"I worked weekends, I didn't really believe in vacations," Gates says of his early years at the helm of Microsoft.
"I had to be a little careful not to try and apply my standards to how hard [others at the company] worked. I knew everybody's licence plate so I could look out the parking lot and see, you know, when people come in. Eventually I had to loosen up as the company got to a reasonable size."
The hard part is to avoid applying them to friends and family. They will resent you for all those sideways glances and scoffs when you're working at home and they're relaxing on the couch.
They also won't be happy when you never have time to do things with them.
Wouldn't it'd be easier to just remember what car people drove, than the plate? Dave drives a green, older Ford Bronco. Jim drives a new red Porsche.
I grew up near Microsoft, and it might help to know that until recently Washington plates for standard cars have all been 6 characters long in the form 123-ABC or ABC-123. On top of that there are a ton of common patterns on the road at any given time due to the way they are distributed. So they are pretty well designed to be memorable.
As an aside: We're now on a 7 letter system in the format ABC1234, and that's most of what you see on the road. These don't stick quite as often -- I can't tell if that's the format change or if I'm just aging or more often lost in thought and not noticing the world around me or what. I believe they all start with A now, so it's not actually an extra letter to memorize, but I think the format change modifies the rhythm to the plate and makes it so it doesn't automatically chunk and therefor doesn't automatically get memorized. I guess trucks (before this change) have always been something like B12345D (where it's always B and usually ends with D, I think) and those didn't stick very well, either.
Now that he's 6, he has about 300 digits of pi memorized. He's also got the entire periodic table, and the song "Yakko's World" (all of the nations).
Some people have an easy time with faces. Others have an easy time with data.
If you're like Feynman's dad you can ignore the names and talk about relationships - "Why has that one got sharp teeth?"; "Why has that tree got big leaves?".
He also regularly asks me questions he's learned the answer to from videos, like "why isn't the District of Columbia a square?", "which countries in South America don't have oceanic coastlines?", and "what would happen if you tried to make Graham's Number but you used 2's instead of 3's?"
Sure.
To bring this back to the topic, though: yes, my son is an absolute genius when it comes to data. I'm not making it up to score internet points. I actually have a six year old who has legitimately reached 4096 in the game 2048, and who has a basic understanding of what a "limit" is, and who in the last week has really taken to fractals. That doesn't mean he's good at everything -- we're still working on pooping in the toilet, not talking in the middle of someone else's sentence, and not having a gigantic meltdown if his milk is in a green cup instead of a yellow cup.
Point being, it may initially seem weird that Bill Gates memorized license plates rather than car makes and models, but that may just be what his brain handles well.
I just highly doubt anyone who is so excited to return the conversation to their "genius" son. It's very https://www.reddit.com/r/iamverysmart/ .
This isn't Reddit. HN guidelines don't say "it's OK to be a jerk as long as you highly doubt someone". If you think I'm making stuff up about my son (who I'm very excited about because I'm a parent and that's how it works) to score internet points, the proper thing to do on HN is hold your tongue and not bother commenting, or use your downvotes once you've earned that right.
That's completely OK as long as bonuses are paid and >1% stock is given.