Bill Gates Regrets Being 'Overly Intense' In His Early Microsoft Career: 'I Didn't Believe In Weekends'

Bill Gates shared with U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak one piece of advice he would give his younger self at the beginning of his career.

Both were answering AI chatbot-generated questions from the Imperial College of London on Friday.

Gates said in those early days, he was kind of “overly intense.” “I didn’t believe in weekends. I didn’t believe in vacation,” he added.

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That boiled down to excluding a lot of people who could have helped him at that time, but they "just didn't fit in." That was due to his "very narrow view of working style, the talking style," the billionaire said.

That was okay for the small early Microsoft Corp MSFT group, he noted. “But then as we got bigger, I had to realize, okay as you get sales teams in, as you get people with families in, you’ve got to think about this. It’s a very long-term thing,” Gates said.

“So I was very intense on myself and I tried to apply that to other people.”

Gates said he could have helped himself by realizing this a little sooner than he did at the end.

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Photo: Courtesy of Red Maxwell on flickr