Transcript – Bill Gates -- Graduation
(Note that all transcripts were created from audio recordings, and therefore any mistakes are the transcriptionist's, not the speaker's.)
Filename -- Bill_Gates_Graduation_031122_bdm_transcript.htm
And while they’re leaving, I want to share with you a part of a graduation address by Bill Gates. Now I suspect everybody here recognizes the name of the software mogul, the man in charge of Microsoft, the multibillionaire. He was asked several years ago to speak at a high school graduation. And he gave a short but rather interesting address. He said he wanted to give the graduates some knowledge of things they did not learn in school. He talked about how the “feel good, politically correct” teaching of this day has created a generation full of kids with no concept of reality, and how this would set them up for failure in the real world.
So according to Bill gates, here are 11 rules that kids need to understand about how the real world works.
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 forty thousand dollars a year right out of high school you won’t be a vice-president with a company-furnished car until you earn both.
Rule 4 – if you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss, he doesn’t have tenure.
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. Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way by paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rainforest from the parasites of your parents’ generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 7 – your school may have done away with winners and losers but life has not. In some schools they’ve abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as many times as you want to get you the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.
Rule 8 – 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 9 – Television is not real life. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
And rule 10 -- Be nice to nerds, chances are you’ll end up working for one.
Now I think all of those rules bear some thought but the most important was the first one.
Life is not fair, get used to it.
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