Bill Gates at Harvard

Remarks of Bill Gates (Harvard Commencement).
President Bok, former President Rudenstine, incoming PresidentFaust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board ofOverseers, members of the faculty, parents, and especially, thegraduates:
I've been waiting more than 30 years to say this: "Dad, I alwaystold you I'd come back and get my degree."
I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. I'll be changing myjob next year … and it will be nice to finally have a college degreeon my resume.
I applaud the graduates today for taking a much more direct route toyour degrees. For my part, I'm just happy that the Crimson hascalled me "Harvard's most successful dropout." I guess that makes mevaledictorian of my own special class … I did the best of everyonewho failed.
But I also want to be recognized as the guy who got Steve Ballmer todrop out of business school. I'm a bad influence. That's why I wasinvited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at yourorientation, fewer of you might be here today.
Harvard was just a phenomenal experience for me. Academic life wasfascinating. I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadn't evensigned up for. And dorm life was terrific. I lived up at Radcliffe,in Currier House. There were always lots of people in my dorm roomlate at night discussing things, because everyone knew I didn'tworry about getting up in the morning. That's how I came to be theleader of the anti-social group. We clung to each other as a way ofvalidating our rejection of all those social people.
Radcliffe was a great place to live. There were more women up there,and most of the guys were science-math types. That combinationoffered me the best odds, if you know what I mean. This is where Ilearned the sad lesson that improving your odds doesn't guarantee success.
One of my biggest memories of Harvard came in January 1975, when Imade a call from Currier House to a company in Albuquerque that hadbegun making the world's first personal computers. I offered to sell them software.
I worried that they would realize I was just a student in a dorm andhang up on me. Instead they said: "We're not quite ready, come seeus in a month," which was a good thing, because we hadn't writtenthe software yet. From that moment, I worked day and night on thislittle extra credit project that marked the end of my collegeeducation and the beginning of a remarkable journey with Microsoft.
What I remember above all about Harvard was being in the midst of somuch energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating,intimidating, sometimes even discouraging, but always challenging.It was an amazing privilege – and though I left early, I wastransformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and theideas I worked on.
But taking a serious look back … I do have one big regret.
I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in theworld – the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, andopportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.
I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics andpolitics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.
But humanity's greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but inhow those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whetherthrough democracy, strong public education, quality health care, orbroad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.
I left campus knowing little about the millions of young peoplecheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And Iknew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakablepoverty and disease in developing countries.
It took me decades to find out.
You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know moreabout the world's inequities than the classes that came before. Inyour years here, I hope you've had a chance to think about how – inthis age of accelerating technology – we can finally take on theseinequities, and we can solve them.
Imagine, just for the sake of discussion, that you had a few hours aweek and a few dollars a month to donate to a cause – and you wantedto spend that time and money where it would have the greatest impactin saving and improving lives. Where would you spend it?
For Melinda and for me, the challenge is the same: how can we do themost good for the greatest number with the resources we have.
During our discussions on this question, Melinda and I read anarticle about the millions of children who were dying every year inpoor countries from diseases that we had long ago made harmless inthis country. Measles, malaria, pneumonia, hepatitis B, yellowfever. One disease I had never even heard of, rotavirus, was killinghalf a million kids each year – none of them in the United States.
We were shocked. We had just assumed that if millions of childrenwere dying and they could be saved, the world would make it apriority to discover and deliver the medicines to save them. But itdid not. For under a dollar, there were interventions that couldsave lives that just weren't being delivered.
If you believe that every life has equal value, it's revolting tolearn that some lives are seen as worth saving and others are not.We said to ourselves: "This can't be true. But if it is true, itdeserves to be the priority of our giving."
So we began our work in the same way anyone here would begin it. Weasked: "How could the world let these children die?"
The answer is simple, and harsh. The market did not reward savingthe lives of these children, and governments did not subsidize it.So the children died because their mothers and their fathers had nopower in the market and no voice in the system.
But you and I have both.
We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can developa more creative capitalism – if we can stretch the reach of marketforces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make aliving, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities.We also can press governments around the world to spend taxpayermoney in ways that better reflect the values of the people who paythe taxes.
If we can find approaches that meet the needs of the poor in waysthat generate profits for business and votes for politicians, wewill have found a sustainable way to reduce inequity in the world.This task is open-ended. It can never be finished. But a consciouseffort to answer this challenge will change the world.
I am optimistic that we can do this, but I talk to skeptics whoclaim there is no hope. They say: "Inequity has been with us sincethe beginning, and will be with us till the end – because peoplejust … don't … care." I completely disagree.
I believe we have more caring than we know what to do with.
All of us here in this Yard, at one time or another, have seen humantragedies that broke our hearts, and yet we did nothing – notbecause we didn't care, but because we didn't know what to do. If wehad known how to help, we would have acted.
The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity.
To turn caring into action, we need to see a problem, see asolution, and see the impact. But complexity blocks all three steps.
Even with the advent of the Internet and 24-hour news, it is still acomplex enterprise to get people to truly see the problems. When anairplane crashes, officials immediately call a press conference.They promise to investigate, determine the cause, and preventsimilar crashes in the future.
But if the officials were brutally honest, they would say: "Of allthe people in the world who died today from preventable causes, onehalf of one percent of them were on this plane. We're determined todo everything possible to solve the problem that took the lives ofthe one half of one percent."
The bigger problem is not the plane crash, but the millions of preventable deaths.
We don't read much about these deaths. The media covers what's new –and millions of people dying is nothing new. So it stays in thebackground, where it's easier to ignore. But even when we do see itor read about it, it's difficult to keep our eyes on the problem.It's hard to look at suffering if the situation is so complex thatwe don't know how to help. And so we look away.

If we can really see a problem, which is the first step, we come tothe second step: cutting through the complexity to find a solution.
Finding solutions is essential if we want to make the most of ourcaring. If we have clear and proven answers anytime an organizationor individual asks "How can I help?," then we can get action – andwe can make sure that none of the caring in the world is wasted. Butcomplexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone whocares — and that makes it hard for their caring to matter.
Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through fourpredictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverageapproach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and inthe meantime, make the smartest application of the technology thatyou already have — whether it's something sophisticated, like adrug, or something simpler, like a bed net.
The AIDS epidemic offers an example. The broad goal, of course, isto end the disease. The highest-leverage approach is prevention. Theideal technology would be a vaccine that gives lifetime immunitywith a single dose. So governments, drug companies, and foundationsfund vaccine research. But their work is likely to take more than adecade, so in the meantime, we have to work with what we have inhand – and the best prevention approach we have now is gettingpeople to avoid risky behavior.
Pursuing that goal starts the four-step cycle again. This is thepattern. The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working –and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20thcentury – which is to surrender to complexity and quit.
The final step – after seeing the problem and finding an approach –is to measure the impact of your work and share your successes andfailures so that others learn from your efforts.
You have to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able toshow that a program is vaccinating millions more children. You haveto be able to show a decline in the number of children dying fromthese diseases. This is essential not just to improve the program,but also to help draw more investment from business and government.
But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to showmore than numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the work –so people can feel what saving a life means to the familiesaffected.
I remember going to Davos some years back and sitting on a globalhealth panel that was discussing ways to save millions of lives.Millions! Think of the thrill of saving just one person's life –then multiply that by millions. … Yet this was the most boring panelI've ever been on – ever. So boring even I couldn't bear it.
What made that experience especially striking was that I had justcome from an event where we were introducing version 13 of somepiece of software, and we had people jumping and shouting withexcitement. I love getting people excited about software – but whycan't we generate even more excitement for saving lives?
You can't get people excited unless you can help them see and feelthe impact. And how you do that – is a complex question.
Still, I'm optimistic. Yes, inequity has been with us forever, butthe new tools we have to cut through complexity have not been withus forever. They are new – they can help us make the most of ourcaring – and that's why the future can be different from the past.
The defining and ongoing innovations of this age – biotechnology,the computer, the Internet – give us a chance we've never had beforeto end extreme poverty and end death from preventable disease.
Sixty years ago, George Marshall came to this commencement andannounced a plan to assist the nations of post-war Europe. Hesaid: "I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of suchenormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to thepublic by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the manin the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. It isvirtually impossible at this distance to grasp at all the realsignificance of the situation."
Thirty years after Marshall made his address, as my class graduatedwithout me, technology was emerging that would make the worldsmaller, more open, more visible, less distant.
The emergence of low-cost personal computers gave rise to a powerfulnetwork that has transformed opportunities for learning and communicating.
The magical thing about this network is not just that it collapsesdistance and makes everyone your neighbor. It also dramaticallyincreases the number of brilliant minds we can have working togetheron the same problem – and that scales up the rate of innovation to astaggering degree.
At the same time, for every person in the world who has access tothis technology, five people don't. That means many creative mindsare left out of this discussion -- smart people with practicalintelligence and relevant experience who don't have the technologyto hone their talents or contribute their ideas to the world.
We need as many people as possible to have access to thistechnology, because these advances are triggering a revolution inwhat human beings can do for one another. They are making itpossible not just for national governments, but for universities,corporations, smaller organizations, and even individuals to seeproblems, see approaches, and measure the impact of their efforts toaddress the hunger, poverty, and desperation George Marshall spokeof 60 years ago.
Members of the Harvard Family: Here in the Yard is one of the greatcollections of intellectual talent in the world.
What for?
There is no question that the faculty, the alumni, the students, andthe benefactors of Harvard have used their power to improve thelives of people here and around the world. But can we do more? CanHarvard dedicate its intellect to improving the lives of people whowill never even hear its name?
Let me make a request of the deans and the professors – theintellectual leaders here at Harvard: As you hire new faculty, awardtenure, review curriculum, and determine degree requirements, pleaseask yourselves:
Should our best minds be dedicated to solving our biggest problems?
Should Harvard encourage its faculty to take on the world's worstinequities? Should Harvard students learn about the depth of globalpoverty … the prevalence of world hunger … the scarcity of cleanwater …the girls kept out of school … the children who die fromdiseases we can cure?
Should the world's most privileged people learn about the lives ofthe world's least privileged?
These are not rhetorical questions – you will answer with your policies.
My mother, who was filled with pride the day I was admitted here –never stopped pressing me to do more for others. A few days beforemy wedding, she hosted a bridal event, at which she read aloud aletter about marriage that she had written to Melinda. My mother wasvery ill with cancer at the time, but she saw one more opportunityto deliver her message, and at the close of the letter shesaid: "From those to whom much is given, much is expected."
When you consider what those of us here in this Yard have beengiven – in talent, privilege, and opportunity – there is almost nolimit to what the world has a right to expect from us.
In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of thegraduates here to take on an issue – a complex problem, a deepinequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus ofyour career, that would be phenomenal. But you don't have to do thatto make an impact. For a few hours every week, you can use thegrowing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with thesame interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them.
Don't let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the biginequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.
You graduates are coming of age in an amazing time. As you leaveHarvard, you have technology that members of my class never had. Youhave awareness of global inequity, which we did not have. And withthat awareness, you likely also have an informed conscience thatwill torment you if you abandon these people whose lives you couldchange with very little effort. You have more than we had; you muststart sooner, and carry on longer.
Knowing what you know, how could you not?
And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now andreflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy. Ihope you will judge yourselves not on your professionalaccomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed theworld's deepest inequities … on how well you treated people a worldaway who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.
Good luck.