- Life is not fair. Get used to it. The average teenager uses the phrase "It's not fair" 86 times a day.
- The real world won't care half as much about your self-esteem as your school does. This may come as a shock to you.
- Sorry, but you won't make $40,000 a year right out of high school. And you won't be a vice-president or have a car phone, either. You may even have to wear a uniform that doesn't have a designer label.
- If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss.
- Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger-flipping. They called it "opportunity."
- It's not your parents' fault if you mess up. You're responsible for everything you do. Remember this the next time you say "It's my life" and "You're not my boss."
- Before you were born, your parents were not boring. They got that way paying your bills and having to listen to you.
- Life is not divided into semesters. And you don't get summers off. Not even spring break. You are expected to show up every day for eight hours, and you don't get a new life every 10 weeks.
- Smoking does not make you look cool. Watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That's what you look like to anyone over 20.
- Your school may be "outcome-based," but life isn't. In some schools,
you're given as many tries as you want to get the answer right. Standards are set low enough so everyone can meet them. This, of course, bears NO resemblance to anything in real life--as you will soon find out.
Good luck. You are going to need it --- and the harder you work, the luckier you will get.
Four Additional Rules
- Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them. We all could.
Attributed to Bill Gates
- "Expressing yourself" with purple hair and/or pierced body parts does not make you look cool either. (See Rule 9) It makes you look moronic.
- 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.
- 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.
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