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At the age of 13, Bill Gates began spending time with a group of older Cub Scouts who took long hiking trips in the Pacific Northwest. The boys hiked for up to seven days at a time, using only topographic maps to guide them. As they logged hundreds of miles of hiking, the boys became a tight-knit team with specific responsibilities. Gates’s parents accepted that he needed freedom to build confidence and be himself. The trips fulfilled Gates’s early need to build transcendent experiences for himself.

At the same time, Gates was also growing close to a different group of boys who spent their after-school hours working on computer programs for a mainframe computer that their school had access to. Like hiking, computer programming gave Gates a sense of freedom and exploration. In June 1971, while on a particularly cold and difficult hike, Gates mentally began writing a new coding language for a personal computer he recently learned about. Focusing on the code allowed him to escape the reality of the cold, snowy hike. Although he ultimately wasn’t able to use the code on the computer, the seeds of that coding language proved useful years later when he learned of the development of another personal computer.