From the course: Career Advice from Some of the Biggest Names in Business

Bill Gates on the many tracks to success

From the course: Career Advice from Some of the Biggest Names in Business

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Bill Gates on the many tracks to success

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(uplifting music) - Would you talk a little bit about career decisions for kids? - There's many tracks to success. If you look at the skillsets that allowed Microsoft to be super successful, it was blending together people with many backgrounds. Engineering was the core thing. Without that, the rest of it sort of didn't make sense. And I'm an engineer. I loved writing software. I got a chance starting at age 13 to spend most my time thinking about okay, what's good stuff software, what can it do, that kind of thing. And so, if you can find something you're passionate about, like I was lucky enough to, that was essentially a hobby that turned into a career, it's greatly simplifying. You see that people who are good at design, thinking about policy, they'll often find a career. I've got a daughter in college, and she's still trying to decide. You know, there's a lot of angst. Should I go be a doctor, social worker, so many choices. And that's great, but it is hard to pick. I do think basic knowledge of the sciences, math skills, economics, a lot of careers in the future will be very demanding on those things, not necessarily that you'll be writing code, but you need to understand, what can the engineers do, what can they not do? How are they likely to revolutionize the field that you're in? Even if you're thinking about sales or marketing, the rules of the game will be changed by the digital revolution, and that's only one revolution. The genetic revolution is coming along, and so the more people can kind of get a sense of that. We're hoping there's an energy revolution that kind of will surprise people in terms of what that provides. So having these frameworks to look at change and understand the impact of this rate of invention that's faster than ever before, people who can adjust to that, help their organization figure out how they take advantage of change, that will be there in all the different job areas. - So do what you love, be ready for change, understand how change works. - Right, and to the degree you like science, engineering, and economics, pick as much of that as you have an appetite for because those are the agents of change for all institutions.

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