My Renewed Understanding about Optimism

This is why people like Bill Gates succeeded, and we need it to combat the climate crisis

People keep trying to skip the hard work Bill Gates does and find the “instant trick” about his success.

It’s true that he’s exceptionally clever and born from a well-off family (wealthy enough to send him to summer camps that were equipped with computers, a rarity at the time).

But what really is extraordinary about Bill Gates are these two things: Hard work and optimism.

The former has been looked at quite extensively by the sensible public, including Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, Outliers. Bill Gates has spent at least 10,000 hours on coding before Microsoft kicked off. That’s a lot of time and dedication.

So today, I think we should look at his optimism and how my life has turned around since I adopted this mindset, and how this will contribute to the future of the planet.

Optimism for Bill Gates is informed

“The glass is half full” is NOT Bill Gates’ optimism. That’s just a subjective way to view a certain situation, but whether the glass has enough or not enough water or not has little or no consequences.

Bill Gates’ optimism, is to believe that the water glass can become full.

If you read his latest book on the climate crisis, he talks about all the things (literally everything) that are emitting greenhouse gases in three concrete aspects: the current situation, what technology is available, and what still needs to be invented.

Some emotional optimists are obsessed with the technology currently available, such as wind power, and falsely believe that they are sufficient for us to sort climate change out.

That’s not what he believes in.

He doesn’t think that’s enough, but he believes technology will continue to advance, and if we pay enough attention and investment to this, it will sort out climate change.

That’s the attitude, the feeling of limitless.

He can feel limitless because he is informed. He studies, analyses, and investigates. He went to factories, laboratories and coal mines to see how things are done and what is changing.

The confidence of limitlessness comes from knowledge.

The opposite of Bill Gates

Recently, I have met with many Hong Kong people who are desperate to migrate to the UK as a result of the current political situation in Hong Kong.

These people are pessimistic, hopeless, and frustrated by police violence, communism, and incompetent government.

Rightly so, but talking to them exhausts me. Frankly, it is like they are trying to take away my optimism to feed their baseless pessimism. They asked me about the career and salary prospects in the UK and complained about how high the tax rate is and how it’s hard for foreigners to be promoted.

They also asked me about the education system in the UK and complained that the British don’t know how to teach their children properly. They are already worried that their 10-year-old kids will become less competitive and speak no Chinese when they grow up.

No matter the glass is half full or half empty, they only see the water level is falling after the migration. They see that they have “no choice” but to come, victimize themselves as refugees escaping a horrible political power to a land of “freedom” filled with obesity, poverty, and high taxes.

What’s wrong with these people? Although they have loved my content providing information about life in the UK, I have decided to draw a boundary. These people are toxic AF, and these people will never thrive, no matter where they go, how rich they are, how low the tax rates become.

How to feel limitless

When I was struggling with physical and mental health as a Londoner I hated myself. I saw myself getting older and sadder each day, failing in the system of human politics and consumerism.

It was around then I watched Bill Gates’ documentary on Netflix and started to read Gates Notes, his blog. It’s funny to see Gates Notes as a “self-help book” considering he doesn’t talk about self-helping at all, but bigger problems.

But from there, I found the wisdom of Bill Gates that fueled his continual success. I think these are insights that everyone should know, and we need to stop hating him for his wealth and smugness.

• He learns continually: many of us stop learning since we left education and tend to speculate more than educate. But he continues to read like a beast, and from there, he is well informed and balanced.
• He sees life bigger than his own: it’s very easy to have a big ego in his position, I don’t know how big his ego is, but I don’t think he spends a lot of time entertaining it. I genuinely think he has used his time wisely on learning bigger issues, from malaria to pandemic and the climate crisis.
• He makes judgements based on data: a stoic would not be making an emotional judgement on things, but an optimist would, it’s a subjective position to be optimistic. He has written about it before and provided books that help us to see the world in a more optimistic manner — through statistics.

Informed optimism with statistics and knowledge

Now statistics are a very manipulable thing, so you need to work quite hard to look at the stats from different angles to make a good judgement. I think he has, and if he is convinced, I believe him too (obviously I have looked at some of the raw stats myself too, echoing point 1 above).

This is when I started to feel limitless, if I learn enough and know enough, I can make informed decisions that would lead me to where I want to go. I also think that Gates’ trips to poorer countries, power plants and laboratories have made him become aware of the truth of knowledge — head knowledge becomes experiential, and have more impact as a whole.

I have written about this before:

The internet is a black hole. We can either get absorbed by funny Tiktok videos for the whole day or we can learn something useful that pave our ways to success (whatever you define it to be). So choose wisely.

Now, about the climate crisis

At the same time I was speaking to pessimistic Hong Kongers I was also having a conversation with conspiracists. This is my trick as a social anthropologist, don’t speculate the ‘others’, know what they are really talking about.

So I know what they are saying about Bill Gates.

Reading Bill Gates’ book on the climate crisis, it’s evident that he has a big heart to ‘save the world’ so to say but he also sees a lot of business opportunities from there. This is very consistent with his personality as a competent businessman.

I am now working for a social enterprise, which I believe is the sweet spot and future of businesses that blend profit-driven “blood-sucking” capitalists with dream-driven inefficient charities.

Gates is literally doing that. I don’t see the point of having either charities or profit-making companies, both making money and doing good should co-exist in almost every single enterprise.

For a man who really reads rather than watching Youtube and listens to frustrated human turned charismatic spiritual coaches talking about aliens, I really think statistics are more convincing.

By observing both action-driven people like Bill Gates and conspiracists, I also decide to choose to become an optimist. I want to make my glass full with knowledge and wise investments.

If you don’t believe him, read the stats yourself, and make your own judgement. Because you don’t have to be Bill Gates to feel limitless, we are limitless.

More from me — not a life coach: