11 Things You Will Not Learn At School

The following post was pulled from an email one of my associates shared with me. The comments by Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, seemed to me to be very appropriate and relevant regarding the life issues we are attempting to address in this blog. I would very much like to know your own reactions to his comments. H. Fireman

Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a high school about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talked about how feel-good, politically correct teaching has created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and about how this approach to teaching fails to address very important realities in life, which sets these students up for failure in the real world.

Listed below are his Eleven Rules regarding the things these kids have not been taught:

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 hamburgers 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 is not your parent’s 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 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 the real world.

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. [Note from H.F.: And they have to pay the bill for the things they order before leaving.]

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you will end up working for one.

"A Leap of Faith, A Moment of Terror"

When I was a child, I knew that there were clear boundaries in my life: things I was not allowed to do and places I was not allowed to go. My Mom and Dad made sure I understood what places were safe and which ones presented a danger to me. So as I child, I learned to play things safe.

Inside my safety zone, I lived in a very neat, orderly, organized world. Everything had its place. I knew what to expect and I felt secure within these boundaries. I was given a model of how the world was supposed to be run and I was taught always to be prepared for whatever happened to me in my life. I suppose that is all well and good when one is a child.

This notion of always being prepared also implied that there is a "right" way to do things and an "incorrect" way as well. As a child, I just blindly accepted that the "rules of the game," as defined by my parent's world, were necessarily correct and true. I believed that I had to live within the boundaries those rules established for my thinking and my actions.

Later, during my teenage years, I was growing up in the tumultuous world of the 1960's. This was the decade that gave us man venturing into space, the Viet Nam War, the civil rights movement, Woodstock, student takeovers on college campuses and Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. My generation challenged the sometimes stifling notions and conventions of the day. My generation openly declared its right to color outside the lines and to think outside the box. By the end of the 1960's, the comfortable and secure order of my world had been shattered and replaced by a chaotic world in which any idea or value could be openly questioned or tossed aside. Certainty, in any realm of thought, became a thing of the past and accelerating change in the way we understood the world became the norm. Our world has not been the same since.

Of course, during the seventies, many of the rebels and revolutionaries of my generation eventually settled down and became housewives, businessmen, college professors and stock brokers. The world seemed to be returning to some semblance of order and sanity. However, the reality was that our lives had been irrevocably changed. No one pretended any longer that if one played by the rules and did all the "right" things, everything would turn out okay for us. The essential inequality and unfairness of human society was laid bare for everyone to see.

It was now okay to openly acknowledge that the real world is not always a fair or predictable place. Everyone does not always play by the rules. Life is not always fair. Often the playing field is anything but level. Very seldom are all things equal. Most of all, our lives are inherently messy and that messiness just goes with the territory.

But we should not assume that the uncertainty that these realities bring to our lives is necessarily an entirely bad thing.

In a recent issue of REALSIMPLE, I came across a really lovely passage in an article by Molly O'Neill. The title of the article is Ready or Not. She talks about living a life ruled by the notion that one has to be prepared for everything that you do in life. At this point in her life, she has found the flaw in that argument and I wanted to share it with you.

Reality does not always dovetail nicely with theory. My... belief in... Being Prepared, I realized, neither guaranteed a particular outcome nor allowed room for chance, luck, spontaneity, or serendipity, the things that keep life interesting. Any push past the zone of the familiar requires a leap of faith, a moment of terror, a howling careening through unmapped territory. "Ready, or not, here I come!" my brothers and I would cry during our backyard games of hide-and-seek when we were young. It was the unknown that caused our hearts to race, the unpredictable that caused our shrieks of discovery to echo throughout our tidy, well-planned community.

By now, you have already figured out that there is always going to be a factor of uncertainty in many of the endeavors we set out to do in the course of our lives. We will have to abandon the safe assumptions that we held within our safety zones and sometimes we have to just wing it, taking sometimes huge risks with untested strategies, with no guarantees of a successful outcome. Sometimes life simply requires what Molly O'Neill called "... a leap of faith.."

In my own life, I have experienced that rush one feels when venturing into a new and uncharted territory. Let me tell you, it is an exhilerating feeling one does not easily forget. I don't go there often enough, but I truly savor the feeling I get when I find myself in those times and places.

At the age of 60, I have tried to make some sense of all this. I have learned from all my experiences that we are going to miss something very important if we choose to live lives which are just a little too orderly and scripted... if we never venture beyond the safe boundaries we contruct for our lives... if our lives aren't just a bit messy and uncomfortably unpredictable. We should want to change and grow as a person during our journey. We cannot do that if everything we think and do is laid out for us by someone else. Living that way may be safe, but it is hardly a satisfying way to live.

We should see our lives as marvelous adventures... a life-long journey during which we will never be sure of what is going to happen next. It is these very elements of the unknown and the unpredictable that keep things exciting and interesting for us until the day we make our exit, stage left.

Kindest Regards,

Howard Fireman
Houston Tx.

Welcome to Life 101 - The Basics

I was inspired to create this completely separate blog because a friend of mind, Syfox, a young fellow from Sydney, Australia, posted a very intriguing entry into his blog a few days ago. He asked those who read that post to comment on their take on the meaning of life. Now that is a serious question.

I considered his question. At 60, I have concluded that we humans are incapable of answering that question with any authority. We can only suggest what life means to each of us individually, which is at best going to be a semi-educated and highly subjective guess. And one person's view on this subject my be unsuitable or irrelevant to another person.

I decided that there are other questions that we really ought to be asking ourselves instead.

• What are some of the realities and hard truths that we will discover in our journey?
  
• What are the sorts of things we should be doing as make the journey from life to death?
• What strategies should we employ to make the journey an easier one?
  
• What sorts of general rules and values do we need to be aware of along the way?
• What are some of the things we should definitely not be doing, if we want to simplify our lives and avoid unnecessary problems?

I realize that my future posts to this particular blog won't be especially definitive observations on life or even that necessarily profound. If anything, I am just trying to present some random thoughts on the subject of how to get through life in one piece and in reasonably good condition. In fact, you will probably already be fully aware of some of observations you will read here.

However, I take the trouble to do this because we humans are somewhat peculiar creatures. Even if we have learned certain bits of common knowledge about life that we know to be "true", we still sometimes forget that hard-won wisdom we have learned along the way and proceed to do some pretty counterproductive and stupid things anyway. Sometimes we don't always learn from our mistakes the first time... or the second time... well, you get the idea. So it can't hurt if I remind you about some things you may already know. And I know I will have to come back and reread some of my own stuff here to remind myself, as well. I understand that in this regard I am probably no better than anyone else.

Take from this blog what is useful and valuable to you. Should you need to refresh your memory from time to time about what you read here, it will always be waiting right here for you.

Please understand that you play an important role in making this blog a success. Here's where you come in. You can enter a comment any time on any of the posts that will appear here. I cordially invite you to share with us your own experiences and your own insights as a comment. If you will do that, all of us will hopefully be a little wiser than we were before. You see, it makes a lot of sense to learn from the experiences and the mistakes of others. If every one of us can learn to make that a habit, we might be able to avoid so many of the unnecessary and stressful situations in our own lives.

Enough with the intro. Now it is time for me to get this show on the road.
Looking forward to hearing from you, when you stop by and visit Life 101 - The Basics.

Kindest regards,

Howard Fireman
Houston, Texas
USA