Bill Gates

My last piece of advice is the one I could have used the most. It took me a long time to learn. And it is this: You are not a slacker if you cut yourself some slack. When I was your age, I didn't believe in vacations. I didn't believe in weekends. I pushed everyone around me to work very long hours. In the early days of Microsoft, my office overlooked the parking lot—and I would keep track of who was leaving early and staying late. But as I got older—and especially once I became a father—I realized there is more to life than work. Don't wait as long as I did to learn this lesson.

I read Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature a few years ago and got to talk to him about it after, which was a lot of fun. I reviewed it for my blog, Gates Notes, because I wanted other people to read it, love it, and hopefully learn from it the way I did. It's probably my favorite book and the one I recommend most often.

Microsoft was at the center of the personal computer revolution, and particularly the creation of a software market where you went out to lots of companies, and encouraged them to write software for different applications, mundane applications, wild applications. That idea that you would encourage people to be creative, and build software, and there would be a whole industry around that.