Was reading the sunday times when i saw a comment which goes somthg like "u cant become rich by being an engineer" from a person being interviewed...he has an engineering degree n went into insurance...i started to think abt the BIG engineering alumni signboard tt i saw in nus last yr...my leechie idol, mr. Liew, has an engineering degree...so did a certain ms. H Ching...n my leechie idol, ms. Olivia Lum, has a chemistry degree n she has nvr been to biz sch...well, i dont know that many insurance folks who r much richer than them! i'm not sure if the media is trying to glamourize certain industries? o.O" in my humble opinion, an education is juz trying to educate us how to learn...it's juz a starting point...which may also explain y diff ppl taking the same course can end up so differently in life?
"Sometimes things happen in our lives that tear us apart inside, but if we don't learn to look past them and see the sun shining above the clouds, we will forever be standing in the rain"
Nvr expect honesty from cheapo ppl!!!
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Bill Gates:
"One of the few people to understand his compulsions was Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, who died of cancer in October. The two men’s long and stormy relationship has been chronicled in Jobs’s latest biography, but, until now, Gates has said little about their divisions - and their bonds.
“Steve was an incredible genius who contributed immensely to the field I was in. We had periods, like the early Macintosh, when we had more people working on it than they did. And then we were competitors. The personal computers I worked on had a vastly higher [market] share than Apple until really the last five or six years, where Steve’s very good work on the Mac and on iPhones and iPads did extremely well. It’s quite an achievement, and we enjoyed each [other’s work].”
This tribute, part praise, part reminder of Gates’s dominance, is more tactful than the comments Jobs made in his lifetime. “He spent a lot of his time competing with me. There are lots of times when Steve said [critical] things about me. If you took the more harsh examples, you could get quite a litany.” In Jobs’s view, his rival was “unimaginative”, “a bit narrow” and derivative. As he once told an interviewer, “He [Gates] would be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram.”
The atmosphere changed in 2007 when Gates left Microsoft to set up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with his wife. “Steve and I did an event together, and he couldn’t have been nicer…I got a fair bit of time with him in his last year. Some months before Jobs died, Gates paid him a long visit. “We spent literally hours reminiscing and talking about the future.” Later, with his old adversary’s death imminent, he wrote to him. “I told Steve about how he should feel great about what he had done and the company he had built. I wrote about his kids, whom I had got to know.”
That last gesture was not, he says, conciliatory. “There was no peace to make. We were not at war. We made great products, and competition was always a positive thing. There was no [cause for] forgiveness.” After Jobs’s death, Gates received a phone call from his wife, Laurene. “She said; 'Look, this biography really doesn’t paint a picture of the mutual respect you had.’ And she said he’d appreciated my letter and kept it by his bed.”
Bill Gates rarely talks in such human terms. As a mathematician, he prefers numbers to emotion, focusing on the billion people in desperate poverty and the money needed to help them survive and work towards prosperity. As someone on the front line of mortality, he has balanced his aims against his own lifespan and wealth. Asked about his goal by a pupil at the school he is visiting, he says: “I’m 56. Hopefully I’ll live another 25 to 30 years to see [unnecessary] deaths drop to zero.”
“It’s not about legacy,” he tells me. “I’d like to see it get done. That is my job.” He has no expectation that his three children, who will inherit only a tiny fraction of his money, will follow him. “Our foundation won’t last long beyond Melinda’s and my lifetime. The resources will last about 20 years after whichever is the last of us to go. There is no family business, and my kids will make their own careers.”
While he speculates that they will be “great doctors or great lawyers”, he admires not only entrepreneurs but the market system. “Capitalism has worked phenomenally. Look at North Korea versus South Korea, or China before and after 1979. Capitalism has shortfalls. It doesn’t necessarily take care of the poor, and it underfunds innovation, so we have to offset that. We don’t have to [ask] whether capitalism is wrong.”
Though not especially religious, and far from pious (“People on the front line are the saints”), Bill Gates is driven on by faith. “I believed in the personal computer and I devoted my life to it,” he says. “If you have a dream, and it comes true, it’s a very cool thing.” Now he extends the passion he once expended on enterprise to ending disease and starvation. The man who changed the way the rich world lives is equally determined to change the way in which the poor world dies."
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