“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
“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“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”
— Ian Fleming Primary source“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
— Richard Feynman Primary source“The way to win is to work, work, work, work and hope to have a few insights. And you’re probably not going to be smart enough to find thousands in a lifetime. And when you get a few, you really load up. It’s just that simple.”
— Charlie Munger Primary source“If you’d have a servant that you like, serve yourself.”
— Benjamin Franklin Primary source