Melinda French Gates

Melinda Gates is exactly who she appears to be. She lives her values on an everyday basis. And you can see her, you know, shaking hands with leaders of the world, having a conversation with them, and you see exactly the same Melinda Gates as you see when she is picking up a sick child. I think the example of Melinda is that if you have a belief, get out there and do something about it. She goes to the places that are far off the beaten path and require a real personal sacrifice to travel to and she takes with her this belief that all human lives are of equal value and then she does something about it. I think it's kind of a model of taking analytic ability, passion, ability to work with others and putting it to work for causes that can make a huge difference. The world could use a lot more like her. People think that he's all heady and she's all about the heart, but in fact she's quite analytical and he's much more emotional than people think. She gets the details of what it takes to build a fantastic new product that can improve health, improve life, but she also gets the surround. What does it take in the first month of life? What does the young teenage mother-to-be need to ensure a healthy birth? What is the education, the nutrition, the women's rights issues that are part of the total package of what it takes to ensure a healthy and productive life? I think Melinda seems unaware that she is in any way more fortunate. She's very concerned about the feelings of others. She's a woman of the world. She is diplomatic, tactful, but at the same time quite firm about her views about things. I think it was Nelson Mandela who said, look, this generation, your shot at greatness is to sort of outlaw a kind of despair and a kind of deprivation that the last generation thought was acceptable. Melinda's making a difference in the lives of tens of millions of people around the world now as well as the investments that they're making for the future. And that's not something that that many people can say. Great leaders know it's not about you. It's about the future that you're trying to create. And if you see her, she's almost shy about it, right, because she doesn't want to talk about herself or the importance of her work. She wants to talk about the importance of the work. The people who enjoy the benefits of her intervention may not even know who she is or know her name, but they will have felt her presence. She is, in her own inimitable and discreet and modest fashion, making some very, very serious waves. I think change comes from people who are willing to take risks. You're not going to change anything if you're not willing to, you know, throw the cards up in the air, change the paradigm, take a new path, explore a new way, innovate a new solution. So you've got to take risks. You show me a young person and tell me who their heroes are, and I'll tell you how they're going to turn out. And there's no better hero, or we'll call it heroine in this case, for every young woman in the country or around the world, really, to have than Melinda Gates. The more young girls that look to her and decide, I want to be another Melinda Gates, the better off the world's going to be.