Eleven Rules of Life by Bill Gates?

by rjjohnston on February 16, 2011

An email has been floating around the internet for years saying Bill Gates presented the aforementioned rules to a group of High School students. Unfortunately for the email creators Bill Gates did not make these eleven rules, an educator by the name of Charles Sykes did in his book “Dumbing Down our Kids”.

Nevertheless, these rules are very true and worth mentioning here.

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 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice president with car phone, until you earn both.

RULE 4
If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure.

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 parent’s 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 are. 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.

  • Guest

    Great stuff. Thanks for posting it. We try so hard to create this soft-cornered world of protected entitlement for our kids so they can be happy, when the well-adjusted one is the kid, living in a house with three families and playing soccer in his yard with a flat ball.

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