The one thing that I learned from Clint, of the many things I learned from Clint, is to always trust your instinct, and don’t think about it too much.

Run toward the hardest problems. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what that meant.  But over time, I realized this was the best advice I ever received. Hard problems teach you what you're capable of.  Fast forward a bit … 12 years ago, I got a chance to put that lesson to the test. I had the opportunity to become CEO of AMD. AMD had enormous potential, but the company had been through some tough years. Some of my mentors thought taking the job was risky. But for me, this was my dream job. This was what I’d been training for all those years. The opportunity to work at the bleeding edge of technology on problems that really mattered. The first thing we had to figure out was what we wante

And I never forgot what he said, Bill Clinton. He looked at me, and he said, “You know, Leon, you can be the greatest OMB director in the history of the world, but nobody’s going to remember you if the White House has fallen apart!” I never forgot that.

Elliot, he has such passion for what it was we were doing that he instilled that passion in me. He was like, “Just go for it. Make it happen.” And I would give him some wild idea, and he’d say, “Go try it.” It was that next set of just knocking down the fear of failure. Just go try anything.