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Did Bill Gates Wait Too Long? - When Should You Start?

Author : Daniel Batten

Most people who have never climbed a great mountain forget that conquering the summit is just the half-way point. Once you are up there, you need to get down. Quick. Same is true in business. Once you conquer your financial targets, you must descend quick. Your descent is your giving back.

This article puts forward the case that it is essential for your own wellbeing to give it away as you are getting it.

Making money is often described by business leaders as climbing to get to the top. We say “climbing the corporate ladder”. Gates has been at the top of the “Forbes 50” for the last 10 years. Forbes called Gates’s decade at the top of their richlist a decade of getting “comfortable with the altitude”. In other words, his success in business was like having “climbed somewhere very high”: he was at the top, he had a great view, but the altitude had its own perils that took some adjusting to.

Wharton management professor Michael Useem and the business people who accompany him on Himalayan treks use the mountains to gain insights about leadership. In Useem's book Upward Bound: Nine Original Accounts of How Business Leaders Reached Their Summits, Useem recounts executives’ collected stories where they explain how their experiences as climbers parallel the challenges they faced managing companies.

The Himalayan Trust was founded by Sir Edmund Hillary, who remains involved in charitable work in South Asia today, 50 years after he and Tenzing ascended the 29,035-foot Everest. One executive in Useem’s book commented that Hillary's devotion to the region and its people is inspirational and a manifestation of one of the essential, if often overlooked, components of leadership, pointing out that Hillary in his role as a leader and philanthropist in Nepal constantly asked the question “How can I serve you?” Hillary, like Gates, is another example of someone who climbed a mountain before the half-way point of his life. In his case he did not use his own money, but the ability to attract money that his profile gave him, to further the philanthropic causes of raising funds for the Nepalese people who dwelt at the foothills of that same mountain. In his case, his mountain was both literal and figurative.

When climbing a mountain, what many people who do not climb mountains forget is that getting to the top is not the end-point – it is the half-way point. You still have to get back down again. The stories of those who have died through failing to make the descent of Everest are numerous and tragic.

The same is true of making money. There are plenty of books that tell us how to make money, but they leave us celebrating at the top of Everest. At most, they allocate one chapter to the other half of the journey.

Most books on “wealth creation” address the “how” of earning money, not the “why”. Of all the books on wealth creation I read, none offered insight into what to me is the most important question of all concerning money: why the average American's happiness has declined 15% over the same 40 year period that wealth has increased (inflation adjusted) 200%. Descending mountains require different muscles, body-parts and skills to ascending mountains. The quads and abdominals get a heavy work out in the ascent, but the hamstrings and knees get a hammering on the way down. Imagine if you had only ever walked up steep slopes, and then you found yourself at the top of a hill. What would you do? It is likely you would either stay there, or find a higher hill to climb. Descending mountains can also be dangerous. Scree slopes can quickly carry people over cliffs if they are unable to control their momentum.

Similarly, disbursing money (descending the mountain) needs to be practised in order to get good at it. Bill Gates frankly admitted that his first billion spent on improving education was based on philosophies that were “naive”. He was naive simply because he hadn’t done it before, and so he lacked the right philanthropic muscles to execute effectively first time. Yet in making money, he is the antithesis of naivity. So with the Gates/ Ballmar approach of “it takes 3 versions to get it right”, Gates simply embarked on version 2. That version will be better, and version 3 will be great, because of his “there is no failure, only feedback” approach to business and life.

To carry this analogy even further, Gates started business in 1978, but did not start practising philanthropy until 1999. In 1984 he made the cover of Time Magazine for the first time as a businessman. In 2005-6, he made the cover for the first time as a philanthropist. This suggests that Gates still has a lot to learn, and a massive contribution still to make. But what if Gates had started philanthropy 10 years earlier? 20 years earlier? Could he have included walking up and down mountains in the same exercise program? Would this have distracted him from dominating business, or enhanced his cause still more?

It is these unanswered questions that mean that despite Gates' massive contribution to philanthropy, there are still many experiments that have not yet been executed, There is still much ground for innovation left: just as Newton made an astonishing contribution to physics, but still left unanswered areas to be explored by the Rutherfords, Bohrs, Heidelbergs and Einsteins who followed.

Warren Buffett has been quite specific about the skill required in philanthropy, making a seemingly outrageous claim that it takes more skill to give it away than to earn it in the first place. His reasoning is that “in making money you look to cut corners, whereas in philanthropy you approach the toughest and unsolved problems.” The fact that Gates took slightly longer to make it to Time’s cover as a philanthropist, and had to share the cover when he did get there adds some credence to this claim. So does Gates’s decision to work fulltime on philanthropy, plus the fact that according to some insiders, the Foundation struggles to find sufficiently good causes to give away the minimum 5% it must for special tax status.

It is fascinating and a little counterintuitive to think that it might be harder to give away money than it is to earn it.. This corresponds closely to my own experiences in spending bestowals in business. Our company successfully won a $1M government grant to pursue research into software to help disease research. We subsequently struggled to spend that money even half as fast as we said we would, because we had the same attitude that every dollar had to be spent not burnt. Why was this hard to do? Because good employees were harder to find, matching funds were slower to procure, and the management structure to facilitate a larger team took longer than expected to establish.

So let’s continue this analogy to its conclusion: mountains inspire us, but are dangerous to aspire. You need to get off them fast! They offer amazing views to the transient visitor, but catastrophe to those who overstay their welcome, as any surviving ascender of Everest will tell you: the time they actually spend at the top is minutes-long.

Those who would set up camp at the top of a mountain would get cold then miserable. Next, the body would begin freezing from the extremities inwards until finally the heart dies too. Does this describe people who make money; but then fail to embark on that philanthropic mountain-descent? Do we not use terms like “dead heart”, “cold”, “miserly”, “miserable” to describe people who had a good heart but were tainted by money like a frost biting the flesh; and ended up making only a monument to their own dying spirit on top of their personal mountain of cash?

While descending a mountain, maintaining our awareness as we descend of scree slopes and other potential dangers, we may find an unexpected ski field too. As any skier will tell you, the joy of skiing with gravity on your side is pure freedom. The businessman is the mountain-climber. However, with gravity on her side, the philanthropist has the opportunity to do something that is intrinsically as enjoyable as skiing. As Gates says, it is "uplifting". It is curious that we would consider missing out on something uplifting in life. And yet, until recently, most of us opted to leave it to lawyers to cut up our estates after we are locked in our little underground wooden toboggans.

There are others who, rather than even allowing themselves to enjoy the view, strive to overtake those people above them. As Philip R. Berber, founder of online-trading firm CyBerCorp Holdings Inc and No. 45 on the “Most Generous Philanthropists” list, put it "Which is the greater blessing: becoming wealthy? Or getting to redistribute God's wealth for the well-being of others? It's very hard to do when you are six feet under."”

Giving it away as you get it is critical if you want to enjoy your years on this planet.

Author's Resource Box

Daniel Batten is a serial-entrepreneur and author of The 6 Secrets of Incredible Influence and an expert in Business Growth and Philanthropy. Find out more by subscribing to his free newsletter: => http://beyondtheceiling.com/newsletter.html or pick up secrets from his blog http://beyondtheceiling.wordpress.com/


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Tags:   realtime philanthropy, philanthropy, business growth, charity in business, charity

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