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The Surprising Habit of Mentally Fit People
When a reporter asked Bill Gates how would he define what he does for a living, he said simply, “I am a scientist.”
“I devote maybe ten percent [of my time] to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want to put it on my business card. I’m a scientist.” (Scientific American, 1994)
A scientist. What does it mean?
Of course, you probably won’t find Mr. Gates strolling around in a lab coat, recording blood measurements of his favorite rat at 2 AM. It’s also unlikely that one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs is secretly an aspiring academic.
It does show, however, that Gates sees himself not as the hand-shaking, deal-making, profit-raking “businessman” figure we’ve been programmed to expect, but rather as a contemplative, rational man who credits his success largely to his mode of thinking.
But what exactly is his mode of thinking? What does it mean, to think like a scientist? Rational thought has been around for a while, and it doesn’t seem all that uncommon. How is Gates’s rational thinking different from everyone else’s?
