A Case Study of Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Kent Evans: Understanding the Role of Luck and Risk in Our Lives

Imagine being one of the only high school students in the world with access to a computer, in an era when computers were a rare and expensive piece of technology. This was the opportunity that Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and their close friend Kent Evans had, and it set them on a path that would forever change the world of technology.

But luck and privilege are only one side of the story. The truth is, the role of chance and circumstance in our lives cannot be overstated, and these forces were at play just as much in the lives of Bill Gates and Paul Allen as they were in the life of their less fortunate friend, Kent Evans.

A Stroke of Luck

In 1968, Lakeside School, just outside Seattle, leased a Teletype Model 30 computer hooked up to the General Electric mainframe terminal. This lucky break came about thanks to Bill Dougall, a World War II navy pilot turned high school math and science teacher. Dougall believed that book study wasn’t enough, and that real-world experience was essential for his students. He also recognized that the world was changing rapidly, and that computers would be a crucial part of the future.

As a result, Lakeside’s computer was not part of the general curriculum. It was an independent study program, and Bill Gates and his classmate Paul Allen quickly became enamored with the machine, using it after school, late into the night, and on weekends. They became computing experts, and their creativity ran wild as they explored the capabilities of this exciting new technology.

During one of their late-night sessions, Gates showed Allen a Fortune magazine and asked, “What do you think it’s like to run a Fortune 500 company?” Allen couldn’t imagine, and Gates responded, “Maybe we’ll have our own computer company someday.” This offhand comment would eventually lead to the founding of one of the world’s most successful companies, Microsoft, which is now worth more than a trillion dollars.

Risk, Tragedy, and Perspective

But luck and privilege only tell part of the story. The third member of this gang of high school computer prodigies, Kent Evans, also had skills and ambition, but he experienced a very different side of luck — the close sibling of luck, risk.

In a tragic twist of fate, Evans died in a mountaineering accident before he graduated from high school. Every year, there are around three dozen mountaineering deaths in the United States, and the odds of being killed on a mountain in high school are roughly one in a million. The same force, the same magnitude, working in opposite directions, shaped the lives of Gates and Evans.

When evaluating people’s financial success, it can be easy to attribute their success to hard work and skill, but the truth is, we are all playing a game with seven billion other people, and the accidental impact of actions outside of our control can be more consequential than the ones we consciously take. If you have a one in a million head start, like Bill Gates did, it can make all the difference in the world.

Conclusion

By understanding the role of luck and risk in our lives, we can become more compassionate, forgiving of ourselves and others, and better able to appreciate the successes and failures of those around us. It can also help us to avoid becoming overly confident when things are going well, and overly discouraged when things aren’t, which is essential if we want to build a lifetime of financial success.

The truth is, the world is too complex to allow 100% of your actions to dictate 100% of your outcomes. Instead, we must acknowledge that we are all playing a game with an infinite number of moving parts, and that our ability to succeed often comes down to factors outside of our control.

In this blog, we discussed the story of Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Kent Evans and the role that luck and risk played in their lives. We also explored the importance of understanding

the role of luck and risk in our lives and how it can help us build financial success, while also being more compassionate and forgiving at the same time.