OK, so this hangs on the wall at work, and I figured I’d share it, ’cause I think it’s kind of neat. Though it did come from Bill Gates. It’s a list of 11 rules Gates (we’ll just call him “Money”) thinks high school and college don’t teach you that they should. Money says that most people nowadays are simply set up for failure in the real world… this comes out of Money’s book “Business at the Speed of Thought.”
1. Life is not fair; get used to it.
2. The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
3. You will NOT make 40K a year right out of high school. You won’t be a VP with a car or a phone, until you earn both.
4. If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure.
5. Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. You grandparents had another word for burger-flipping. They called it opportunity.
6. If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes - learn from them.
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 are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents’ generation, try ‘delousing’ the clothes in your own room.
8. You school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades; they will let you try as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
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.
10. Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to their real jobs.
11. Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.