(no subject)
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/whos-smarter-bill-gates-or-mark-zuckerberg/index.html
i was perusing nytimes.com this morning and stumbled upon this and immediately became engrossed in the ongoing debate between readers as they discussed what the blog proposed: who is smarter, bill gates, founder of Microsoft, or mark zuckerberg, creator of facebook?
i don’t care who is smarter and i feel it’s increasingly difficult to compare those two guys in particular. and how exactly are we measuring brainpower here? success? money? new ideas? iq?
some of the claims made by readers are shocking. pointing fingers at gates and zuckerberg, accusing them of theft and stupidity; questioning their ethics, knowledge, and studious (or not-so-studious) behavior; and bringing steve jobs into the debate. my favorite was when one person accused both of them of being bad students and dropping out of harvard because they were going to flunk out, saying “all bad students study the night before the test and that’s it.” either this guy’s an idiot or he needs to do some proof-reading before he posts to the world. perhaps he meant that all bad students begin studying the night before the test, which seems more likely, but even then his case doesn’t hold. first of all, how do you define a good student? taking good notes, getting a’s and b’s, studying at least a week before a test, getting close with the professor? or being a well-rounded student, getting involved in many different activities, AND maintaining a’s and b’s? it’s such a vague term that doesn’t have a solid definition. even a student who has good grades can be involved in several activities and have such a jam-packed schedule that all they can do is study the night before. additionally, i don’t know a single college student that wouldn’t study the night before a test, even if they felt they had a good grasp of the material. an outlandish statement by “john in the bronx,” to say the least.
my feelings on the situation? people are always going to want to take a piece of the cake. i honestly don’t know whether or not gates or zuckerberg stole ideas from other people, though I can’t imagine every aspect of their creations were all their own; but it would seem that if their ideas were truly stolen, the person from whom the ideas were stolen would have dug up some proof and sued. since no one seems to have proof, maybe gates and zuckerberg are actually the smart businessmen they claim to be.
also, when you come up with a new, innovative idea like both of them did, you can’t help but tell someone about it; you’ve got to be downright excited. someone’s going to want to steal their thunder, or maybe if someone just has it out for gates or zuckerberg they’ll want to sabotage their career. hey, anything’s possible. but geez, don’t believe everything you’ve ever read! i’m willing to bet that a lot of the people commenting on this NYT blog, accusing gates and zuckerberg of theft, feel this way because they read it somewhere or one of their friends said it at a gathering of some sort and never questioned it. i'm just saying, do some research before you blurt something out in an attempt to be intelligent but come off as an idiot.
i think the most we can learn from gates’ an zuckerberg’s stories is that sometimes a college education isn’t everything. if we can learn anything, it’s having an idea, finding the right timing, then taking it and running like hell.