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Harvard Commencement Speech
Bill Gates
In his commencement speech at Harvard, Bill Gates talks to the graduates about the use of modern technology for the betterment of humanity.
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The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century which is to surrender to complexity and quit.
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Ive been waiting more than 30 years to say this: Dad, I always told you Id come back and get my degree.
I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. Ill be changing my job next year and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume.
What I remember above all about Harvard was being in the midst of so much energy and intelligence. It could be exhilarating, intimidating, sometimes even discouraging, but always challenging. It was an amazing privilege and though I left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and the ideas I worked on.
But taking a serious look back I do have one big regret.
I left Harvard with no real awareness the awful inequities in the world the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.
I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.
But humanitys greatest advances are not in its discoveries but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity reducing inequity is the highest human achievement.
I left campus knowing little about the millions of young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. And I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries.
It took me decades to find out.
You graduates came to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the worlds inequities than the classes that came before. In your years here, I hope youve had a chance to think about how in this age of accelerating technology we can finally take on these inequities, and we can solve them.
...If we can really see a problem, which is the first step, we come to the second step: cutting through the complexity to find a solution.
Finding solutions is essential if we want to make the most of our caring. If we have clear and proven answers anytime an organization or individual asks How can I help?, then we can get action and we can make sure that none of the caring in the world is wasted. But complexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone who cares and that makes it hard for their caring to matter.
Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have.
The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century which is to surrender to complexity and quit.
The final step after seeing the problem and finding an approach is to measure the impact of your work and share your successes and failures so that others learn from your efforts.
You have to have the statistics, of course. You have to be able to show that a program is vaccinating millions more children. You have to be able to show a decline in the number of children dying from these diseases. This is essential not just to improve the program, but also to help draw more investment from business and government.
But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the work so people can feel what saving a life means to the families affected.
The defining and ongoing innovations of this age biotechnology, the computer, the Internet give us a chance weve never had before to end extreme poverty and end death from preventable disease.
as my class graduated without me, technology was emerging that would make the world smaller, more open, more visible, less distant.
The emergence of low-cost personal computers gave rise to a powerful network that has transformed opportunities for learning and communicating.
The magical thing about this network is not just that it collapses distance and makes everyone your neighbor. It also dramatically increases the number of brilliant minds we can have working together on the same problem and that scales up the rate of innovation to a staggering degree.
At the same time, for every person in the world who has access to this technology, five people dont. That means many creative minds are left out of this discussion smart people with practical intelligence and relevant experience who dont have the technology to hone their talents or contribute their ideas to the world.
We need as many people as possible to have access to this technology, because these advances are triggering a revolution in what human beings can do for one another. They are making it possible not just for national governments, but for universities, corporations, smaller organizations, and even individuals to see problems, see approaches, and measure the impact of their efforts to address the hunger, poverty, and desperation.
When you consider what those of us here in this Yard have been given in talent, privilege, and opportunity there is almost no limit to what the world has a right to expect from us.
In line with the promise of this age, I want to exhort each of the graduates here to take on an issue a complex problem, a deep inequity, and become a specialist on it. If you make it the focus of your career, that would be phenomenal. But you dont have to do that to make an impact. For a few hours every week, you can use the growing power of the Internet to get informed, find others with the same interests, see the barriers, and find ways to cut through them.
Dont let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives.
You graduates are coming of age in an amazing time. As you leave Harvard, you have technology that members of my class never had. You have awareness of global inequity, which we did not have. And with that awareness, you likely also have an informed conscience that will torment you if you abandon these people whose lives you could change with very little effort. You have more than we had; you must start sooner, and carry on longer.
Knowing what you know, how could you not?
And I hope you will come back here to Harvard 30 years from now and reflect on what you have done with your talent and your energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the worlds deepest inequities on how well you treated people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.
Good luck.
Excerpts of the speech given by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates at Harvard University on June 7, 2007.
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