I often repeat to them something that — not my mentor, but a senior scientist at the NIH — said to me once. We were having lunch together. I was despondent, despondent because nothing had worked. I had been there a year. And this guy said to me, “Look,” he said, “do you know the difference, Bob, between an average scientist and a world class scientist?” I said no. He said, “Here’s what it is.” He said, “For the average scientist, maybe one percent of their experiments work. But for the world class guy, the world beater, it could be as high as one-and-a-half or two percent.” And then that really stuck with me because it’s really true.

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

Harold Prince went to see it and he wrote me a letter saying don’t be discouraged about this because actually there’s some quite good songs in here. But he also said something which stayed with me all my life, which is that you can’t listen to a musical if you can’t look at it, by which he was actually saying that the designs for Jeeves were absolutely hideous.

Her lesson all the time was “To them to whom much has been given, of them will much be required.”

Boy, being a parent is a hard job, I think, because in parenting you want your kids to like you. Too much sometimes. It’s a hard line to find between doing what’s necessary to give them the tools to be good kids and make good decisions and all that, versus just completely not giving them a chance to accomplish anything because you do everything for them. I kind of feel like it’s okay if these kids go out and make a few mistakes, because they’re going to learn. The last ten years have been interesting, because I’m a stepparent to three kids, and I’m a father to two kids, an older and a younger. And it’s a real interesting dynamic.