I do not want to waste any time. And if you are not working on important things, you are wasting time.
As a kid, I was less interested in the physical tinkering than thinking about what we would now call the physics, as opposed to the engineering.
If people ridicule you, look them in the eye and say, 'Yeah, I may have failed, but at least I tried,' and get on with it.
I've never regretted anything I've done, even the things that I've failed at. I've often regretted not trying something really big, because you'll never know.
I started realizing that I wasn't so dumb; rather, most people simply didn't know the answers to the questions that I was interested in-or they didn't care.
As we move towards 8 or 10 billion people on the planet, there's a little less gold per capita. Each one of us will continue to be fighting over an ever smaller percentage of total resources. This is not a happy thought.