“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
“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“If you always tell people why, they’ll understand it better, they’ll consider it more important, and they’ll be more likely to comply. Even if they don’t understand your reason, they’ll be more likely to comply.”
— Charlie Munger Primary source“Where should we go? I don’t care. Anywhere you want. Anywhere we don’t know people.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“My life used to be full of everything. Now if you aren’t with me I haven’t a thing in the world.”
— Ernest Hemingway Primary source“Lead the ideas of your time and they will accompany and support you; fall behind them and they drag you along with them; oppose them and they will overwhelm you.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte Disputed