Bill Gates Says This 'Very Bad Habit' Nearly Derailed His Career

Billionaire Bill Gates is worth $175 billion today and helped transform the tech industry by co-founding Microsoft. Things could have looked a lot different if Gates didn't fix a bad habit along the way.

While an undergraduate student at Harvard University, Gates has a bad habit of procrastinating.

“I liked to show people that I didn’t do any work, and that I didn’t go to classes and I didn’t care,” Gates said in a 2005 Q&A session with Warren Buffett, as reported by CNBC.

Gates said he would prepare for tests at the last minute.

“People thought that was funny. That was my positioning: the guy who did nothing until the last minute.”

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Gates recalled the need to break this “very bad habit” when he entered the business world. The billionaire dropped out of Harvard after two years.

“When I went into business that was a really bad habit and it took me a couple years to get over that.”

Gates acknowledged that while procrastination might have seemed like a cool character trait in college, it quickly became a liability in the business world, where last-minute work is generally frowned upon.

“Nobody praised me because I would do things at the last minute.”

Gates said in the business world, he worked hard to reverse course and tried to emulate the students at Harvard “who were always organized and had things done on time.”

While he was able to get rid of the bad habit, Gates confessed in the 2005 interview that he still hadn’t fully learned not to put things off.

“I’m still working on it, but procrastination is not a good habit.”

This article was previously published by Benzinga and has been updated.

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