Bill Gates as a point

[DevensMom]

Bill Gates- High School Address to MT. WHITNEY HIGH
SCHOOL in Visalia,CA.

Love him or hate him, he sure hits the nail on the head with this! To anyone with kids of any age, here's some advice.
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.

[TriciaF]

Just gotta jump in and say that whether you like the list or not....Bill Gates did not write or say it. You can read who did at the link below:

www.snopes.com/language/document/liferule.htm

[donnita]

I first read this in Ann Lander's column, and liked it so much I hung it on the fridge for all my daughters to see.

But the one I have doesn't have that last point about working for a nerd someday - maybe Bill added that one himself!

[TriciaF]

www.snopes.com says;

"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. (The list has appeared in newspapers, although not necessarily in this book.) 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.

Advice columnist Ann Landers has printed the first ten items (uncredited) several times, and the list has been used by radio commentator Paul Harvey. The prize for misattribution, however, has to go to The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, which printed the list twice in three weeks in mid-2000, the first time crediting it to "Duluth state Rep. Brooks Coleman of Duluth," and the second time to Bill Gates. "