The Power of Optimism

Optimism isn’t a passive expectation that things will get better; it is a conviction that we can make things better.

started Microsoft, WHEN PAUL ALLEN AND I we wanted to bring the power of computers and software to the people — and that was the kind of rhetoric we used. At the time, only big businesses could buy computers. We wanted to offer the same power to regular people — to democratize computing.

By the 1990s, we saw how profoundly personal computers could empower people. But that success created a new dilemma: if rich kids got computers and poor kids didn’t, technology would make inequality worse. That ran counter to our core belief: that technology should benefit everybody. So we worked to close the digital divide. I made it a priority at Microsoft, and Melinda and I made it an early priority at our Foundation — donating personal computers to public libraries to make sure everyone had access.

The digital divide was a focus of mine in 1997, when I took my first trip to South Africa. I went there on business, so I spent most of my time in meetings in downtown Johannesburg, staying in the home of one of its richest families. It had only been three years since the election of Nelson Mandela marked the end of apartheid. When I sat down for dinner with my hosts, they used a bell to call the butler. After dinner, the men and women separated, and the men smoked cigars. I thought, “Good thing I read Jane Austen, or I wouldn’t know what was going on.”

The next day, I went to Soweto — the poor township southwest of Johannesburg that had been a centre of the anti-apartheid movement. It was a short distance from the city into the township, but the entry was sudden, jarring and harsh: I passed into a world completely unlike the one I came from.

My visit to Soweto became an early lesson in how naïve I was. Microsoft was donating computers and software to a community centre there — the kind of thing we did in the United States. But it became clear to me very quickly that this was not the United States. I had seen statistics on poverty, but I had never really seen poverty. The people there lived in corrugated tin shacks, with no electricity, no water, no toilets. Most people didn’t wear shoes; they walked barefoot along the streets. Except there were no streets — just ruts in the mud.

The community centre had no consistent source of power, so they had rigged up an extension cord that ran about 200 feet to a diesel generator outside. Looking at the setup, I knew the minute the reporters and I left, the generator would get moved to a more urgent task, and the people who used the community centre would go back to worrying about challenges that couldn’t be solved by a PC.

When I gave my prepared remarks to the press, I said: “Soweto is a milestone. There are major decisions ahead about whether technology will leave the developing world behind. This is to close the gap.” As I was reading these words, I knew they were irrelevant. What I didn’t say was: “By the way, we’re not focused on the fact that half a million

people on this continent are dying every year from malaria. But we’re sure as hell going to bring you computers.”

Before I went to Soweto, I thought I understood the world’s problems, but I was blind to the most important ones. I was so taken aback by what I saw that I had to ask myself, ‘Do I still believe that innovation can solve the world’s toughest problems?’ I promised myself that before I came back to Africa, I would find out more about what keeps people poor.

Over the years, Melinda and I learned more about the most pressing needs of the poor. On a later trip to South Africa, I paid a visit to a hospital for patients with MDR-TB, or multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, a disease with a cure rate of under 50 per cent. I remember that hospital as a place of despair. It was a giant open ward with a sea of patients shuffling around in pajamas, wearing masks. There was one floor just for children, including some babies lying in bed. They had a little school for the kids who were well enough to learn, but many of the children couldn’t make it, and the hospital didn’t seem to know whether it was worth it to keep the school open.

I talked to a patient there in her early thirties. She had been a worker at a TB hospital when she came down with a cough. She went to a doctor, and he told her she had drugresistant TB. She was later diagnosed with AIDS. She wasn’t going to live much longer, but there were plenty of MDR patients waiting to take her bed when she vacated it.

This was hell with a waiting list; but seeing hell didn’t reduce my optimism: it channeled it. I got in the car and told the doctor who was working with us: “Yeah, I know, MDRTB is hard to cure. But we should be able to do something for these people.” This year, we’re entering phase three with a new TB drug regime. For patients who respond, instead of a 50 per cent cure rate after 18 months for $2,000, we could get an 80-90 per cent cure rate after six months for under $100. That’s better by a factor of a hundred.

Optimism is often dismissed as false hope. But there is also false hopelessness. That’s the attitude that says we can’t defeat poverty and disease. We absolutely can.

Bill called me after he visited the MELINDA: TB hospital. Ordinarily, if we’re calling from a trip, we just go through the agenda of the day: ‘Here’s what I did; here’s who I met.’ But this call was different. He said: “Melinda, I’ve gone somewhere I’ve never been before,” and then he choked up and couldn’t talk. Finally he just said: “I’ll tell you when I get home.” I knew what he was going through. When you see people with so little hope, it breaks your heart. But if you want to do the most, you have to see the worst. That’s what Bill was doing that day.

I’ve had days like that, too. Ten years ago, I traveled to India with friends. On the last day there, I spent some time in a home for the dying. I walked into a large hall and saw rows and rows of cots. Every cot was attended, except for one far off in the corner that no one was going near; so I walked over there. The patient was a woman who seemed to be in her thirties. I remember her huge, brown, sorrowful eyes. She was emaciated, on the verge of death. Her intestines weren’t holding anything — so they had put her on a cot with a hole cut out in the bottom, and everything just poured through into a pan below. I could tell she had AIDS, both from the way she looked, and the fact that she was off in the corner alone. The stigma of AIDS is vicious — especially for women — and the punishment is abandonment.

When I arrived at her cot, I suddenly felt totally helpless. I had absolutely nothing to offer her. I knew I couldn’t

If you want to do the most, you have to see the worst.

save her, but I didn’t want her to be alone. So I knelt down next to her and reached out to touch her — and as soon as she felt my hand, she grabbed it and wouldn’t let go. We sat there holding hands, and even though I knew she couldn’t understand me, I just started saying: “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s not your fault.”

We had been there together for a while when she pointed upward with her finger. It took me some time to figure out that she wanted to go up to the roof and sit outside while it was still light out. I asked one of the workers if that would be okay, but she was overwhelmed by all the patients she had to care for. She said: “She’s in the last stages of dying, and I have to pass out medicine.” Then I asked another, and got the same answer. It was getting late and the sun was going down, and I had to leave, and no one seemed willing to take her upstairs.

Finally, I just scooped her up and carried her up the stairs. On the roof, there were a few of those plastic chairs that will blow over in a strong breeze, and I set her down on one of those, and I helped prop her feet up on another, and I placed a blanket over her legs. And she sat there with her face to the west, watching the sunset. I made sure the workers knew that she was up there so they would come get her after the sun went down. Then I had to leave her.

But she never left me. I felt completely and totally inadequate in the face of this woman’s plight; but sometimes it’s the people you can’t help who inspire you the most.

Optimism, for me, isn’t a passive expectation that things will get better; it is a conviction that we can make things better — that whatever suffering we see, no matter how bad it is, we can help people if we don’t lose hope and we don’t look away.

Melinda and I have described some devastating scenes. BILL: But we want to make the strongest case we can for the power of optimism. Even in dire situations, optimism can fuel innovation and lead to new tools to eliminate suffering. But if you never really see the people who are suffering, your optimism can’t help them. You will never change their world. And that brings me to what I see as a paradox.

The world of science and technology is driving phenomenal innovations. We’re on the verge of mind-blowing breakthroughs in what human beings can do for each other, and people are really excited about the future. At the same time, if you ask people, ‘Is the future going to be better than the past?’ most say: ‘No. My kids will be worse off than I am.’ They think innovation won’t make the world better for their children.

So, who’s right? The people who say innovation will create new possibilities and make the world better? Or those who see a trend towards inequality and a decline in opportunity, and don’t believe innovation can change that?

In my view, the pessimists are wrong — but they’re not crazy. If technology is purely market-driven, and we don’t focus innovation on the big inequities, we will be left with amazing inventions that leave the world even more divided. We won’t improve public schools. We won’t cure malaria. We won’t end poverty. We won’t develop the innovations poor farmers need to grow food in a changing climate.

If our optimism doesn’t address the problems that affect so many of our fellow human beings, then our optimism needs more empathy. If empathy channeled our optimism, we would see the poverty and the disease and the poor schools, we would answer with our innovations, and we would surprise the pessimists.

In Soweto, I started learning that if we’re going to make our optimism matter to everyone and empower people everywhere, we have to see the lives of those most in need. If we have optimism without empathy, it doesn’t matter how much we master the secrets of science: we’re not really solving problems; we’re just working on puzzles.

Let your heart break. It will change what you do with MELINDA: your optimism. On a trip to South Asia, I met a desperately poor mother who brought me her two small children and implored me: “Please, take them home with you.” When I begged her forgiveness and said I could not, she said: “Then, please take one.”

If we have optimism without empathy, it doesn’t matter how much we master the secrets of science.

On another trip, to South Los Angeles, I was talking to a group of high school students from a tough neighbourhood when one young woman said to me: “Do you ever feel like we are just somebody else’s kids whose parents shirked their responsibilities, that we’re all just leftovers?”

These women made my heart break — and still do. And the empathy intensifies if I admit to myself: that could be me. When I talk with the mothers I meet during my travels, I see that there is no difference at all in what we want for our children. The only difference lies in our ability to give it to them.

What accounts for that difference? Bill and I talk about this with our kids at the dinner table. Bill worked incredibly hard and took risks and made sacrifices for success. But there is another essential ingredient of success, and that ingredient is luck — absolute and total luck.

When were you born? Who were your parents? Where did you grow up? None of us earned these things: they were given to us. When we strip away our luck and privilege and consider where we’d be without them, it becomes easier to see someone who’s poor and sick and say, ‘that could be me.’ This is empathy: it tears down barriers and opens up new frontiers for optimism.

In the course of your lives, you will come to see suffering that will break your heart. When this happens — and it will — don’t turn away from it; turn toward it. That is the moment when change is born.