“In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone.”
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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“In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone. IBM could recover, but in terms of what it was, it’ll never have a position like that again. It was during the glory years, its years of greatest profit and greatest admiration, that it was making the mistakes that sowed the billions of dollars of losses that came later.”
Bill Gates
“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“People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten.”
— 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“Lost time is never found again.”
— Benjamin Franklin Primary source“When you’re good to others, you are best to yourself.”
— Benjamin Franklin Primary source“Insist on yourself; never imitate.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”
— Ian Fleming Primary source