You don’t really start getting old until you stop learning.
Bill Gates
The meaning of the quote
On May 12, 2007, 95-year-old Nola Ochs walked across the stage at Fort Hays State University in Kansas to collect her history degree. Her 21-year-old granddaughter Alexandra graduated in the same ceremony.
Ochs had signed up for her first college course in 1930. Then she married, raised 4 sons on the family farm and didn’t go back to class for almost 50 years.
She started again at a community college in 1978 and kept going. At 94, she moved 100 miles from her farm into a campus apartment to finish the last 30 hours of her degree. In an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer, she described her study method.
“I work like a beaver. When finals come, I work like two beavers.”
Ochs went on to earn a master’s degree in 2010, a few months before her 99th birthday, and kept taking classes until she was 100.
The quote separates 2 kinds of old. One is the number of birthdays you’ve had, and nobody can stop that number from climbing. The other is the moment your mind closes the door on anything new, and that kind of old can hit at 25.
By Gates’s measure, a 30-year-old who says “I’m not a tech person” and refuses to learn the new software at work is older than a grandmother who joins the family WhatsApp group, figures out voice notes and starts forwarding everyone recipes, even though she has twice as many birthdays.
Gates said it in a 2017 interview with TIME about books and reading. When the interviewer asked whether reading had been essential to his success, Gates said yes, gave the quote and added that every book teaches him something new or helps him see the world differently.
Reading is the main way Gates keeps learning. He reads about 50 books a year, takes a canvas tote bag full of them on vacation and fills the margins with notes.
You don’t need 50 books a year to stay young. A new language, a new recipe or the settings on your phone all count, as long as you keep taking in something you didn’t know yesterday.
Action steps
Learning something new is a habit you can start this week.
- Pick 1 subject you’ve written off.
Finish the sentence “I’m not a ___ person.” Whatever goes in the blank is your first subject. - Give it 20 minutes a day.
Gates reads for about an hour every day. You can start with 20 minutes on your lunch break or before bed and build from there. - Write in the margins.
Gates scribbles notes in his books, and you can do the same in a notebook or on your phone. Putting an idea in your own words helps it stick. - Learn next to someone younger.
Ochs sat in the front row of classes full of students young enough to be her great-grandchildren. Ask a teenager to show you an app, or join a class where you’re the oldest person in the room.
The calendar decides your age. You decide when you get old.
About the author
In 1968, 13-year-old Bill Gates got his first look at a computer terminal at Lakeside School in Seattle and started teaching himself to program.
His first business failed. With his school friend Paul Allen, he built Traf-O-Data, a machine that turned the car counts from rubber road hoses into traffic charts. They signed up a few local governments, but just as business picked up, Washington and other states started offering the same service for free. Allen later wrote that the venture taught them how microprocessors worked.
“Each failure contains the seeds of your next success, if you are willing to learn from it.”
Paul Allen
Those lessons paid off within a few years. In January 1975, Gates called a company in Albuquerque that had just started making one of the first personal computers and offered to sell them software.
He hadn’t written it yet.
He and Allen wrote it, and Gates left Harvard after 3 semesters to start Microsoft with him. The company’s software ended up on most of the world’s personal computers and made Gates the world’s richest person for years, money he now gives away through the Gates Foundation.
Gates has called himself a weird dropout because he still takes college courses all the time. In his memoir Source Code: My Beginnings, he tells the story of his childhood and the years before Microsoft.
In June 2007, Harvard finally gave him a degree, an honorary one. He opened his commencement speech with a joke.
“Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree.”
Gates collected that degree less than a month after Nola Ochs collected hers in Kansas. It took him 32 years and her 77, and neither of them stopped learning in between.
You can find the quote in his 2017 TIME interview, where he talks about the books that changed his life and the reading habits he still keeps.
Resources
- Bill Gates Discusses His Lifelong Love for Books and Reading (Article)
- Source Code: My Beginnings (Book)
- Remarks of Bill Gates, Harvard Commencement 2007 (Article)
- Microsoft exists because Paul Allen and Bill Gates launched this high school business (Article)
- 4 online tools Bill Gates uses to stay sharp and learn something every day (Article)
- Gates Notes (Website)
- Nola Ochs (Wikipedia)
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