Being overly critical.

Self-doubt and a reoccurring fear that people would prefer the other Alfred Molina.

I am unable to use scissors.

The inclination to pretend I read a friend’s book when maybe I didn’t completely finish.

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.

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.

When I was younger, I thought that was all you needed. If you understand physics, how hard can it be to run a team? The idea that some skills, like managing people, are not correlated with scientific IQ — in fact some of them are negatively correlated to scientific IQ — took me a while to figure out.

Satya is very good at extracting the maximum value from my time and making sure I look at all the important things. He’s very thoughtful, good at working with people, working through problems in a calm sort of way.

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.

The one area where the breakthrough isn’t taking place, and it’s tough, is very inexpensive broadband access to homes or even small businesses. The price of broadband has not gone down. And there’s nothing in the next two or three years that’s really going to change that. So if I had a wand and I could ask for one more hardware technology miracle, it’d be some way of having $20-a-month broadband to homes and small businesses.