A group of students asked Bill and Melinda Gates what they would choose if they could have any superpower in the world. Their answers—more energy and more time—serve as the theme for the 2016 Gates Annual Letter. I read both essays by Bill and Melinda Gates which together comprise the 4,600 word letter. The Gates’ might wish for superpowers, but they already have one and it’s a power that can trigger radically innovative solutions to our earth’s problems. Bill and Melinda Gates have the power to explain complex subjects in a way that nearly everyone can understand.
The Gates Letter features three techniques that all leaders/educators should adopt to explain complex ideas to a wide group of people: concrete examples, sixth-grade words and personal stories.
Cite Concrete Examples
Bill Gates wrote part one of the essay. If he had one wish to help the poorest people in the world it would be to find a cheap, clean source of energy. Gates reminds us that 18% of the world (1.3 billion people) can’t do simple things because they don’t have access to energy. What simple things? Gates gets specific.
“At some point today, you’ll probably do one or all of these things: Flip a switch for light. Take fresh food from a refrigerator. Turn a dial to make your home warmer or cooler. Press a button on your laptop to go online. You probably won’t think twice about any of these actions, but you will actually be doing something extraordinary.”
Most scientific explanations of complex problems go over people’s heads because speakers use jargon or esoteric words that are hard to grasp. The human mind doesn’t handle abstractions; there’s power in specificity. Gates uses very specific examples to drive home his point.
Use Grade School Language
In my research I’ve discovered that complex thinkers who are successful communicators speak in grade school language when they educate the general audience. Bill Gates does it exceptionally well. In his essay he shows a formula for producing clean energy, a mathematical formula that Gates argues will take carbon emissions down to zero.
P x S x E x C = CO2
“That might look complicated. It’s not,” writes Gates. “On the right side you have the total amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) we put in the atmosphere. This is what we need to get to zero. It’s based on the four factors on the left side of the equation: the world’s population (P) multiplied by the services (S) used by each person; the energy (E) needed to provide each of those services; and finally, the carbon dioxide (C) produced by that energy. As you learned in math class, any number multiplied by zero will equal zero. So if we want to get to zero CO2, then we need to get at least one of the four factors on the left to zero. Let’s go through them, one by one, and see what we get.”
Not only is Gates’ explanation of his formula remarkably simple, he uses the shortest, easiest words possible. I entered all of the text from Bill Gates’ essay into a tool used by educators to evaluate textbooks for appropriate grade levels. It returned a grade of 6.7, meaning the average sixth grader should be able to read and to reasonably understand Gates’ essay. Melinda’s essay returned nearly an identical score of 6.8.
Speaking of Melinda, she relies on a powerful educational technique even more so than her husband does—personal stories.
Share Personal Stories
“Unless things change, girls today will spend hundreds of thousands more hours than boys doing unpaid work simply because society assumes it’s their responsibility,” Melinda writes in her essay. Melinda then brings us into the world of one woman she’s met.
“When I visited Tanzania a couple of years ago, I spent a few days with Anna and Sanare and their six kids. Anna’s day started at 5 a.m. with lighting a fire to cook breakfast. After we cleaned up, we fetched water. Once Anna’s bucket was full it weighed 40 pounds…When we got back to the house I was exhausted, even though I’d carried less than Anna. But we couldn’t rest, because it was time to build the fire again for lunch. After that we went into the forest to chop wood for the next day’s fires, being careful not to get stung by scorpions. Then we went for more water, then milked the goats, then dinner. We were up past 10 at night, washing dishes in the moonlight.
How many thousands of steps did I take that day? However many it was, Anna had to multiply that number by every day of her life.”
By taking us into Anna’s world, Melinda Gates is trigging a rush of brain chemicals among her readers , most notably an increase in oxytocin, a hormone known to create empathy between two people. Oxytocin explains why we don’t know Anna but we feel for her plight.
Bill and Melinda Gates are optimists. They believe that the world can find breakthroughs to serious problems in the next 15 years if young people put their minds to solving it. “If you’re someone with some crazy-sounding ideas to solve our energy challenge, the world needs you. Study extra hard in your math and sciences. You might just have the answer,” says Bill. I agree. Someone might find the answer, and when they do they’d better be able to communicate their idea effectively or the ‘energy miracle’ Gates hopes for might never see the light of day.