Bill Gates on work-life balance

You can over worship and mythologize the idea of working extremely hard for my particular makeup. I mean it really is true that I didn't believe in weekends, I didn't believe in vacations. I mean, you know, I knew everybody's license plate so I could tell you over the last month when their car had come and gone from the parking lot. So I don't recommend it A I don't think most people would enjoy it. Once I got into my 30s I could hardly even imagine how I had done that because by then some natural behavior kicked in and I loved weekends and my girlfriend liked vacations and that turned out to be kind of a neat thing. Now I take lots of vacations. My 20 year old self is so disgusted with my current self I was sure I would never do anything but ride and coach. Now I have a plane. So it's very much counter revelations have taken place at high speed. But yes, it is nice if during those first several years if you have a team that's chosen to be pretty maniacal about the company and how far that goes, you should have a mutual understanding. So you're not one person expecting one thing, another person expecting another thing. And you'll have individuals who have health or relatives or things that are distracted. But yes, I have a fairly hardcore view that there should be a very large sacrifice made during those early years, particularly if you're trying to do some engineering things that you have to get the feasibility. And in the software world it's very particularly for platforms these are winner take all markets. So the greatest mistake ever is whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is. That is Android is the standard phone platform, non Apple phone platform. That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win and it really is winner take all. If you're there with half as many apps or 90% as many apps, you're on your way to complete doom. There's room for exactly one non Apple operating system and that, what's that worth? 400 billion that would be transferred from company G to company M. And it's amazing to me having made one of the greatest mistakes of all time and there was this antitrust lawsuit and various things that our other assets, Windows Office are still very strong. So we are a leading company. If we'd gotten that one right we would be the leading company. But oh well, the difference between A and D. So this idea that just small differences can magnify themselves, that doesn't exist for a lot of businesses. You know, if you're a service business, it doesn't exist. But for software platforms, it's absolutely gigantic. And so that's partly where you have the mentality of every night you think, am I screwing this up? And eventually, we did screw a super important one.