Bill Gates — billionaire entrepreneur, co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, and once world’s richest man — has a passion for books. He dedicates at least an hour a day to reading 50 books a year. So when Gates recommends a book to you, he thoroughly knows what he’s talking about. He strongly believes that if millions of people read a certain book, in particular, it would change the world. Well, that’s sounds like he’s really onto something.
Related media: Bill Gates On Factfulness
What’s The Fact About
Have you ever given an enthusiastic review to a book you ever read? Here’s someone own review:
“This is one of the most educational books I’ve ever read,” Gates says in a YouTube video. “It covers a space that is not easy to go learn about. The world would be better if literally millions of people read the book. I give it my highest recommendation.”
The much talked about and highly recommended book is “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think,” by author Hans Rosling, once a Swedish statistician, global health expert, and a friend of Gates. The book was published posthumously, with a little help from Rosling’s son, Ola, and daughter-in-law, Anna. It’s clearly one of Gates’ new favorite books as of April 2018.
The book offers a modern and useful insight of looking at the world. The core points from this book tries to illustrate why your life is way better than it may seem. In his blog post, Gates writes about Rosling’s idea of lumping countries of the world into two overly simplistic buckets: “developed” and “developing.” Though in reality, it’s way more complicated than it seems.
Opening The Gates
Here’s how Rosling’s book gives a hypothetical insight of our global standards of living:
Stage 1 (1 billion people): You survive on less than $2 a day and get around by walking barefoot. Your food is cooked over an open fire, and you spend most of your day traveling to get water. You and your children sleep on a dirt floor at night.
Stage 2 (3 billion people): You survive on between $2 and $8 a day and you can buy shoes and maybe a bike, so it doesn’t take quite so long to get water. Your kids go to school instead of working all day. Dinner is made over a gas stove, and your family sleeps on mattresses.
Stage 3 (2 billion people): You survive on between $8 and $32 a day and you have running water and a fridge in your home. You can afford a motorbike so you can get around easier. Some of your kids start — and even finish — high school.
Stage 4 (1 billion people): If you spend more than $32 a day, you’re here. You have at least a high school education and can likely afford a car and a vacation every now and then.
You Gotta Fight Biases
This is the bottom line: The book provides humanity with a tool to combat our innate nature of biases and other selfish traits, or as Gates writes, “ten instincts that keep us from seeing the world factfully.”
These ten instincts outlined in the book includes: The fear instinct (the tendency to pay more attention to things that scare us), the size instinct (the idea that numbers, on their own, can look more impressive than they really are), and the gap instinct (the thought that most people fall between two extremes).
Finally, Gates writes that Rosling’s book gave him that breakthrough thoughts that inspired his humanitarian foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, that he and his wife dedicate so much of their time and resources. ‘Factfulness’ may help you see that progress is happening all over the world, things may not be as bad as they seem, and life is only getting better.
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Written by: Nana Kwadwo, Tue, Feb 05, 2019.
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