Page 32 - Morgan Housel - The Psychology of Money_ Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness-Harriman House Limited (2020)

Luck and risk are siblings. They are both the reality that every outcome in
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life is guided by forces other than individual effort.

NYU professor Scott Galloway has a related idea that is so important to
remember when judging success—both your own and others’: “Nothing is
as good or as bad as it seems.”

Bill Gates went to one of the only high schools in the world that had a

computer.

The story of how Lakeside School, just outside Seattle, even got a computer
is remarkable.

Bill Dougall was a World War II navy pilot turned high school math and
science teacher. “He believed that book study wasn’t enough without real-
world experience. He also realized that we’d need to know something about
computers when we got to college,” recalled late Microsoft co-founder Paul
Allen.

In 1968 Dougall petitioned the Lakeside School Mothers’ Club to use the

proceeds from its annual rummage sale—about $3,000—to lease a Teletype
Model 30 computer hooked up to the General Electric mainframe terminal
for computer time-sharing. “The whole idea of time-sharing only got
invented in 1965,” Gates later said. “Someone was pretty forwardlooking.”
Most university graduate schools did not have a computer anywhere near as
advanced as Bill Gates had access to in eighth grade. And he couldn’t get

enough of it.

Gates was 13 years old in 1968 when he met classmate Paul Allen. Allen
was also obsessed with the school’s computer, and the two hit it off.

Lakeside’s computer wasn’t part of its general curriculum. It was an
independent study program. Bill and Paul could toy away with the thing at