这里是原文：Why you shouldn't imitate Bill Gates if you want to be richBill Gates is a lot luckier than you might realise

He may be a very talented man who worked his way up from college dropout to the top spot on the list of the world’s richest people

But his extreme success perhaps tells us more about the importance of circumstances beyond his control than it does about how skill and perseverance are rewarded

We often fall for the idea that the exceptional performers are the most skilled or talented

But this is flawed

Exceptional performances tend to occur in exceptional circumstances

Top performers are often the luckiest people, who have benefited from being at the right place and right time

They are what we call outliers, whose performances may be examples set apart from the system that everyone else works within

Many treat Gates, and other highly successful people like him, as deserving of huge attention and reward, as people from whom we could learn a lot about how to succeed

But assuming life’s “winners” got there from performance alone is likely to lead to disappointment

Even if you could imitate everything Gates did, you would not be able to replicate his initial good fortune

For example, Gates’s upper-class background and private education enabled him to gain extra programming experience when less than 0

01% of his generation then had access to computers

His mother’s social connection with IBM’s chairman enabled him to gain a contract from the then-leading PC company that was crucial for establishing his software empire

This is important because most customers who used IBM computers were forced to learn how to use Microsoft’s software that came along with it

This created an inertia in Microsoft’s favour

The next software these customers chose was more likely to be Microsoft’s, not because their software was necessarily the best, but because most people were too busy to learn how to use anything else

Microsoft’s success and market share may differ from the rest by several orders of magnitude but the difference was really enabled by Gate’s early fortune, reinforced by a strong success-breeds-success dynamic

Of course, Gates’s talent and effort played important roles in the extreme success of Microsoft

But that’s not enough for creating such an outlier

Talent and effort are likely to be less important than circumstances in the sense that he could not have been so successful without the latter