Bill Gates’ gateways of advice

Love him or hate him, Bill Gates 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!

Rule2: The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule3: 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.

Rule5: 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.

Rule7: 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.

Rule9: 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 in 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.

And finally…If you can read this – Thank a teacher!

Dealing with Dualities

Opposites exist in all aspects of our lives. Often it is in opposites that we find meaning and understanding. For example, through understanding death, can we gain real insight into the meaning of life. All those people who live their lives recklessly or superficially, often discover greater depth to their lives through a near-death experience. Another example is how we often define things by what they are not. How do you define peace? A prevalent definition is it is the state absent of war. The yin-yang is also a great example of the interrelated and interdependent relationship between dualities.

So is duality necessary? Does duality create harmony or conflict? Or both or neither?

Let’s use the analogy of a relationship, because let’s face it, it’s an attractive attention grabber. We’ve heard it a dozen times before of how “opposites attract.” Perhaps, but the question is, if opposites attract, does it hold? Opposites attract because it creates interest and excitement, but surely that must dwindle eventually if the couple disagrees on important matters. Obviously what is important depends on the couple and whether they are willing to compromise. Opposites I can think of are couples with the following dualities:

• One clingy, one independent
• One stingy, one lavishes
• One material, one spiritual
• One committed, one ‘just for fun’
• One a planner, one living day by day (or hour by hour for some people!)
• One practical, one off with the fairies
• One complex, one simple
• etc etc

Now while I’m writing up this list, there’s some dualities that come to mind where duality is very necessary and if there were personalities too similar, the relationship might not work. For example, if there are two really dominant and/or stubborn personalities in a relationship, there would be too much powerplay.

So perhaps dualities are intrinsic and important to relationships, like everything else in life. They provide balance and anchors for the two people. I think that as long as the two people still respect (and even support) the differences in each other, be able to compromise and find the middle ground, it could work.

The one example that I can think of where it won’t work, is if one wants to stay together and the other wants to leave – I think that’s the ultimate dualistic “no-no”.

So if you’re faced with dualism in your life – whether it’s your love life, family, friends, career, study, etc – look at it more objectively and see whether the duality can be used for the positive. If it can’t, then sometimes bringing harmony to your life through letting go it isn’t so bad after all. Like what I said in my previous post about experiencing light through darkness, sometimes life is the way it is, and you don’t need to define your experiences by its opposite.