So I’ve grown tired of the endlessly circulating "Bill Gates' Rules for Life" graduation speech that never actually happened. Had any of the last generation of business, technology, or intellectual leaders followed them we would still be using paper ledgers to build Ford Pintos. These rules are about as far from what we should be teaching students as one can get.
Let's think about what the rules would really be in today's economy.
Rule 1: Life isn’t fair. The people who want you to get used
to it usually benefit from it at your expense. Don’t get used to it; do
something about it.
Rule 2: The world doesn’t care about your self-esteem. But
if you wait until you accomplish something to feel good about yourself, you’ll
never accomplish anything.
Rule 3: Whether you make $60,000 a year right out of college
has a lot more to do with your parents’ social position than anything you did
in college.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait until your co-workers make fun of you for not knowing the difference between till (what one does to a field) and ’til (a contraction of until). Words matter in real life; your teachers know that.
Rule 5: You will not get hired to flip burgers that once you
have a college degree because employers will see you as overqualified. If you
don’t have a degree, it is unlikely that there are any opportunities for promotion
beyond fry cook.
Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault. But
the fact that you run away from the inevitable ass-chewing by someone grumpy
about kids these days rather than learning from your mistakes is the fault of someone at
least as old as your parents.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents were ending apartheid
in South Africa, banning the CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer, ending
the Cold War, and convincing the world that there is, in fact, something wrong
with a man groping his secretary’s ass. Please do save the rainforests.
Rule 8: Schools without winners and losers where you get as
many times to get it right as you can try doesn’t bear any resemblance to real
life, except for the real lives of most of the entrepreneurs who’ve remade the
world in the last 30 years. Failure is only permanent if you don’t keep trying:
remember that Apple once fired Steve Jobs.
Rule 9: Employers today expect you not only to put in the
effort to get the needed tasks done but also to figure out what matters to you and
use that to contribute to the organization. Google gives every employee 20% of their time to work on their passion. That led to Gmail, Google Docs, Google
Maps, and the Egyptian Revolution.
Rule 10: Television is not real life. In real life, people
bring laptops to the coffee shop so they can get work done without driving an
hour each way to work in an office for 40 hours a week that a company has to heat,
light, and clean for 168 hours a week.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. But recognize when the person
talking to you is a disgruntled relic of a dying economy, and tell them to fuck
off.
Awesome re-write!
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