I am including these 14 rules of life which kids won’t learn in school as important life lessons, which I would like to share with you.
This list of fourteen harsh rules were written by author Charles J. Sykes and not Microsoft Bill Gates.
You can find them in Skyes’ book “Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good about Themselves, but Can’t Read, Write or Add“.
Anyway, let’s go through the fourteen rules for the real world aka Charles Sykes 14 Rules:
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 $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.
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 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.
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.
Rule 12: Smoking does not make you look cool. It make you look moronic.
Rule 13: 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.
Rule 14: 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. maybe you should start now. You’ll are welcome.
You should check out Charles J. Sykes’ book “50 Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School: Real-World Antidotes to Feel-Good Education“.