Bill Gates reveals a lesson he ‘could have learned a lot sooner’ from Warren Buffett: ‘Took far too long…’

Billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have shared a few pieces of financial advice with each other over their three-decade-old friendship. Recently, Gates opened up about one of those lessons. He said it was something he wished he had learned a lot sooner, to clear up his busy schedule and (possibly) be happier and more productive.

“It took far too long for me to realise that you don’t have to fill every second of your schedule to be successful,” Gates wrote on Threads on Thursday. “In hindsight, it’s a lesson I could have learned a lot sooner had I taken more peeks at Warren Buffett’s intentionally light calendar.”

Bill Gates shared that as the CEO of Microsoft, he “had every minute packed” on his schedule for 25 years until he stepped down in 2000. The billionaire also admitted to being a difficult boss who did not hesitate to send requests to employees around 2 am.

“I thought that was the only way you could do things,” Gates had said in a 2017 interview alongside Warren Buffett. The former said he finally learned to cut some slack after checking out the personal daybook of the Berkshire Hathaway CEO. ″[I] remember Warren showing me his calendar… he [still] has days that there’s nothing on it,” Gates said, adding that Buffett’s sparser schedule taught him an important lesson. “You control your time … It’s not a proxy of your seriousness that you fill every minute in your schedule.”

In the same interview, Buffett said, “I can buy anything I want, basically, but I can’t buy time.”