William Henry Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, author, philanthropist, and humanitarian. He and his business partner Paul Allen founded and built the world’s largest software business, Microsoft. Also, with his wife Melinda, Bill Gates chairs the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private charitable foundation. Inspirational Bill Gates quotes will show you how to succeed in life, motivate you to take action and encourage you to change your world.
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Famous Bill Gates Quotes
I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.
Of all the statistics in health, death is the easiest, because you can go out and ask people, Hey, have you had any children who died, did your siblings have any children who died? People don’t forget that.
This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.
If you take from the most wealthy and give to the least wealthy, it’s good. It starts to balance out.
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
Unfortunately, in rich world health, innovation is both your friend and your enemy. Innovation is inventing organ replacement, joint replacement. We’re inventing ways of doing new things that cost $300,000 and take people in their 70s and, on average, give them an extra, say, two or three years of life. And then you have to say, given finite resources, should we fire two or three teachers to do this operation?
The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
I watched the piles of feces go up the conveyor belt They made their way through the machine A few minutes later I took a long taste of the end result: a glass of delicious drinking water.
Everyone needs a coach. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast, or a bridge player.
If you want to improve the situation of the poorest two billion on the planet, having the price of energy go down substantially would be the best thing you could do for them.
In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count, like customer satisfaction and performance you thrive on that.
You may have heard of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. There’s another day you might want to know about: Giving Tuesday. The idea is pretty straightforward. On the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, shoppers take a break from their gift buying and donate what they can to charity.
Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10 percent to business thinking. Business isn’t that complicated. I wouldn’t want to put it on my business card.
Married life is a simpler life. Who I spend my time with is established in advance.
Don’t compare yourself with anyone in this world if you do so, you are insulting yourself.
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.
We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.
I admire leaders in science, people who really figure things out like Richard Fineman or people who work on vaccines, tons of people working on the HIV vaccine. There are leaders in business, people like Warren Buffett, who’ve got a certain approach they take that is pretty amazing. There are product innovators like Steve Jobs were, where he gets behind a concept and does a fantastic job.
Don’t make the same decision twice. Spend time and thought to make a solid decision the first time so that you don’t revisit the issue unnecessarily. If you’re too willing to reopen issues, it interferes not only with your execution but also with your motivation to make a decision in the first place. After all, why bother deciding an issue if it isn’t really decided?
If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.
Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don’t think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without talking about the other.
Microsoft is involved in setting some fairly key standards and people are afraid of it because they think, Geez, they are quite capable. It’s daunting, I suppose.
If you show people the problems and you show people the solutions, they will be moved to act.
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
To win big, you sometimes have to take big risks.
My dream is that every child has enough food to eat, good medical care, and the chance to go to school and even attend college.
A bad strategy will fail no matter how good your information is, and lame execution will stymie a good strategy. If you do enough things poorly, you will go out of business.
It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.
Business people need to shake off the notion that information is hard to get.
One thing people underestimate is how markets don’t allow anyone to do anything except make better and better products. There’s not much leeway. The world is a lot more competitive than most people think, particularly in a high technology area. If a company takes its eye off improving its products, if it tries to do anything that would be viewed as an exercise of power, it’ll be displaced very rapidly.
Only a few businesses will succeed by having the lowest price, so most will need a strategy that includes customer services.
I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There’s never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again.
Customers want high quality at low prices and they want it now.
Life is not a continuous process, there’s some sort of finite number of achievements that defines your life.
A company’s ability to respond to an unplanned event, good or bad, is a prime indicator of its ability to compete.
Discrimination has a lot of layers that make it tough for minorities to get a leg up
Reward worthy failure experimentation.
I have to admit that business-type thoughts do sneak into my head: I hope our customers pay us, I hope this stuff is decent, I hope we get it done on time. The little additions and subtractions that one has to do. Take sales, take costs and try to get that big positive number at the bottom.
Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.
When making choices, or setting policies about the economy, education or medicine, society is best served by electing people who are particularly hardworking, intelligent and interested in long term thinking.
It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.
I remember in 1980 or 1981 looking at a list of people who had made a lot of money in the computer industry and thinking, Wow, that’s amazing. But I never thought I’d be on that list. It’s clear I was wrong. I’m on the list, at least temporarily.
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.
Microsoft has had many, many successful products. I’m committed to one company. This is the industry I’ve decided to work in.
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one.
We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.
We get Comfort from those who agree with us, but we get Growth from only those who don’t agree with us !
To win big, you sometimes have to take big risks.
If your goal is to make the world a better place, one thing you can do is pick a specific challenge that you really care about. Then, learn as much as you can about it and try to volunteer your time to help an organization that is working in this area. While you’re doing that, look for creative new ways to use technology to tackle parts of the problem that you come in contact with.
I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.
I failed in some subjects in exam, but my friend passed in all. Now he is an engineer in Microsoft and I am the owner of Microsoft.
Patience is a key element of success.
I believe technology will continue to become more affordable and more people will have the chance to use it. This will help more people get medical care and a good education.
The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can’t solve extreme poverty and disease, isn’t just mistaken. It’s harmful.
I read an hour almost every night. It’s part of falling asleep.
Everyone needs a coach. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast, or a bridge player.
By helping us to be more productive, technology lets us to spend less time focusing on survival, and more on solving other challenges.
Don’t compare yourself with anyone in this world, if you do so, you are insulting yourself.
I definitely think leaving kids massive amounts of money is not a favor to them.
I can understand wanting to have millions of dollars, there’s a certain freedom, meaningful freedom, that comes with that. But once you get much beyond that, I have to tell you, it’s the same hamburger.
Television is not real life. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
It is hard to sell Congress and the American people on foreign aid. Is it harder to do that than it is to sell billionaires on the idea that they should give all their money away.
Life is not fair get used to it!
Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
My grade point average went from a 2.2 to a 4.0 over the summer. I wanted to get straight A’s. I decided to get straight A’s. I didn’t want people to think I was dumb. And when you get straight A’s once, it’s easier.
When a country has the skill and self confidence to take action against its biggest problems, it makes outsiders eager to be a part of it.
I do normal kind of contributions, particularly for people who are going over to Africa and help highlighting global health, and that’s tended to be pretty bipartisan in nature because of the coalition there exists fortunately around these global health issues. But I don’t think my backing, putting a lot of money into political contributions is a way I’m going to try and help improve the world.
Money has no utility to me beyond a certain point.
The internet is just a passing fad.
Our success has really been based on partnerships from the beginning.
