Life Lessons from Bill Gates

Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.

Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2 : The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5 : Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, ‘learn from them’..

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

Comments ():

Thumbs up, Marina!
I especially enjoyed the 7-th Lesson regarding parents!

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aga! the constant problem of generation gap! )))

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From Snopes (http://www.snopes.com/language/document/liferule.asp):

This list is the work of Charles J. Sykes, author of the book Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, Or Add. Many versions of this list omit the last three rules:

Rule No. 12: Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic. Next time you're out cruising, watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That's what you look like to anyone over 20. Ditto for "expressing yourself" with purple hair and/or pierced body parts.

Rule No. 13: You are not immortal. (See Rule No. 12.) If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven't seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.

Rule No. 14: Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school's a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you'll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now. You're welcome.

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Thank you for sharing the name of real author of the list. I didn't know it. I think I should edit the lesson and add his name! The last lessons are great great too. Why are they omiting them?

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I will be sending this to my two wonderful boys...and read the list at least once per month for the whole of this year...lessons in life - beautiful, lol!

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I'm glad you liked it. I hope your boys will find these rules useful :-)

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It's called false authority syndrome, Marina. Look it up on Snopes (http://www.snopes.com/). In fact, always check with Snopes to find out if the attribution (or the issue) is true. These kinds of lists get hijacked to feed the "joke" emails that people spam their friends with, because more people will forward it if they think a famous billionaire said it, rather than a regular, sensible person.

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Marina ! its really nice. Thanks
Dinesh
http://searchengineers.wordpress.com

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Yep, great list regardles of who came up with it!!!

Kudos Mr. Sykes... thanks for posting Marina!!!

Chris

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@MARINA...
amazin teachins...true to every sense...but wud have never realized if u didnt post it ova here..
specially Rule #7('bout parents)..
cheers..!!!
lolzzz..!!!

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