The way I see it, there were two great triumphs, two things that I'm proudest of. One is the economic recovery, in which the people of America created -- and filled -- 19 million new jobs. The other is the recovery of our morale. America is respected again in the world and looked to for leadership.

But I was not really planning to create what seems to be a lasting impact. I was just always about personal expression and pride in who I was as an Australian Indigenous girl. It was more about me sharing all of me with the world. But, certainly after all these years, it makes me really proud.

I am most proud of the legacy of my students and postdocs. The real triumph, for me, is witnessing the transformation of the individuals who have passed through my lab. They arrive with potential and leave making substantial impacts. Seeing them flourish professionally and contribute meaningfully to our field is, without a doubt, my greatest accomplishment.

Well, I’m very proud, this is true, I mean. But, you know, it’s also being with the right people, in the right place, at the right moment. And, you know, it’s a team work too.

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.

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.

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.

I was too emotional about something not going too well.

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.