I n excerpts from his new book Showing Up for Life: Thoughts on the gifts of a lifetime, Bill Gates Sr., cochair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, talks about bringing up Bill, doing the right thing, and why he reveres Rotary.

Things I learned from my children

It goes without saying that children learn the most by watching their parents in action. But the reverse is also true. If we pay attention, parents can learn a great many things from observing our kids.

I learned from Trey [Bill Gates Jr., nicknamed because he’s actually third in line] that childhood curiosity can last a lifetime. When Trey was very young I often took him to the li¬brary. He loved to read and often needed to return the books he’d read to check out more.

I know many parents would love to entice their children into becoming readers. So let me report that it’s possible to take even the best of good habits a little too far. One unintended consequence of all those trips to the library was that Trey read so much he was reading at the dinner table!

Mary and I did our best to convince him that, in light of certain social proprieties, reading while dining with others was not a good thing.

One contributor to Trey’s nonstop reading was the fact that every summer the teachers at his school gave their students a summer reading list and there was a contest to see who could read the most books. Trey was so competitive he always wanted to win and often did.

Still, I believe the main reason Trey read so obsessively was that he was so curious. He didn’t just want to learn about some things. He wanted to learn about everything.

We tried to nurture our children’s curiosity in ways I think many parents do.

We didn’t allow the children to watch much television, but we let them buy plenty of books. And it’s true that we didn’t enforce bedtime as strictly if one happened to be reading late.

If an unfamiliar word came up at the dinner table, one member of the family always walked to the nearby den, opened up the mammoth dictionary there, looked up the word, and read the definition out loud. In Trey’s mind, this reinforced the notion that if you have a question, the answer exists somewhere. All you have to do is go find it.

Trey performed well in school. In fact, his teachers exulted in him. And I don’t think Mary and I realized how much he was learning from his experiences. A case in point is the experience that marked his first brush with the world of commerce – selling nuts.

When Trey was a Cub Scout, his troop earned the money they needed to support their activities by selling raw nuts for the holidays. Groups within the pack competed against each other to see who could raise the most money. So Trey spent countless hours going door to door soliciting orders for nuts.

On evenings and weekends, I went with him, driving him to different neighborhoods and waiting in the car while he went from house to house.

It turns out that way back then Trey was recording his impressions on such things as what it’s like to go knocking on doors trying to sell a product, what factors influ¬ence buying decisions, and to what degree finding the right market for your product influences your overall success.

By the time he was entering his teens Trey’s curiosity had led him to another activity from which he was learning a great deal – spending time in his school’s computer room with his friend Paul Allen.

While still in school Trey, Paul, and another friend developed their first entrepreneurial venture: a company that created and marketed a piece of equipment they had developed called the Traf-O-Data.

It was designed to collect and make sense of the information generated by those little car-counting devices you’ve probably seen hundreds of times – a thin hose stretched across a road and connected to a black box.

The Traf-O-Data took the raw data from all those little black boxes and created a graph that gave you an hour-by-hour picture of each day’s traffic flow. It was a useful tool for anybody trying to make decisions about traffic routing and road construction.

After many successful kitchen-table practice sessions my son convinced some employees of the City of Seattle to come to the house for a demonstration.

Well, things that day at the Gates home didn’t go according to plan.

The Traf-O-Data did not perform.

How did Trey react when his first live demonstration of his system failed?

He went running into the kitchen, shouting on the way: “Mom, Mom ... come and tell them that it worked!” It’s probably no surprise that he made no sale that day! The Traf-O-Data did finally achieve some success, although it didn’t foreshadow anything like a Microsoft.

Years before they founded Microsoft, Trey and Paul Allen were studying how highly successful people achieved success. Trey gathered intelligence on that topic at home around the dinner table. When he was growing up, Mary and I had friends, many of whom we’d known since college, who were achieving distinction in a variety of fields – from science and medicine to public service and business. When we invited these friends to dinner, they spoke passionately about their endeavors, and the kids picked up a great deal just by listening to them and, in Trey’s case, by asking them questions.

Of course, Trey’s questions weren’t reserved for guests only.

When Mary was working on the United Way committee that decides how the organization allocates money to nonprofits, Trey would barrage her with questions: “Mom, what needs aren’t being met? What other problems contribute to this problem? Who’s trying to meet them? What results are they getting? How do you measure that?”

Trey’s curiosity and his loyalty to deep analytical thinking have never wavered.

Trey remains as much of a reader today as when he was a child. He doesn’t read anymore at the dinner table – and that’s a good thing because some of the books he’s attracted to are increasingly unappetizing. They have titles such as The Eradication of Infectious Diseases, Mosquitoes, Malaria & Man, or Rats, Lice, and History .

He seems to remember everything he reads and is, at times, eager to share what he’s learned with the next person he encounters.

His wife, Melinda, says one downside of this is that sometimes when he approaches people at a cocktail party they bolt because they’re afraid he’s going to start talking about tuberculosis!

Trey collected his college degree long after he and Melinda were married. He had dropped out of col¬lege in 1975 as a Harvard sophomore.

Of course Mary and I were sick when Trey told us he planned to leave college to take advantage of a window of opportunity [selling computer software] he believed would be long gone by the time he graduated from Harvard. However, he promised us that he would go back to Harvard, “later,” to get his degree.

“Later” finally arrived thirty-two years down the road on June 7, 2007, the day Harvard awarded Trey an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. I traveled to Cambridge with him and Melinda to watch him collect his honors and deliver Harvard’s commencement address.

Perhaps there’s a lesson in this for the parents of other curious children who, from the start, require the freedom to meet life on their own terms. It is that there is no statute of limitations on the dreams you have for your children. And there is no way to predict how much delight you might feel when those dreams are realized in a far different way than you could have imagined.

Showing up for life

Eighty percent of success is showing up
--Woody Allen

A few years ago I received an award from the YMCA.

The day the award was to be presented I looked around the crowded ballroom wondering why all those people were making such a fuss over me.

The only thing I could come up with was that I show up a lot.

I show up because I care about a cause. Or because I care about the person who asked me to show up. And maybe sometimes I show up because it irritates me when other people don’t show up.

My obsessive showing up has become a joke among my children. Still, I notice they’ve picked up the habit. And frankly, that’s what happened to me.

I started showing up because as far back as I can remember I watched other people I admired showing up. In my hometown of Bremerton, Washington, showing up to lend your neighbors a hand was just something decent people did. My parents, on a scale of one to ten, were nines at showing up.

My parents never talked about showing up. They just did it.

Another adult who provided me with powerful life lessons in showing up was our next-door neighbor, Dorm Braman. He showed up for so many things and accomplished so much in his life you’d have thought it would take two men to live Dorm’s life.

Dorm owned a cabinet-making business and in his spare time he led our Boy Scout troop.

He was a remarkable man whose showing up touched a lot of lives. In fact, even though he had never graduated from high school, after we Boy Scouts were all in college, Dorm ran for mayor of Seattle and won. Later, he was appointed by President Richard Nixon as assistant secretary of transportation.

In the early years when he was our Scoutmaster, one weekend every month – rain or shine – Dorm took us on adventures that ranged from laid-back camping trips to arduous twenty-mile hikes through the Olympic Mountains.

Far and away the most unforgettable memory I have of Dorm’s showing up involved the building of what we called Camp Tahuya and Sundown Lodge.

This adventure began when Dorm decided our Boy Scout troop was going to acquire its own campsite and on it build a marvelous log lodge.

The first step was to persuade the local Lions Club to back the idea and buy the troop the land. We named the place Camp Tahuya after the river that ran through it.

Once we had the site, Dorm taught us how to clear land, fell trees, and build.

A lot has changed since then. At that time, we felled the trees by hand and sawed the logs into proper lengths using two-man crosscut saws, and hand-peeled and planed them smooth and to proper dimensions using hand-wielded adzes. We had one power tool – a circular saw powered by Dorm’s flatbed truck.

Every weekend for three summers we twenty teenagers, Dorm, and our assistant scoutmaster worked all day, cooked our meals over open fires, and slept under the stars.

After three summers of labor (plus that of countless weekends during the school year) we had our log lodge in the woods. It was an imposing twenty-five-by-forty-foot structure with a main floor larger than most of our homes and a massive fireplace built by the father of one of the boys who was a stonemason. It had a large kitchen and a sleeping loft.

It is difficult to convey the extent of the work it took to build Sundown Lodge – or our sense of achievement in getting it done – to anyone who has never built a building from the ground up.

In the narrowest sense, it would be true to say that we learned to use a variety of common hand tools, build a complex structure, and grow calluses and a few scars where none existed before.

In a broader sense, we were witness to an example of visionary and inclusive leadership and the amazing power of people working together toward a common goal.

All the showing up Dorm did in our lives gave shape to more than a log lodge in the woods. It gave shape to a place in our minds where we believed anything was possible.

There’s no problem bigger than we are

Many people imagine Rotary clubs as places where businesspeople meet once a week to sell each other their products.

Well, I had never been to as many Rotary meetings as I have since we started our foundation. That’s because one cannot be passionate about immunizing the world’s children without coming to revere Rotary.

More than twenty years ago, when most volunteer efforts were aimed at solving problems that existed down the street, Rotary took on a global fight nobody believed they could win. A fight to end polio worldwide.

Since then Rotary has revolutionized our thinking about the possibilities that exist for ordinary people to significantly change the world.

Talk about fighting polio doesn’t stir every soul in America anymore because it no longer is a serious threat here. But this wasn’t always so.

My daughter Kristi was born in 1953. At that time, there were major polio epidemics in this country. No vaccine was yet available. Like so many other parents, I worried that if she wandered into the wrong swimming pool my little girl could contract polio and end up in an iron lung.

Mass immunization campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s ended such fears for most American parents. By the 1980s nobody cared about polio. Nobody, that is, but Rotary.

At that time polio was still paralyzing a thousand children a day in poorer countries. That’s why in 1985 [a million] Rotarians from roughly [160] countries – and every Rotary club in the world – took on the challenge of creating a polio-free world. What they have accomplished since then defies description. Worldwide, cases of polio have declined by 99 percent.

Rotary members have done everything from spending their vacations immunizing children in faraway places, to lobbying heads of state, to negotiating cease-fires in civil wars long enough to get millions of children vaccinated.

They’ve shown us how to mobilize people, raise more money than anybody thought volunteers could, and create private-public partnerships that can take on large-scale global problems.

I believe – as do most experts – that Rotary will achieve its audacious goal of eradicating global polio. Along the way they have taught us that when we are inspired to work together in the interest of an engaging cause, there is no problem bigger than we are.

Bill Gates Sr., a lawyer, civic activist, and philanthropist, is cochair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Excerpted from SHOWING UP FOR LIFE by Bill Gates, Sr. and Mary Ann Mackin © 2009 by Bill Gates, Sr. Excerpted by permission of Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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