Showing Up for Life: Thoughts on the Gifts of a Lifetime
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 0385527020
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A heartfelt, deeply personal book, Showing Up for Life shines a bright light on the values and principles that Bill Gates Sr. has learned over a lifetime of “showing up”—lessons that he learned growing up during the Great Depression, and that he instilled in his children and continues to practice on the world stage as the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Through the course of several dozen narratives arranged in roughly chronological fashion, Gates introduces the people and experiences that influenced his thinking and guided his moral compass. Among them: the scoutmaster who taught him about teamwork and self reliance; and his famous son, Trey, whose curiosity and passion for computers and software led him to ultimately co-found Microsoft. Through revealing stories of his daughters, Kristi and Libby; his late wife, Mary, and his current wife, Mimi; and his work with Nelson Mandela and Jimmy Carter, among others, he discusses the importance of hard work, getting along, honoring a confidence, speaking out, and much more.
Showing Up for Life translates one man’s experiences over fourscore years of living into an inspiring road map for readers everywhere.
As Bill Gates Sr. puts it:
I’m 83 years old. Representing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and everyone who is a part of it has given me the opportunity to see more of the world and its rich possibilities than most people ever do. I never imagined that I’d be working this late in life, or enjoying it so much.
house at night and onto the University of Washington campus to work on computers with his friend Paul Allen. They had landed a job with a company located not too far from our house that was paying them to test the security for their mainframe computers by trying to hack into the system. Mary and I had no idea our son was out late on school nights living a second life as a hacker. Kristi knew but never betrayed her brother's trust. As she said to me recently, “That basement was easy to sneak out
that?” Trey's curiosity and his loyalty to deep analytical thinking have never wavered. When he and Paul started Microsoft he instituted a tradition he called “Think Week.” This was time Trey spent mostly alone doing his most serious creative thinking about the company. I say “mostly alone” because when Mary's mother was alive, he spent Think Week with his grandmother, Gami, at her home on Hood Canal. She would cook for him and be there when he wanted company. Trey remains as much of a reader
arrested by the time they're eighteen; girls who don't have positive early learning experiences are much more likely to become pregnant in their teens; more than half the children in my home state (and perhaps a comparable number in yours) are prepared only for failure the day they enter kindergarten. Research shows that infants start learning soon after they're born. They soon recognize faces and respond to stimuli, especially love and attention; they mimic expressions on the faces they see;
today. Courageous men and women talked, and marched, and died in the cause of equal justice. The work they began is not yet complete, but their example has illuminated for all of us the endless possibilities of a society that offers all its people equal rights, equal justice, and equal opportunity. My optimism for global progress is based on people and places I've seen around the world. In my travels for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation I've met many people who are, in fact, changing the
away from Seattle. And she was entertaining Warren Buffett and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham there that weekend. She wanted to bring her guests to our vacation place on Hood Canal to introduce Warren to Trey. Mary immediately saw this as a great idea, and so she called Trey to ask him to come to Hood Canal that Friday to meet Warren. At first, he resisted, reminding his mother that Friday was a workday at Microsoft. However, being a dutiful son, he agreed to come. That's how the