Bill Gates, Sr.

How do you raise a child who's going to grow up to be wildly successful? (And maybe even a centibillionaire?) That's a version of the question every parent asks themselves. Every parent wants their kids to be successful, to be wise, to be decent people. Very few, when their children are born, think, “I want my kid to be the world’s first centibillionaire.”

[Excerpted from Showing Up for Life: Thoughts on the Gifts of a Lifetime, by Bill Gates, Sr, Bill Gates, Jr.]

Some Second Thoughts About Thinking

In the early days of Microsoft’s success, when my son’s name was starting to become known to the world at large, everybody from reporters at Fortune magazine to the checkout person at the local grocery store would ask me, “How do you raise a kid like that? What’s the secret?”

At those moments I was generally thinking to myself, “Oh, it’s a secret all right . . . because I don’t get it either!”

Bill Gates has given us Microsoft, but his father Bill Gates Sr. is no slouch either.