Bill Gates' speech to MT. WHITNEY HIGH SCHOOL in Visalia, California.

To anyone with kids of any age, or anyone who has ever been a kid, here's some advice Bill Gates recently dished out at a high school speech about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school.

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 $40,000 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 are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents' 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.

Behind every success story is a Father-in-Law desperate for his daughters husband to look like he isn't a drag on the family name.

Or a wife with a great lawyer.

Behind every Bill Gates is a couple million guys who thought they had a good idea too.

The official recipe for success in the real world.
Have a building on campus at Yale named after your uncle.
Have a trust fund in perpituity laid by for you by your adoring Mom.
Have a family name traceable to the Mayflower.
Have a set of great grandfathers who killed indians and took their land that happened to have oil in it.
Have a family that bought land next to the superfund site for pennies then had the government clean it up and gentrify the nieghborhood through political gerrymandering.
Kiss the biggest ass in the building.
Hustle old ladies out of their about to be foreclosed homes.
Be born looking like Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt.
Join a wall street brokerage firm as a mail clerk then extort and threaten your way to the middle office and learn to play golf.
I have more advice also.

Or stay broke; and struggle; by working hard and not taking any shit from pin-head managers who want you to laugh at their jokes; vote republican and pay your taxes regularly.

good, bad or indifferent. I grew up in that lifestyle and I'd like to know what happenned to it?
Maybe my parents said the same and theirs before them...

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I have my own definition of how to get by as I am sure you do also. I don't need Bill Gates to explain it to me.

I am not sure what the point of this post concerning Gates was; he was a bright guy; and also very lucky. My dad always said It's good to be smart and lucky but if you have to choose then I'd rather be lucky than smart.