“Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe ten percent to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want to put it on my business card.”
Bill Gates
Playboy Interview: Bill Gates (Primary source)
The Playboy interview captures the 38-year-old CEO at a pivotal moment: newly married to Melinda French, presiding over a company whose MS-DOS ran on roughly 90% of the world’s PCs, and facing a Justice Department antitrust inquiry that had picked up where a three-year FTC investigation left off.
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“People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“Few skills are more important than knowing how to distinguish what’s true from what’s false.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“The axiom that you learn more from your failures than your successes is trite but absolutely true.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“The type of person who comes up with the brilliant idea isn’t often the best person to turn it into a business.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“But life isn’t hard to manage when you’ve nothing to lose.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Just as animals flourish in niches, people who specialize in the business world—and get very good because they specialize—frequently find good economics that they wouldn’t get any other way.”
— Charlie Munger Primary source“Because people are very careful with the secrets of their own business doesn’t mean that they’ll be careful with the secrets of yours.”
— Ian Fleming Primary source