Two questions Bill Gates looks to answer to solve every problem from Microsoft to Covid

Gates believed that the Coronavirus pandemic is not likely to go away before the end of 2021. (Reuters photo)

For those looking to solve a problem the Bill Gates’ way, here’s how to approach it: start off by answering two questions. “The first question is who has dealt with this problem well? And second, what can we learn from them?,” Gates said in a GatesNotes blog published recently. “Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve tackled every big new problem the same way: by starting off with two questions. I used this technique at Microsoft, and I still use it today. I ask these questions literally every week about COVID-19,” Gates added.

Gates, who is currently worth $123 billion as per Bloomberg Billionaires Index, had dropped out of Harvard to launch Microsoft along with Paul Allen in 1975. In March this year, Gates stepped down from Microsoft’s board to give more time to his philanthropic activities such as “global health and development, education, and my increasing engagement in tackling climate change,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post.

While the two questions, according to Gates, seem like obvious but “sometimes it’s surprisingly hard to find the answers—especially when it comes to global health.” For instance, Gates added that there are low- and middle-income countries that have made huge leaps in, for example, delivering vaccines or ending malnutrition. However, it would be tough for others to figure out these countries, how they achieved that and implement the lessons in their own country.

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Hence, Gates’ investment firm Gates Ventures and the philanthropic arm Gates Foundation have supported the Exemplars in Global Health programme launched earlier this year. The programme is a coalition of health experts and organizations from countries at every income level to check countries that have made the most progress in global health and what can be learnt from them to help others.

Meanwhile, Gates believed that the Coronavirus pandemic is not likely to go away before the end of 2021. “The innovation pipeline on scaling up diagnostics, on new ththerapeutics, on vaccines is actually quite impressive. And that makes me feel like, for the rich world, we should largely be able to end this thing by the end of 2021, and for the world at large by the end of 2022,” Gates told Wired.