Bill Gates: a CREATOR’s Living Legacy
This is a remarkable presentation by Bill Gates, for three reasons.
- It reveals some of the massive impact that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation backed by Warren Buffet is having on making our world a better place for coming generations.
- It shows how much better a presenter can become when he or she is in their Flow and living their legacy.
- In the Wealth Dynamics Profile, Bill Gates is a CREATOR near the top of the Wealth Spectrum.
Here are some of the amazing things you can learn.
- Bill Gates points out that the market does not drive people to do the right thing. As one of the richest and most successful entrepreneurs in the world, he certainly speaks with authority on that.
- It reveals some of the massive impact that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation backed by Warren Buffet is having on making our world a better place for coming generations.
- It shows how much better a presenter can become when he or she is in their Flow and living their legacy.
- He admits that he is an optimist saying that, “Any tough problem can be solved.” Talk about tough problems, his foundation is tackling malaria, early childhood deaths in poor countries, providing great teachers to people of low income, and by any measure his foundation is making profound and remarkable progress.
- He speaks with passion and dedication about how previous efforts to eradicate malaria have been effective in developed countries, but how much remains to be done in developing countries.
- He uses plain speech, anchors it with numbers and graphical malaria maps we can understand, and then reinforces his point by releasing some (uninfected) mosquitoes into the auditorium, saying that “there is no reason that only poor people should have this problem.”
- He uses a small number of uncluttered slides, in great contrast to his speeches at Microsoft, and resulting in a far superior presentation!
- He uses metaphors to masterfully illustrate the problem so that people get it without any need for explanation. Listen to how he states that there is more money spent on baldness drugs than on malaria, suggesting that baldness is more likely to be an affliction of rich men.
- After explaining the dimensions and solutions to the problem of how to fight malaria and reduce childhood deaths in poor countries, he shifts the focus to how to increase the quality of education for low income people in rich countries.
- He connects the quality of good teachers with the level of innovation that keeps an economy strong, and points out that while less than 20% of people have access to good teachers, while the chances of a lower income child going to jail are much greater than that of being able to attend a 4-year college.
- He tells how his foundation is focusing on the issue of how to reward, retain, model, and widely share the benefits of learning from top teachers, realizing from their research that this is what makes all of the difference.
- His foundation supports KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) , an organization which helps kids from lower income climb the mountain to college, and how in fact 96% of their high school graduates do end up going to a 4-year college.
- He gives us a glimpse of how the teachers in this program are fully engaged themselves, and work hard in team teaching to keep all of the kids involved, particularly those in the critical time of Middle School, grades 5~8.
- He returns to his optimistic note, that now with technology many of the benefits of learning from top teachers can be widely shared, through digital video in the classrooms, team teaching, and making the classes of master teachers available on the Internet and on DVDs.
- He ends with a strong You-Focus, saying that Education is the most important thing to get right, and that the people in the TED audience are not only engaged in a similar mission, but are also in a perfect position to help.
- He ends by presenting all of the people present with a free copy of the book by Jay Matthews, the Newsweek journalist who wrote, Work Hard, Be Nice: How Tow Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America.
- No wonder Bill Gates got a standing ovation at TED. And that is competing against some of the top speakers of our time.



