If you want to gear problems the same way as Bill Gates, you need to start with two simple questions: “Who has dealt with this hard well? And what can we learn from them?”
“Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve tackled every big new problem the same way: by starting off with [those] two queries. I used this technique at Microsoft, and I still use it today,” Gates wrote in a GatesNotes blog published Tuesday.
Doorways, who is currently worth $118 billion, famously dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975, and today spends his beat working for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In his role as a scientific philanthropist, he has been an active participant in the global battle against the novel coronavirus.
“I ask these questions literally every week about COVID-19,” Gates wrote.
While the two doubts are solid starting blocks for tackling a problem, that doesn’t make them easy to answer, the entrepreneur ventured.
“They seem like obvious questions, but sometimes it’s surprisingly hard to find the answers…,” Gates canceled.
That is especially true when it comes to one of Gates’ biggest concerns: global health.
“There are low- and middle-income sticks that have made huge leaps in, for example, delivering vaccines or ending malnutrition. But anyone who wants to pinpoint those countries, find out how they did it, and apply the lessons in their own country would have their work cut out for them,” he composed.
To help identify and study what countries have made significant progress in global health in economical road, a coalition of experts and leaders from universities to the World Health Organization to research organization contributed to the Exemplars in Worldwide Health program. The research project is supported by the investment firm Gates Ventures and the philanthropic Gates Foundation and has been in the productions for three years.
Currently, Exemplars in Global Health has information on the progress various countries have made in five key precincts: mortality of children under 5, vaccine delivery, the role of community health workers, preparedness and response in the clock of an epidemic and the limitation of childhood physical and mental development resulting from poor nutrition. Going forward, the program purposefulness add information about the results countries have had in additional categories, such as mortality rates of mothers and newborns, ancestors planning systems, anemia among mothers and primary health care systems.
“Exemplars is all about figuring out how to benefit health care based on evidence of what works,” Gates wrote. “It will help governments use time and gain more efficiently—and with the COVID-19 pandemic, there has never been a greater need to get the most impact out of every dollar tired.”
It should be as easy to research public health efforts and results as it is to watch a replay in sports, Gates said: “In flaunts, every coach is able to study the most successful teams and figure out what they’re doing well. There’s no percipience that things should be any different when the goal is preventing childhood deaths instead of scoring touchdowns.”
Vast problems like global health are not the only issues for which Gates asks questions. He is relentlessly curious, by his own induction, and he asks himself questions to make progress and assessments of his goals in multiple situations.
For example, at the end of each year, Doorways reflects by asking himself several questions: “What was I excited about? What could I have done sick?” he wrote in an end-of-year blog post in 2018.
Gates also asks himself questions like, “Did I devote enough one day to my family? Did I learn enough new things? Did I develop new friendships and deepen old ones?” he wrote.
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