Bill Gates gets it right !

I never hoped he will ! In fact when I saw the forwarded mail in my inbox, I felt slightly irritated. What with all the commencement speeches being forwarded. I am sure at this rate and given the consumerist society we live in, we will be able to buy a collector's edition of these speeches very soon !

So I reluctantly opened it up and expected the now old formula speech of most-dramatic-events-of-my-life, the recent speech by Narayan Murthy at NYU being one very bad example (but people seem to be getting inspired by that also !!). As I have mentioned before on this blog, my disillusionment with such speeches started after I saw the video of Steve Jobs delivering his wonderfully written piece at Stanford. His presentation had no life, no soul and for me, no inspiration either.

But to my pleasant surprise, Bill got this one right ! Looking back, Steve Jobs and Narayan Murthy sound like 2 narcissists now. And this when I had much less sympathies for Bill Gates than for Narayan Murthy to start with. Anyway, I guess I will let you read the speech for yourself and decide. To me he said all the right things, things that we need to realize most in today's world, things that you me and all others need to give a good piece of our minds.

Here is the text of the speech.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Amazing! hits right on the head. most bright people (i.e. who are good at analyzing and solving problems) generally end up working on things which give pleasure only to them. Its a bit like Ayn Rand philosophy (and flawed, atleast i feel so)...but probably with little more empathy for the rest of the world, one can also try to do contribute to solve 'actual' problems. True that if you are for example academia you need to really focus to survive in your field but somewhere down the line this need for focus somehow becomes an excuse not to do anything else, however important these other things may be in bigger picture. hopefully i (and many others) will be more open-eyed.
June 22, 2007 at 11:42 PM
Anonymous said…
Kind of interesting, because the only other commencement speech (apart from the one given to our graduating class - and I am sentimental enough about graduation that I will not be bitter about the speech) that I'd read fully was "Stay hungry. Stay focussed."
Thanks for the link.
:-)

Eakta
July 6, 2007 at 5:29 AM
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