“Fear should guide you, but it should be latent.”
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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“If we weren’t still hiring great people and pushing ahead at full speed, it would be easy to fall behind and become a mediocre company. Fear should guide you, but it should be latent. I have some latent fear. I consider failure on a regular basis.”
Bill Gates
“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”
— 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“The axiom that you learn more from your failures than your successes is trite but absolutely true.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten.”
— Bill Gates Primary source“I don’t play in a game where the other people are wise and I’m stupid. I look for a place where I’m wise and they’re stupid.”
— Charlie Munger Primary source“To be sure, we are behind, and will be behind for some time in manned flight. But we do not intend to stay behind, and in this decade, we shall make up and move ahead.”
— John F. Kennedy Primary source“To be great is to be misunderstood.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”
— Bill Gates Primary source