Bill Gates A Qualified Economist On Nigeria? He’s Far Better Than That, People
The Oasis Reporters
March 25, 2018
Darren McCollester/Getty Images
Embarrassed by the frank assessment Bill Gates made on the handling of the Nigerian economy by President Muhammadu Buhari, APC media cadres suspected to be from the Buhari Media Center have gone on the offensive trying to impugn the pedestal Mr. Gates stood on to do a critique on the Nigerian economy. After all, Bill Gates was said to have dropped out of the Ivy League Harvard University. They ask, “is he an economist”?
But did Bill Gates actually drop out of college?
He spoke to David Rubinstein, a television personality interviewer and Gates admitted it, but he has no regrets whatsoever. It should be noted however that he didn’t drop out because he was unable to make good grades.
Far from it. If anything, Gates was a brilliant young man with ideas ahead of time, so when the time came for the ideas to become real and transform how we think, function, do things etc, he quit college honorably to pursue that dream.
The story of Bill Gates is the stuff of legend: Despite pulling good grades, he dropped out of Harvard University in 1975 to go co-found Microsoft, setting him on the path to becoming the wealthiest man in the world.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Gates says that he doesn’t have many regrets. He says he liked lots of things about college — “there were smart people around, and they fed you, and they gave you these nice grades that made you feel smart” — but he doesn’t think he missed out on much.
“It was unfortunate that I didn’t get to stay there, but I don’t think I missed any knowledge, because whatever I needed to learn, I was still in a learning mode,” Gates says.
In other words, Gates says that his well-known love of reading (he reads 50 books a year), taking online classes, and generally expanding his mind by any means available more than makes up for anything he missed out on at Harvard.
“I’m kinda weird dropout because I take college courses all the time,” Gates says. “I love being a student.”
It also does seem like Gates has evolved his thinking on college — despite his own status as a dropout, his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has made affordable college education a big priority, even as it’s become a big point of policy for politicians. He recently said the value of a college degree is “easy to underestimate.”
Besides, in 2007, Gates returned to Harvard to accept an honorary degree.
On a final note, Gates’ good grades were even more impressive when you consider that he recently revealed that he never actually showed up to any of the Harvard classes he was registered for— he thought it was more fun to go to random other class sessions, and cram before finals for those classes he was actually enrolled in.
Ideas rule the world. To start from the middle of his story, Bill Gates and his friend, Steve Jobs got a contract from IBM to write programs for computing. He wrote codes himself. Fortunately for him and unfortunately for IBM, their belief in the company was that hardware was the future of the company, while Bill Gates believed that the future of computing was in software, so IBM lawyers wrote the contract terms but out of fear of the unpredictable tomorrow, let the incredible software side with Gates.
This was at a time when computers were expensive and very few people had them. For him to practice, he had to go to places where computers would not be in use, especially at night, then cracked his brain on how to pack a “million brains” into a small chip, that came out cheaper, handier and more available, with the ability to do a limitless array of millions of things.
With time, Software won the future, and by age 30, Bill Gates had become a billionaire, who still bought a fairly used car for the first time.
If only IBM knew.
Harvard graduates, students and everyone else uses Bill Gates’ software, so who is making the greatest impact? As a frontiersman, he quickly understood the future and defined it, the rest became history.
Today his vast wealth is helping to kick wild polio virus out of Nigeria, as he intervenes in other health, education and nutrition sectors in Nigeria. The philanthropist and inventor deserves more respect from Africans, not denigration.
Harvard University recognized this, and gave him a degree, thirty years after dropping out.
Credits : Business Insider Inc.
David Rubinstein
Oasis Reporters in-house writing
