Columnist's Midlife Assessment: I Can't Be Bill Gates, But I Can Make A Difference

The Miami Herald's Leonard Pitts, Jr., thinks about Bill Gates' decision to run his charitable foundation full time, and how you don't have to be the world's richest man to make the world a better place:

if life's first act is about growing up, coming of age, learning the lessons that shape you, and the second is about acquiring things, getting ahead, building a career, shouldn't the third be about something bigger than one's own aspirations and comforts? Shouldn't it be about doing something, leaving something, creating something that makes life better for somebody else?

.... Standing on the doorstep of 50, though, has a way of disabusing a man of his illusions. I am never going to be point guard for the Lakers, never going to be lead singer of the Temptations, and I'm never going to write a billion-dollar check. Not one that clears the bank, at any rate. Not unless they give me a really, really big raise.

It occurs to me, though, that maybe the lesson of Bill Gates' example -- for hundredaires and thousandaires, at least -- lies less in Spider-Man's maxim than in this one: Do what you can, where you are, now.

... I can't write a billion-dollar check. But I can paint a fence, mentor a child, maybe even endow a small scholarship. Bill Gates has me thinking with fresh energy about those and other things I can do -- the responsibility I have -- to change my corner of the world.

As midlife crises go, that's not a bad one to have.

Nicely said.