Page 33 - Morgan Housel - The Psychology of Money_ Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness-Harriman House Limited (2020)

their leisure, letting their creativity run wild—after school, late into the
night, on weekends. They quickly became computing experts.
COBACOBA

During one of their late-night sessions, Allen recalled Gates showing him a
Fortune magazine and saying, “What do you think it’s like to run a Fortune

500 company?” Allen said he had no idea. “Maybe we’ll have our own
computer company someday,” Gates said. Microsoft is now worth more
than a trillion dollars.

A little quick math.

In 1968 there were roughly 303 million high-school-age people in the
world, according to the UN.

About 18 million of them lived in the United States.

About 270,000 of them lived in Washington state.

A little over 100,000 of them lived in the Seattle area.

And only about 300 of them attended Lakeside School.

Start with 303 million, end with 300.

One in a million high-school-age students attended the high school that had
the combination of cash and foresight to buy a computer. Bill Gates
happened to be one of them.

Gates is not shy about what this meant. “If there had been no Lakeside,
there would have been no Microsoft,” he told the school’s graduating class
in 2005.

Gates is staggeringly smart, even more hardworking, and as a teenager had
a vision for computers that even most seasoned computer executives
couldn’t grasp. He also had a one in a million head start by going to school
at Lakeside.

Now let me tell you about Gates’ friend Kent Evans. He experienced an

equally powerful dose of luck’s close sibling, risk.