Yesterday, I read Bill Gates’s blog titled “An Email from my younger self”.
He was 52 when he wrote this email and I found something about this and the subject of the email interesting. The blog featured a bunch of science textbooks he recommends and the email was a list of some he got in 2008.
And the quick introduction is that after retiring from Microsoft and transitioning to a full-time role at Gates Foundation he found it important to go back to learning about the basics of science to be well-equipped for his role at the organization.
I found this interesting, especially because the relevance of learning the basics of science at a managerial level could pose a good debate.
It is one thing to read fiction, biography, or an investigative book but he read about biology, physics, mechanics, materials, calculus, and chemistry in textbook format. Which, I don’t think must have been overly exciting to read, without genuine interest.
I was intrigued by this and arrived at an obvious realization that to be well-equipped to solve a problem, reading is important. Reading anything and everything about that topic is relevant.
I am currently working on my master’s thesis and I often find that I have to go back to learning some high school basic science, and maths knowledge, or about the fundamentals of a topic.
There have been moments when I have wrestled with my gaps in knowledge and wondered about their relevance but for some reason, knowing Bill Gates found it important to still learn them at 52 feels encouraging.
Next, I realised you don’t have to have a background in a particular area to solve a problem. You just have an interesting idea about it, read some interesting books about it, watch some interesting explainer videos about it, or listen to some interesting conversations about it.
This is how new knowledge is formed and how new ideas begin to develop and take shape within you.
The Mechanical Engineer who became a Chemist.
Frances H. Arnold is a 2018 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry but her background was actually in Mechanical and Aerospace engineering. She gained a bachelor’s degree in this at Princeton and worked as an engineer for a bit before she decided to get a Ph.D. in chemical engineering. I use to wonder how people managed to do that; switch across fields with relatively no background, experience, or knowledge in it.
Or work on problem areas, they have no foreknowledge of. Now that I am doing something similar for my MSc. Thesis I again realised you don’t need to know everything all at once. You don’t have to have all the answers when you start.
It just starts with an interesting idea or a couple of interesting facts and you have just got to read as many “interesting” materials as you can find about your interesting idea or about the problem you encounter along the way. My thesis is focused on electromagnetism but trying to understand how to use it to manipulate magnetic materials in a resin has led me on a journey of understanding a bit of organic chemistry; molecular bonds, functional groups, and the likes of it.
The knowledge required to solve a problem is acquired over time, it builds over time.
Experts never begin as Experts.
Akira Yoshino was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 for contributions to the development of the lithium-ion battery. He didn’t start out trying to solve this problem and as stated in his biography was no expert on the problem area.
“I was not an expert on battery technology, but from that point forward I became deeply involved in battery technology.”
From immersing himself in this area, reading, and having conversations with people in this area, he discovered a paper by Professor John Goodenough that led him to the right track. Now, he is a voice on battery technology.
Not too Old or Late — experience is overrated.
Ivar Giaever is a Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics (1973), here is a LinkedIn excerpt of a conversation he had with a colleague early in his career;
“When I came to General Electric, I was then 30 years old. I said to [my colleague John Fisher], ‘I’d really like to learn some physics. But I know I’m too old to make any discovery in physics because most physicists do that when they’re in their twenties.’
And John said to me, ‘You’re not too old. You make discoveries when you’re learning. So if you start learning at thirty you can still make discoveries.’
N.B: Ivar Giaever was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics for his research on tunnelling in semiconductors and superconductors, which was carried out when he was 31 years old.
Maybe you have been where I was once whereby the gaps in your knowledge troubled you, find some consolation that a Nobel Prize winner shared that worry.
And to cap off why Bill Gates studying A-level science was fascinating to me, here is a continuation of Ivar Giaever’s conversation with his colleague.
“And, he said, I give you the advice that when you’ve worked in physics for a while maybe you should change your field again because then you learn again. The fun thing in life is just learning different things.”
Bill Gates is learning different things with no foreknowledge about them, by doing so, he is filling the gaps in his knowledge and consequently making discoveries, however big or small.
The lesson here is an obvious one but one that resonates with me all over again.
You can do anything, you can learn about anything, experience is overrated, and reading anything and everything in any way is important. You learn more along the way, knowledge is built this way, big and small discoveries are made and they are important.
