This is the ‘Win with Stories’ newsletter. Every week I send an email with a message wrapped in a short story. I also share one actionable tip and a few content recommendations to help you enhance your business storytelling skills.
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Kent Evans, Bill Gates’ best friend.
Kent Evans/Netflix
Kent Evans was Bill Gates’ best friend in school. And by Gates’ own admission, he was very clever. Both these young boys, were two of the four who used the computer lab at Lakeside High School in Seattle, Washington.
This was a time when computers were unheard of at schools, let alone students having access to one of them.
Evans and Gates were close. They worked together in the lab during the day, and spent a lot of time talking on the phone in the night.
They read Fortune Magazine and imagined, “If you went into the civil service, what did you make? Should we go to be CEOs? What kind of impact could you have? Should we go to be generals? Should we go be ambassadors?”
Gates also recalls that his friend would carry a briefcase around with gadgets and magazines.
But then the age of 17, Evans was a part of a group that was climbing Mount Shuksan on May 28, 1972. As luck would have it, he fell during the expedition and died.
Had he been alive, he might have been one of the co-founders of Microsoft. Who knows, he might have done other things that would impacted the world.
Gates recalls telling himself that, ”hey O.K., now I’m going to do these things that we talked about, but I’ll do it without Evans.”
Netflix’s documentary ‘Inside Bill’s Brain’ has Gates narrating this experience from his life.
But Morgan Housel puts it in more useful context in his book ‘The Psychology of Money’. He says that we cannot undermine the role of luck and risk in our lives.
Gates had the one in a million opportunity that was access to a computer in the 60s. He has also credited his alma mater, stating that without the computer lab at Lakeside High there would have been no Microsoft.
Evans, on the other hand, succumbed to the one in a million risk of losing his life during a climbing expedition.
So not all our success can be credited to us alone, luck definitely plays a role. And in the same way, we need to be wary learn of risks we take, and understand their possible consequences.
Housel suggests this in relation with finance and investing, but I feel the lesson is applicable across disciplines and life situations. What do you think?
ONE communication tip for today.
Connections and Contrasts.
Housel uses the opportunity of Lakeside High and the risk of mountain climbing to make his point about Luck and Risk. However, what makes his argument more memorable is that these two stories are linked to one another through Bill Gates.
That one friend reaped the rewards of luck, and the other one was a victim of risk.
This can be applied in many different communication situations from reports, to pitch decks and to speeches.
Look for a connection in the contrasts between two points that you want to make.
Sometimes you can introduce a contrast to drive home the your point(read this Linkedin post by Ramakrishna NK of Rang De to understand this technique).
Quick exercise: Have you come across connections and contrasts in anything you’ve read or watched? If yes, do share with me so we can discuss.
Also if you’d like to write a post or statement using ‘Connections and Contrasts’, please do so and share with me. I can share my feedback on that post.
All you need to do is reply to this email 🙂
A few things you can read today.
- ‘I don’t want to trek any further’(Linkedin post and last week’s story).
- Why rejecting customers is a good idea(Linkedin post).
- What’s better than a 100 good tweets?(Linkedin video)
- Thinking of quitting your career? Here’s what you need to prepare for.
- How did a young entrepreneur deceive super smart investors?(Blog).
That’s it from me this week. Tell me one thing that will make you share this newsletter with friends and colleagues 🙂
If it’s already share-worthy, then please forward this to your network right away. Let’s all win with stories.
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