Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in a blog post wrote about two questions he has been asking since he was a teenager while dealing with problems in life.
The questions are: Who has dealt with this problem well? And what can we learn from them?
"Ever since I was a teenager, I've tackled every big new problem the same way: by starting off with (those) two questions. I used this technique at Microsoft, and I still use it today," Gates wrote in a GatesNotes blog post. "I ask these questions literally every week about COVID-19. They seem like obvious questions, but sometimes it's surprisingly hard to find the answers."
Gates has been active in the fight against coronavirus by contributing worldwide through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It is especially not easy to answer such questions with aspects related to global health.
"There are low and middle-income countries that have made huge leaps in, for example, delivering vaccines or ending malnutrition. But anyone who wants to identify those countries, find out how they did it, and apply the lessons in their own country would have their work cut out for them," he wrote.
Gates contributes to Exemplars in Global Health Program through Gates Venture and Gates Foundation. The program which has been active for two years has a coalition of experts and leaders from universities to the World Health Organization that gathers information of various countries on issues like mortality of children under 5, vaccine delivery, the role of community health workers, preparedness and response in the face of an epidemic and the limitation of childhood physical and mental development resulting from poor nutrition.
"Exemplars is all about figuring out how to improve health care based on evidence of what works," Gates wrote. "It will help governments use time and money more efficientlyand with the COVID-19 pandemic, there has never been a greater need to get the most impact out of every dollar spent."
Gates also introspects by asking himself several other questions: "What was I excited about? What could I have done better?" he wrote in an end-of-year blog post in 2018.
Gates also asks himself questions like, "Did I devote enough time to my family? Did I learn enough new things? Did I develop new friendships and deepen old ones?" he wrote.