Philanthropist, COVID prepper, harbinger of doom in Ted Talks, and founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates is wishing that he had kicked up his feet and just chilled out a bit more. In his recent commencement speech to the forestry and engineering graduates of Northern Arizona University, the icon of the Gen X '90s looked kindly on slacking but admitted that he drove himself and his colleagues really hard back in early days of the web, all while outlining the five things he wishes he’d heard before he didn’t graduate. Gates famously dropped out of college to pursue his Microsoft dream, which many might say worked out fine for him, if fine means earning billions of dollars.

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Hindsight is 20/20, especially after becoming wealthy, and it appears as if Gates has his own ghost of Christmas past visiting him. The self-professed most important piece of advice Gates gave the crowd of fellow engineers was, “You are not a slacker if you cut yourself some slack.” Acknowledging that it took a long time to let that lesson sink in for himself, Gates joined the many exposing the benefits of greater work-life balance. These days, after chipping away at his $125 billion dollar fortune via his many philanthropic efforts—including finding that alcohol just doesn’t have any health benefits after all—one of the world’s richest men is reassessing how intense he needed to be to get to the top.

“When I was your age, I didn’t believe in vacations,” Gates notes, in remarks posted to his blog, Gates notes. He told the crowd that when he was 22 years old, he thought he would be working at Microsoft forever. “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.” Looking at it now, he encouraged the new graduates to learn from his mistakes. “Take a break when you need to. Take it easy on the people around you when they need it, too.”