>>Don't know much about how Edison or Zuckerberg got where they did, but Gates had extraordinary opportunities as a kid that gave him thousands of hours of computer use at a time when most people had none. He didn't just wake up one day and become a computer genius; he had years of training.
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>Zuckerberg went to Harvard. That probably doesn't count as an extraordinary opportunity, though, huh?

Yes, it absolutely does count as an extraordinary opportunity. However, given what he did when he did, he probably had some pretty good opportunities before that, too.

Okay, looked it up. Son of a psychiatrist and a dentist, so comfortable life from the get-go. Transferred to Phillips Exeter his junior year of high school. And then there's this:

Zuckerberg began using computers and writing software in middle school. His father taught him Atari BASIC Programming in the 1990s, and later hired software developer David Newman to tutor him privately. Newman calls him a "prodigy", adding that it was "tough to stay ahead of him". Zuckerberg took a graduate course in the subject at Mercy College near his home while still in high school.

I'm not saying that he didn't show drive and native ability. I'm saying that his life experiences gave him the opportunity to turn those things into an empire.

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>Anyways, millions of hackers had that kind of training.

No, I don't think so. How many of those millions got private tutoring in programming as teens? How many took graduate courses as high school students? How many would have been allowed to?

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>Most of them don't have the big ideas or the motivation to shape reality.
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>The reason not everyone in the world, even people with educations from good schools, is a mover and shaker on Gates' kind of level:
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>- It's easier to complain about the world than to shape it, so most people never try all that hard

I agree that many people never try that hard, but most people also never start with the advantages of a Gates or a Zuckerberg.

Tamar