11 Rules of Life

Bill Gates is supposed to have written these, but apparently he didn't - they come from a book written someone else! 

UPDATE: This list is the work of Charles J. Sykes, author of the 1996 book Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, Or Add. (Sykes' list was published in numerous newspapers, although it did not appear in his 1996 book. It did, however, form the meat of Sykes' 2007 book, 50 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School: Real-World Antidotes to Feel-Good Education.)

They are good points though...

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 40 thousand dollars 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. 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.

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 are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents' 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; 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 summer 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.

Found a website with the further 3:

12. Smoking does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic. Next time you're out cruising, watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That's what you look like to anyone over 20. Ditto for "expressing yourself" with purple hair and/or pierced body parts.

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.

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 as to be a kid. Maybe you should start now.