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Bill Gates, 11 Things You Won’t Learn In School

Posted: 13 May 2008

Love him or hate him, he sure hits the nail on the head with this! To anyone with kids of any age, here’s some advice.

Bill Gates Picture

 Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.
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.

If you can read this - Thank a teacher!
If you are reading it in English - Thank a soldier.

The Power of Focus

Posted: 12 Sep 2007

If you are anything like me, you probably find yourself thinking of new projects, things to learn and items that need to be completed. The process in itself can be beneficial to your business and may be a required ingredient for success. The trick is to know where to draw the line.

The trap I kept falling into was that wasting my time writing new ideas down and then gathering more information on those ideas. And when I ran across something I didn’t understand, I took the time to research it and learn it.

The results were disastrous! By diverting time away from my current project (doing any number of things on other projects) I would be killing my momentum and would stretch simple projects out for months. Obviously, it was a terrible trap. The important project would suffer as I simply ran of time at the end of the day.

At first, I was terrible about time management and was easily distracted by issues that were “urgent” but NOT important. The result, I would get discouraged with the project at hand and would drop it due to lack of results. I even told myself that many of these projects would take too much time to learn and a long time to complete.

Can you see the trap? It gets even worse! If you keep on doing this for long enough, you will actually program your subconscious mind NOT to complete a project EVER. You will forever keep failing. Eventually this character flaw may even filter through to other areas of your life.

The Internet is jam-packed with information. And, there’s a lot of rubbish to wade through. But there is also a lot of valuable information available and a lot to learn, so developing your online business to a profitable stage can take forever. The only solution is to start employing the tremendous power of focus.

Here’s the secret …you must never be working on more than two projects at a time, EVER. Preferably, work on just one project at a time, particularly if you only do your online venture on part-time basis.

Don’t get distracted. Don’t dilute your time. Work on your project, whatever it may be, until completion. The results may not be as you expected and many times they may be disappointing. But you will know, in your heart, that you did your best, and you will improve. Then, and only then, begin working on the next project.

By all means, plan your future. If you want to work on the future ideas, set an hour per week aside for doing just that. And then each week spend that hour thinking about your new projects, write them down. When the time is up, go back to your current project.

If you develop and use the power of focus, your completion rate will get better with each project and you’ll soon become successful. On the other hand, if you keep falling into the time traps of too many projects or too much information, you will get nowhere.