Bill Gates' effect on literature

On May 15th, Bill Gates constructed a steam of tweets that sounded "like a graduation speech". In the midst of all of this, he listed the reason why he became the philanthropist he is today. That reason? The Better Angels of Our Nature by: Steven Pinker. The book is now a hot commodity on Amazon, with sales raising by more than 6,000 percent in the past 24 hours.

The Washington Post published an article on the exciting event. The headline of the article is "Bill Gates told new grads to read this book. Now it's surging on Amazon". This headline really does tailor to the whole article. The article begins with an opening about Gates' tweets and about how he changed from "a hard-nosed business man intent on shutting out the competition...to that of a wise, inspiring philanthropist seeking to solve some of the world's toughest social challenges." They then went on to cover the pandemonium that was Amazon within the past 24 hours.

Fortune also published an article. However, theirs was a bit different. The headline prefaced the article with "This is the one book Bill Gates says new graduates should read". A headline like that really pulls readers in because of how influential of a person Gates is. Most graduates want to be as successful as him, so of course they want to read his book. This article also differed from the Washington Post's article because they included the actual tweets Gates crafted. Including tweets in your article will really make it appeal to younger audiences which I believe was the target audience of this article.

Although this book came out years ago, I think it's amazing that it's still so important today. I also think it's amazing how one person can really influence an entire group of people to go out there and be successful.

photo originally from: gatesnotes