Tag: academic success

What Bill Gates Regrets not doing

bill gates redditIf you haven’t heard of Reddit’s AMA,  you wouldn’t be alone.  The bookmark website has a section which invites celebrities and high profile names along with more regular “Joes” and “Janes” from around the world to be “asked anything.”  AMA stands for “Ask Me Anything.”  Recently, the richest man in the world did his 3rd Reddit AMA.  In the first question I saw, he responded to the question:

Hi Bill, my question: Is there anything in life that you regret doing or not doing?

His response:

I feel pretty stupid that I don’t know any foreign languages. I took Latin and Greek in High School and got A’s and I guess it helps my vocabulary but I wish I knew French or Arabic or Chinese. I keep hoping to get time to study one of these – probably French because it is the easiest. I did Duolingo for awhile but didn’t keep it up. Mark Zuckerberg amazingly learned Mandarin and did a Q&A with Chinese students – incredible.

While I realize many of you here in Hong Kong learn English as a second language or “foreign language” to some, I would encourage you to be even one step better: take another language under your belt and take it seriously.

Many years later, you won’t regret it … like Bill Gates did.

 

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Excel on the SAT, Excel in Life

successPersonally, I know what a Harvard or Ivy League education can do for a person: it opens doors – heaps of them.

I have plenty of anecdotes and I share them in education seminars all the time.  However, many people like pure, concrete statistics and I was on the look out for them earlier today.  While searching though, I landed on (Harvard) Professor Steven Pinker‘s article in the New Republic titled “The Trouble with Harvard: The Ivy League is Broken and only  Standardized Tests can fix it.”   It was an interesting read and had more esoteric vocabulary than I’ve seen in a single article in a long time.  Thus, a quizlet list dedicated to it.

Half way through the read though, I found a very interesting find for anyone in the Test Preparation industry:

Camilla Benbow and David Lubinski have tracked a large sample of precocious teenagers identified solely by high performance on the SAT, and found that when they grew up, they not only excelled in academia, technology, medicine, and business, but won outsize recognition for their novels, plays, poems, paintings, sculptures, and productions in dance, music, and theater. A comparison to a Harvard freshman class would be like a match between the Harlem Globetrotters and the Washington Generals.

Does that mean if you get a 2400 that you’ll become one of the world’s richest on Forbes or win a Nobel Peace prize?  

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