It's commonly believed that the words of wisdom below - titled "Rules Kids Won't Learn In School" - originated from Bill Gates (former CEO of Microsoft). Another view is that they can be credited to a number of authors.
The list is actually the work of author Charles J Sykes, and was published in numerous newspapers.
- Life is not fair; get used to it.
- The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
- You will NOT make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a car phone, until you earn both.
- If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.
- Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.
- If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
- 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 closet in your own room.
- Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades; 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.
- 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.
- Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
- Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
- Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic.
- You are not immortal. 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.
- 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.
However, Bill Gates can be credited with some words of wisdom himself, and the following were taken from his book "Business @ The Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System"
- insist that communication flow through e-mail
- study sales data online to share insights easily
- shift knowledge workers into high-level thinking
- use digital tools to create virtual teams
- convert every paper process to a digital process
- use digital tools to eliminate single-task jobs
- create a digital feedback loop
- use digital systems to route customer complaints immediately
- use digital communication to redefine the boundaries
- transform every business process into just-in-time delivery
- use digital delivery to eliminate the middle man
- use digital tools to help customers solve problems for themselves