Rules in life

The list of rules I intend to present in this entry is currently haunting our inboxes, but I felt the message was just too good not to share here. According to it Bill Gates gave a speech for high school kids where he talked about today's youth's misguided concept of reality and how these kids because of that are set 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.

Obviously Mr. Gates worded his speech to specifically apply to high school students, but I think many of the points he makes applies to a much wider demographic. Our expectations when entering the working world straight from school be it high school, college or university, they hardly if ever match up to the reality we meet. The wages aren't what we imagined. Our boss demands more of us, not to mention tolerates way less bullshit than the teacher ever did. We don't have unlimited chances to correct mistakes we make, one too many and we have to look around for another job.

The general life lessons applies to all of us. The world doesn't deal in fairness, and the sooner we realize that, the better equipped we are to handle it. Sometimes bad things happens to good people and fortune is bestowed upon the undeserving. But whining and self-pity will not accomplish anything. If you are unhappy with something in your life, it is on you to do something about it, to make the change happen. It might not always be enough, but it will sure as hell take you further than sitting on your ass and doing nothing.

A teacher of mine once described the way of life the following way:
"We do something we don't enjoy [work], so that we can be able to do the things we do enjoy."

With that he was not insinuating that we don't enjoy whatever it was we chose [or was chosen for us] to do for a living, but he was talking about how we in life make compromises. Nothing comes for free. What we desire is proportional to the effort necessary to achieve it.

However, we always have to remember rule number one for the times where despite our strongest effort, things don't go our way:

Life isn't fair!