Bill Gates states what has long been suspected
He never even said he had autism anyway and said he would never seek to get diagnosed.
How can you have lived for 7 decades and be super rich, have a condition that causes a great deal of stress but not enough to be bothered to pick up the phone for instantaneous help or be diagnosed
The idea just makes a mockery of our struggles.
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Its used to describe someone who`s autistic, dyslexic or ADHD, but also used casually to describe a NT with an unusual mind, which Bill Gates probably has.
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I think it would be fair to include folks with BAP under the ND label.
If Gates doesn't meet the diagnostic criteria for autism he almost certainly would qualify for a BAP diagnosis.
As for why he doesn't pursue diagnosis, he's an old man who would gain little from confirming his suspicions at this point in his life. But, not wishing to pursue a diagnosis isn't proof that he isn't on the spectrum or at least closely adjacent to it.
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but also used casually to describe a NT with an unusual mind, which Bill Gates probably has.
Yeah I think that's probably what Gates meant. Seinfeld also attributes his weirdness to aspergers but there's no evidence he has it either.
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How can you have lived for 7 decades and be super rich, have a condition that causes a great deal of stress but not enough to be bothered to pick up the phone for instantaneous help or be diagnosed
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The idea just makes a mockery of our struggles.
He has never said anything about his current or future diagnostic status but for arguments sake let’s assume he has not been diagnosed a good assumption in my opinion.
What help can a clinician give him that he already has not figured out at this stage?
He obviously has products that other people feel can make them a lot of money. Good businesspeople make deals with people they don’t like everyday. Me and you do not have that advantage.
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I mean if most neurological conditions are a spectrum then its possible many people have traits otherwise their condition flies under the radar. I don't find it that spectacularly mind blowing that Gates (or Musk/Branson) fall on a neurological spectrum somewhere. I am beginning to suspect its being fetishized as some type of superpower by some people?
I think every person is capable of living up to their potential and environment also plays a role in individual circumstance like for Bill Gates.
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Why was he being pushed towards sport? He had no talent for it and if he had pursued sport, he'd be a few orders of magnitude less wealthy and I'd be writing this on an OS/2 PC instead of a Windows PC.
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As he mentioned it was an attempt to socialize him.
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There is no question in my mind that he is neurodiverse.
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Me too. I quite like Bill Gates these days. I didn't much, back in the day when Microsoft was busy stifling all competition to their products (and I still hate that there's no native Office for Linux). Compared to the current batch of Tech barons though, he seems to have his head screwed on straight. I'm interested to read his book. From what I understand he inherited a strong sense of public duty, or the responsibility that comes with great wealth, from his parents. I do think he's trying to make a positive contribution to the world, as opposed to plant tracking chips in us through vaccine injections or whatever nonsense people think.
As for his neurodiversity, I'd buy it. Having heard him talk about his early experiences with computers, the apparent innate understanding and hyperfocus on learning how to program those machines to make them do what he wanted...it's not a diagnostic in itself but its an indicator.
His success came early, he was in the right place at the right time. He had the exposure to the machines and the brain to see the potential in them. His special interest just happened to be a future mega industry in its infancy, and deeply lucrative as it developed. Then he had the money to shape the world around him to be comfortable to his needs from quite a young age.
I wonder how much trouble most NDs would have if their special interests were marketable or they just had the resources to make their worlds comfortable? I don't think his success excludes him from being autistic at all.
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Speaking about Source Code, released this month, the Microsoft co-founder says it was "the question of whether to say explicitly that I probably would've been diagnosed as on the spectrum" had he been growing up today.
"It's just being honest," he says, explaining that it also made sense to him to include that at the very end of his book (which covers the early years of his life), because growing up "those words didn't come up."
As he notes in the epilogue, when he was a child "the fact that some people's brains process information differently from others wasn't widely understood" — and "the term 'neurodivergent' wouldn't be coined until the 1990s."
"I do think when I got to college, the term ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder] came up and people started to be prescribed medicine for that," Gates, 69, says. "I never was, but I probably would've been diagnosed with that as well."
But since that wasn't experience, the question of neurodivergence didn't come up until years later.
"It's only as an adult that in a few cases people ask me that question," Gates shares, adding that after the question was posed, he "had to reflect and say, 'Yes.' "
Still, dad Bill Sr. and mom Mary managed to give him the "precise blend of support and pressure I needed," something which Gates knows made him a "lucky kid."
"They gave me room to grow emotionally, and they created opportunities for me to develop my social skills," he writes in Source Code.
And while he may wish that those skills had "come sooner," Gates writes that he "wouldn't trade the brain I was given for anything."
peaking with PEOPLE, Gates says that his candor helps contextualize some of his childhood stories for readers — including the time he turned in a 177-page report on the state of Delaware.
"I think in a way, unless I'd said that you might've thought — oh, sure, he wrote a little bit longer report or sure he was fidgety at his desk," he says. "But it was extreme enough, like 200 pages versus 10 pages and going off to read at long periods of time and not wanting to be interrupted and trying to make sense of things more than most other kids."
While his social skills may have been slow to develop, Gates did go on to form "very deep friendships" with people he felt similarities with, including Paul Allen, who shared his love for learning, computers and software, and with whom he'd eventually co-found Microsoft.
All in all, Gates feels fortunate for the way everything played out.
"If somebody said, 'Here's a pill that your social skills will be better, but you won't be able to concentrate so much,' I would not go back and take that pill," he tells PEOPLE. "I've had the most amazing and interesting and fulfilling life."
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