Bill Gates: He eats Big Macs for lunch and schedules every minute of his day | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates: He eats Big Macs for lunch and schedules every minute of his day

telegraph.co.uk

151 pointsbilifuduo76 comments

Yeah honestly if it came down to this kind of to-the-second-planned lifestyle, just kill me now and get it over with. You can keep the money.

This is just me personally though. I'm sure Gates is used to it, and probably enjoys it. But it's certainly nothing that I would want to aspire to.

I'm reminded of the sentiment: "You have your place, and it's not more exalted, relevant, profitable, or contributing to the general advancement of humankind than that of a pretty good salesman possibly selling a decent product. Or that of a pretty decent java developer, or a decent graphics designer."

But I still admire parts of his approach to life and I think he's done some pretty cool stuff. The world is a beautiful place filled with many beautiful people, who are not heroes and can never be heroes...but can be wonderful human beings (which comes with all the faults of being human).

Ok let me stop talking before I go off on 20 other tangents. I haven't had my morning coffee yet.

Most successful people have a schedule planning out their days https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/08/daily-rituals-...

Your productivity skyrockets and it becomes automatic after a few weeks. I started by just getting up early and scheduling my mornings to finish technical books like CS:APP and it worked so well I now schedule my work week as much as possible http://calnewport.com/blog/2015/09/29/deep-habits-three-rece...

> Most successful people have a schedule planning out their days

Successful at what exactly? Enjoying life, earning money or something else?

I assume success at whatever it is they are seeking to accomplish! Even "enjoying life" can benefit from some time management I should think. :)

Really there's only one definition of success: Getting shit you want done.

Well, lots of succesful artists get "shit they want done", in that they leave a great body of work/legacy, and yet their days are nothing like micro-managed...

I feel like a lot of successful artists though spend their whole days on art, so in terms of a schedule every slot of their time table is filled with doing exactly that.

Not sure what kind of artist you're talking about - the stereotypical starving one, or the modern successful media personalities? In the latter case, I'm sure their time is micromanaged to the minute by a whole staff of professionals. In the former, well... if I had courage to just blow off errands and people and commitments to spend all time on my own projects, I guess I could be as productive too.

>Not sure what kind of artist you're talking about - the stereotypical starving one, or the modern successful media personalities?

I don't consider the "modern successful media personalities" artists.

So, yeah, the stereotypical starving ones (or not so starving, some of them went millionaires in their lifetimes and still led a blurry / non "optimized" life).

>I don't consider the "modern successful media personalities" artists.

Why not? What they make still qualifies as art.

Mason Currey's book is full of examples of artists that micro managed their time like Mozart and Kafka's strict schedules

https://podio.com/site/creative-routines

That's because his book was all about "routines". That's selection bias right there.

If you read random artist biographies you're rarely gonna find the same emphasis on routines.

In science, major breakthroughs don't usually come from strained application of rational thinking, they come from spontaneous intuitive leaps. These leaps occur more readily when the mind is in a relaxed state free from worry and distractions, where you can just let your thoughts wander.

And that relaxed state comes from externalizing your process into structure and routine, so your mind can focus on high thinking and not juggling all your cluttered concerns

Exactly and I for one do no need time management for that, so it is a personal preference.

if you get done what you need to do you should be default have more time to enjoy life simply because you know your life is in order.

frankly how can it be worse than wondering if something will get done or you forgot? build your life around a routine with built in you time (you/family/pets/etc) and stick to it. it will become natural and you will have more peace in your life.

Most successful people are able to hire someone to manage a schedule planning out their days.

FWIW cal doesn't say you should schedule ever minute perfectly, just that you should have a flexible plan of what you wanna do every hour (can include just chilling)

I think having a schedule is perfectly fine, so long as one reserves the right to throw out the schedule whenever something spontaneous comes up. It becomes a matter of discipline to allow for spontaneous events that are enjoyable or beneficial, rather than anything that is an excuse to procrastinate on real tasks.

This is just "shucks he's just like the rest of us PR". [1]

[1] I remember seeing, I think it was in the early 80's about Sam Walton "drives pickup truck, drinks cup of coffee at the local shop every morning).

My sister, the newly minted Chemical Bank rep, would visit Sam (no, he never wanted any credit lines) in the late 70's and early 80's, and, sure ' nuff, he'd take her down to the diner in town in his old pickup and offer a RC and moon pie. He was the real stuff.

Except Sam was the real deal. Even after he had hundreds of stores, he flew himself around in a single engine Cessna to check up and work with his managers. When they had annual corporate meetings with all the executives and managers, everyone received a box of walmart deli fried chicken for lunch. The culture was always to save on frivolity and pass the savings on. Even today, corporate headquarters are rather spartan. Mostly inside old converted store buildings.

I think there's a middle ground where you can make your work especially efficient so that you have more time/money to enjoy the rest of your life. As you acknowledged, many would enjoy aspects of the productivity challenge.

Whenever you hear about a very tight schedule, it's because someone has ended up with more appointments in their day than is reasonable; our capacities as humans are good for socializing for hours on end every day, and not so much at physical or mental exertion. Athletes and top researchers most likely aren't engaging in this level of precision.

Basically, unless you're really ambitious about taking a "leadership" role, you aren't going to need to schedule your life at more than perhaps hourly intervals. It's still a good idea to have a little bit of scheduling to build up your day as an intentional lifestyle instead of a series of reactions(I tend to do the "calendar as to-do list" thing), but you can do so in moderation.

Exactly, I could not plan my day like this if I wanted to. There's simply not that many structured demands for my time. I'm not important enough.

I discovered that if I don't impose some structure on those "unstructured demands for my time", they tend to crowd out the whole day and give me lots of anxiety. Adult life is so full of bullshit erands, and other people are very time consuming...

Or maybe I'm just burned out.

Reduce bullshit errands as much as possible. Next reduce people to who you care about.

I feel the same way. I dislike "making" myself do things and being super scheduled sounds hellish. Having lots of demands on my time and attention also stresses me out and I need lots of decompression/restorative alone time afterwards.

Also quarter pounders are better than Big Macs.

That desire and enjoyment of staying busy is the very reason he's a billionaire.

If his natural tendency was to relax and avoid these hard problems, he wouldn't have been so successful. It's one of the reasons many of us here won't become millionaires either.

A few months ago some people from Bill's team contacted us about a demo day that they personally give Bill every 4-6 weeks. This particular topic was on Agtech. They said they spend about 400-500 hours researching each market and preparing a 2-hour closed door demo day for Bill and a few of his advisors. For a particular topic they said they research the market and narrow it down to six or seven companies. They ask each company for a bunch of information and then his team gives Bill a 5-10 minute demo of each company followed by a question period.

This is probably just one of many examples how Bill is able to acquire information at such a higher rate than most of us. Quite literally he's probably spending over a million dollars a month on education. For the rest of us, we just have to read HackerNews :)

Are there any affordable services that do something similar for the rest of us? I'd love learning from someone who could give me a bird's eye view of industries, key players, challenges, etc. with the data and demos to back it up.

Why would they be affordable? That is incredibly valuable information.

I wonder why they wouldn't record these demos and make them available to the general public. Seems like dissemination of this kind of knowledge could be very interesting and beneficial to people outside of just Gates and his advisors.

You may be sharing a lot of sensitive information that you don't want to show your competitors. Albeit, maybe the team could put together a superstar demoday with those companies afterwards.

I'm sure having a McDonald's Gold Card helps: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2015/nov/...

Today I learned...

The Warren Buffett piece your article links to is great!

My favorite section:

And, ah, here we have my McDonald's card which lets me eat free at any McDonald's in Omaha for the rest of my life. So that's why the Buffett family has Christmas dinner at McDonald's. It explains a lot of thing. (Laughs.)

Becky: Does anyone else have one of those cards?

Warren: There's just a few of them. Bill Gates has one. His is good throughout the world, I guess. Mine is only good in Omaha, but I never leave Omaha so mine is just as good as his.

Becky: Who doesn't have one?

Warren: Well, I think President Clinton wanted one very badly, but I don't think he has one. I think he has to go to McDonald's with me.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/21528623

I wonder how true that is and how much is part of Buffet's PR to make him a non-loathed billionaire. Being frugal is one thing, but feeding your family garbage on Christmas?

These free perks are technically income. It seems like a billionaire would prefer to just pay for the food out of pocket rather than worry about the accounting overhead of declaring gifts on their income tax.

Bill Gates doesn't give a single thought to accounting overhead or tracking things for income tax purposes. He has a team of people whose job it is to do that.

Keep your intake below $38/day to stay under the annual exclusion and it should be OK.

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

I'm going to assume that you are a billionaire, wise about tax paperwork. Possibly Buffett.

oh I wish this millionaire stood as an independent presidential candidate!

He has demonstrated himself wise, kind, well meaning and uncorruptable.

I well remember how Microsoft was evil and Gates was the devil and we all loved to hate this success.

But applying himself to philanthropy he has demonstrated his intellectual integrity and genuine goodness.

Maybe he knows that what he's doing right now is and will be more beneficial to the world, than say what he could achieve as the POTUS.

And more enjoyable by far than spending 1.5 years on the campaign trail.

Then spending the majority of his time as POTUS travelling to do fundraising dinners.

The article is all about how that is how his life already is...

But he is the worlds richest man and doesn't need to "fund raise"; he cannot be brought.

Doesn't he already do more fundraising with his foundation than most (any?) politicians do? I'm sure that sort of charitable fundraising is infinitely more rewarding, but in terms of the motions is it that different?

He does a lot, but really, fund raisers work as politicians on the side, rather than vice versa.

Keep in mind that the media can demonize anyone and turn any hero into a villain. If Bill Gates ran for national office you'd soon hear stories about how he is an evil monopolist who used Microsoft to enrich himself at the expense of hundreds of small, independently owned software companies, who were crushed in the 80s and early 90s, with thousands of unfortunate people out of work as a result. Etc. Etc. Not to mention whatever skeletons would fall out of his (or anyone's) personal closet. (Personally I am a fan of Gates' life and career and do think he'd serve competently in almost any position he occupied; just using this example to make a point.)

He was quite the devil when he was younger if you followed him back then. Most younger people are not aware of the Gates early on.

Am I really supposed to believe he eats a Big Mac everyday?

And if he does what does that say about his stance on climate change?

If he really eats Bic Mac everyday, I'm personally willing to trust him more on this than popular opinion about how McDonalds is evil and processed food gives cancer.

(The article says he eats it every chance he gets when he's on the road because his wife doesn't let him eat it when she's around)

Your scientific view is that McDonald's is a foundation of a healthy diet?

"Doesn't cause cancer" doesn't mean "is the foundation of a healthy, balanced diet".

Personally, hashbrowns are hashbrowns. Doesn't matter if I cook them or McDonalds cooks them. Coffee is also, at least to me, coffee. Doesn't matter if I brew it or McDonalds brews it.

If my breakfast is going to be hashbrowns and coffee - I can buy that at McDonalds. Some people are not okay with buying it from McDonalds because it is McDonalds, which doesn't make much sense to me.

Especially when the videos from past interviews come out like this one! https://youtu.be/8TCxE0bWQeQ

But all candidates get demonized, and then you choose between the least of both evils. In practice, it results in a similar outcome. Media could paint all candidates as the greatest hero, and you'd pick the bigger Saint of them all.

One style is the complement of the other, so I don't think you make a good point.

> But all candidates get demonized, and then you choose between the least of both evils. In practice, it results in a similar outcome. Media could paint all candidates as the greatest hero, and you'd pick the bigger Saint of them all.

> One style is the complement of the other, so I don't think you make a good point.

I am not a psychology student or a professional and I am unaware if studies have been done on the topic. Also, I am speaking in general, not just with respect to the US elections.

I disagree. Demonizing and providing the option to select the lesser evil is much more effective psychologically than saintifying and providing the option to choose the better saint. It is reasonable to expect people to be extra cautions in choosing the lesser evil as it troubles their morality if they wrongly choose the bigger evil. In the latter case however, people could afford to be more complacent, and could even fail to perceive any difference at all. And we can all see that demonizing is never done equally, some parties get targeted more than others, for whatever reasons, So it seems one could steer the result by choosing to demonize. I don't think or know that this is intentionally used as a strategy (by whom?) but if it were its clever.

MS under it's supervision has been caugh in lying, cheating, corrupting institutions and other unholly behavior so I feel his behavior now is more a way of trying to get redemption for his past sins. The PR seems to work though, most people completely forgot, and forgave.

OTOH, the stuff MS was vilified for is now how we expect everyone to operate (FB, Apple, Google, Amazon)

I wonder if his schedule included 3 hours of YC news and random internet reading.

When every minute is probably like $10k+ in "cost", I can see why you'd schedule every minute.

How much is a minute of your life worth to you?

If I get to decide how many minutes, $10k seems good. I would take a few days off my life if it gave me near unlimited flexibility with how I can live the rest of my life.

Much less than that.

What I do with a minute of my time will make virtually no difference to me or anyone else.

Like 0.25$ or so, and that's overestimating.

That makes no sense. Gates doesn't work to create income anymore.

I remember a similar interview, years ago when he was still at Microsoft. He had 3 monitors, one was exclusive to e-mails and meetings every hour.

Does he order his big macs some special way so that the buns don't slide?

He does seem to have an effective charity organization. There is a big focus on high-impact problems that other organizations just don't have.

Paywall for me.

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