with Quotes “I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.” ― Bill Gates “Computers are great because when you're working with them you get immediate results that let you know if your program works. It's feedback you don't get from many other things.” ― Bill Gates “Some people may call me a nerd. I claim the label with pride.” ― Bill Gates “The climate is like a bathtub that’s slowly filling up with water. Even if we slow the flow of water to a trickle, the tub will eventually fill up and water will come spilling out onto the floor. That’s the disaster we have to prevent. Setting a goal to only reduce our emissions—but not eliminate them—won’t do it.” ― Bill Gates “Business is a money game with few rules and a lot of risk.” ― Bill Gates “Unless we move fast toward zero, bad things (and probably many of them) will happen well within most people’s lifetime, and very bad things will happen within a generation.” ― Bill Gates “times with follow-up questions. Eventually it sank in. The world needs to provide more energy so the poorest can thrive, but we need to provide that energy without releasing any more greenhouse gases. Now the problem seemed even harder. It wasn’t enough to deliver cheap, reliable energy for the poor. It also had to be clean.” ― Bill Gates “[Bill] Gates said he connected with [Eddy] Izzard even though it would appear they have nothing in common — but that might be the point the author is trying to communicate. "I've recently discovered that I have a lot in common with a funny, dyslexic, transgender actor, comedian, escape artist, unicyclist, ultra-marathoner, and pilot from Great Britain. Except all of the above," Gates wrote. "We're all cut from the same cloth. In his words, 'We are all totally different, but we are all exactly the same” ― Bill Gates “But we can’t solve a problem like climate change without an honest accounting of how much we need to do and what obstacles we need to overcome.” ― Bill Gates “In essence, governments can say to each other, “If you want to do business with us, you’ll have to take climate change seriously.” ― Bill Gates “I wanted a woman who could get me out of a Third World prison. Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.” ― Jeff Bezos “Start With the Customer and Work Backward” ― Jeff Bezos “We humans coevolve with our tools. We change our tools, and then our tools change us.” ― Jeff Bezos “You know the business plan won’t survive its first encounters with reality,” he says. “But the discipline of writing the plan forces you to think through some of the issues and to get sort of mentally comfortable in the space. Then you start to understand, if you push on this knob, this will move over here and so on. So, that’s the first step.” ― Jeff Bezos “Position yourself with something that captures your curiosity, something that you're missionary about.” ― Jeff Bezos “Complaining is not a strategy.You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it be.” ― Jeff Bezos “the quality of customer experience a partner delivers is the single most important criteria in our selection process—we simply won’t build a partnership with any company that does not share our passion for serving customers.” ― Jeff Bezos “Second, most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90 percent, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.” ― Jeff Bezos “We believe that it’s technology married with the humanities that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.” ― Jeff Bezos “You collect as much data as you can, you immerse yourself in that data but then you make the decision with your heart.” ― Jeff Bezos “I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.” ― Elon Musk “In terms of the Internet, it's like humanity acquiring a collective nervous system. Whereas previously we were more like a [?], like a collection of cells that communicated by diffusion. With the advent of the Internet, it was suddenly like we got a nervous system. It's a hugely impactful thing.” ― Elon Musk “Don't confuse schooling with education. I didn't go to Harvard but the people that work for me did.” ― Elon Musk “You need to live in a dome initially, but over time you could terraform Mars to look like Earth and eventually walk around outside without anything on... So it's a fixer-upper of a planet.” ― Elon Musk “If humanity is to become multi-planetary, the fundamental breakthrough that needs to occur in rocketry is a rapidly and completely reusable rocket … achieving it would be on a par with what the Wright brothers did. It’s the fundamental thing that’s necessary for humanity to become a space-faring civilization. America would never have been colonized if ships weren’t reusable.” ― Elon Musk “I'm a Nazi! With all my heart!” ― Elon Musk “With automation comes abundance.” ― Elon Musk “Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it’s true. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy.” ― Warren Buffett “It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.” ― Warren Buffett “When I was sixteen, I had just two things on my mind - girls and cars. I wasn't very good with girls. So I thought about cars. I thought about girls, too, but I had more luck with cars. Let's say that when I turned sixteen, a genie had appeared to me. And that genie said, 'Warren, I'm going to give you the car of your choice. It'll be here tomorrow morning with a big bow tied on it. Brand-new. And it's all yours.' Having heard all the genie stories, I would say, 'What's the catch?' And the genie would answer, 'There's only one catch. This is the last car you're ever going to ge tin your life. So it's got to last a lifetime.' If that had happened, I would have picked out that car. But, can you imagine, knowing it had to last a lifetime, what I would do with it? I would read the manual about five times. I would always keep it garaged. If there was the least little dent or scratch, I'd have it fixed right away because I wouldn't want it rusting. I would baby that car, because it would have to last a lifetime. That's exactly the position you are in concerning your mind and body. You only get one mind and one body. And it's got to last a lifetime. Now, it's very easy to let them ride for many years. But if you don't take care of that mind and that body, they'll be a wreck forty years later, just life the car would be. It's what you do right now, today, that determines how your mind and body will operate ten, twenty, and thirty years from now.” ― Warren Buffett “I learned to go into business only with people whom I like, trust, and admire.” ― Warren Buffett “An investor should act as though he had a lifetime decision card with just twenty punches on it.” ― Warren Buffett “I won't close down a business of subnormal profitability merely to add a fraction of a point to our corporate returns. I also feel it inappropriate for even an exceptionally profitable company to fund an operation once it appears to have unending losses in prospect. Adam Smith would disagree with my first proposition and Karl Marx would disagree with my second; the middle ground is the only position that leaves me comfortable.” ― Warren Buffett “When a person with money meets a person with experience, the one with experience ends up with the money and the one with money leaves with experience.” ― Warren Buffett “An idiot with a plan can beat a genius without a plan.” ― Warren Buffett “In some corner of the world they are probably still holding regular meetings of the Flat Earth Society. We derive no comfort because important people, vocal people, or great numbers of people agree with us. Nor do we derive comfort if they don't.” ― Warren Buffett “Derivatives are like sex. It's not who we're sleeping with, it's who they're sleeping with that's the problem.” ― Warren Buffett “stocks of companies selling commodity-like products should come with a warning label: “Competition may prove hazardous to human wealth.” ― Warren Buffett “our experience with newly-minted MBAs has not been that great. Their academic records always look terrific and the candidates always know just what to say; but too often they are short on personal commitment to the company and general business savvy. It’s difficult to teach a new dog old tricks.” ― Warren Buffett “If you see somebody with even reasonable intelligence and a terrific passion for what they do and who can get people around them to march, even when those people can't see over the top of the next hill, things are gonna happen” ― Warren Buffett “You should never test the depth of the water with both feet.” ― Warren Buffett “If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business. If you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10%, then you’ve got a bad business.” ― Warren Buffett