There is a list floating around the internet called “Rules Kids Won’t Learn In School,” which was originally from a book by Charles Sykes called “Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why America's Children Feel Good about Themselves But Can't Read, Write, Or Add.” While many people attribute it to Bill Gates, it’s actually all the work of a man most people have probably never heard of and whose credit for his work has been inadvertently given to someone else. The list includes 14 of what you might call “hard truths,” or things that are true about life but are pretty hard to swallow for most of us. We’d all like to believe that life is easy and that we will have successful futures simply because we want to. But, unfortunately, life isn’t easy, and, according to Sykes (or Gates, depending on whom you ask), it will be even harder if we don’t accept that we need to put in the work necessary to ensure we have the futures we want. Two of the 11 items on the list stuck out to me most because they seem the most obvious to me – and yet are the most difficult for me to accept.
“The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.”
It’s true that, most of the time, you’ll feel like you’re completely on your own in the professional world. There won’t be someone looking out for you, helping you figure yourself out and paying you to do it. It won’t matter whether you are confident in who you are or not. No one is going to give you a job just because you can’t figure out what else to do. You are the only one who is going to care about or for you. But even if you don’t quite know who you are or how to feel about yourself now, you should feel good about who you’re trying to become and what you’re trying to accomplish. You should be working to become a person of whom you can be proud. You don’t need to wait to accomplish something to feel good about yourself as long as you know that you’re trying to accomplish it.
It’s important to remember that wherever you end up, as long as you’re working toward something better, you’ll keep moving. And that’s what’s important – that you keep moving toward something you can feel good about. Because if you keep moving and keep trying to be whatever you’re driven enough to work to become, you’ll know that you were the one who got yourself ahead at every turn. You can have the satisfaction of knowing that, despite what people may have told you about who you could be, you helped yourself get closer and closer to where you wanted to go without the help of anyone who told you that you couldn’t.
So Sykes is right. You can’t wait around soul-searching and waiting for someone to come along and tell you you’re worthy of pursuing your dreams. Whether you believe it or not, being human makes us worthy of pursuing nearly anything we want to achieve. The question is whether, in the face of failure and obstacles thrown in our paths, we will choose to take these challenges as signs of defeat or use them to learn and to shape our futures into something new with or without the help or encouragement of others.
“Life isn’t fair – get used to it!”
It’s true, honestly. Life isn’t fair. The little time we have in life is spent in constant competition with ourselves and with others. At every point in our lives, we are met with hardships that we couldn’t see coming, we’re met with people who refuse to believe in us or who willfully tear others down, and we’re constantly taken aback by how unfair everything seems to be. It feels unfair because it is. There’s no way to escape or outrun the fact that no matter what we do and no matter how much we want to believe that we’ll get something because we deserve it, life is unpredictable, and we’re not the only ones who can influence our futures.
We aren’t all blessed with the same opportunities from the get-go. We aren’t all able to afford the same luxuries that others can like shoes and phones and college degrees. Life is not set up in a way that promises anything to anyone, and it’s most unkind to those who, despite knowing that they’re not, realistically, going to receive any breaks, still believe that they should and, somehow, will. If you’re someone who’s hoping that someone will hand you a job when you graduate high school or set you up with an opportunity that will change your whole life, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. You’re going to see that, just as the world doesn’t care about your self-esteem, it doesn’t care about giving you what you need or deserve. Your future is in your own hands, and it’s coming so much faster than you think. It might seem like tomorrow, or it might seem like months or years or a lifetime away, but I can promise you that your future is already happening. It might as well already be gone. Because, before you know it, tomorrow will be years ago, and that future that seemed like a lifetime away will have passed you by without a second glance.
So if you find yourself thinking, “Life isn’t fair,” don’t just think it means you should accept defeat. Life certainly wasn’t fair for Sykes, who wrote this book and whose work was wrongfully attributed to Gates so often that Snopes.com had to get in on the rumor mill and post the list itself with correct attribution. This list is telling no one to accept defeat. It’s putting you on your guard, warning you that, at every turn, obstacles in life will try to defeat you, and it’s how you handle these situations – whether you are able to build a future despite the unfairness that you face and whether you are able, at the end of the day, to say that you knew life would be challenging and you still chose to pursue your dreams anyway – that will define your life.
-Hope Swedeen
When have you faced challenges that have made you think “life’s not fair?” How have you found the motivation to pursue your goals despite the obstacles life has thrown your way?
“The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.”
It’s true that, most of the time, you’ll feel like you’re completely on your own in the professional world. There won’t be someone looking out for you, helping you figure yourself out and paying you to do it. It won’t matter whether you are confident in who you are or not. No one is going to give you a job just because you can’t figure out what else to do. You are the only one who is going to care about or for you. But even if you don’t quite know who you are or how to feel about yourself now, you should feel good about who you’re trying to become and what you’re trying to accomplish. You should be working to become a person of whom you can be proud. You don’t need to wait to accomplish something to feel good about yourself as long as you know that you’re trying to accomplish it.
It’s important to remember that wherever you end up, as long as you’re working toward something better, you’ll keep moving. And that’s what’s important – that you keep moving toward something you can feel good about. Because if you keep moving and keep trying to be whatever you’re driven enough to work to become, you’ll know that you were the one who got yourself ahead at every turn. You can have the satisfaction of knowing that, despite what people may have told you about who you could be, you helped yourself get closer and closer to where you wanted to go without the help of anyone who told you that you couldn’t.
So Sykes is right. You can’t wait around soul-searching and waiting for someone to come along and tell you you’re worthy of pursuing your dreams. Whether you believe it or not, being human makes us worthy of pursuing nearly anything we want to achieve. The question is whether, in the face of failure and obstacles thrown in our paths, we will choose to take these challenges as signs of defeat or use them to learn and to shape our futures into something new with or without the help or encouragement of others.
“Life isn’t fair – get used to it!”
It’s true, honestly. Life isn’t fair. The little time we have in life is spent in constant competition with ourselves and with others. At every point in our lives, we are met with hardships that we couldn’t see coming, we’re met with people who refuse to believe in us or who willfully tear others down, and we’re constantly taken aback by how unfair everything seems to be. It feels unfair because it is. There’s no way to escape or outrun the fact that no matter what we do and no matter how much we want to believe that we’ll get something because we deserve it, life is unpredictable, and we’re not the only ones who can influence our futures.
We aren’t all blessed with the same opportunities from the get-go. We aren’t all able to afford the same luxuries that others can like shoes and phones and college degrees. Life is not set up in a way that promises anything to anyone, and it’s most unkind to those who, despite knowing that they’re not, realistically, going to receive any breaks, still believe that they should and, somehow, will. If you’re someone who’s hoping that someone will hand you a job when you graduate high school or set you up with an opportunity that will change your whole life, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. You’re going to see that, just as the world doesn’t care about your self-esteem, it doesn’t care about giving you what you need or deserve. Your future is in your own hands, and it’s coming so much faster than you think. It might seem like tomorrow, or it might seem like months or years or a lifetime away, but I can promise you that your future is already happening. It might as well already be gone. Because, before you know it, tomorrow will be years ago, and that future that seemed like a lifetime away will have passed you by without a second glance.
So if you find yourself thinking, “Life isn’t fair,” don’t just think it means you should accept defeat. Life certainly wasn’t fair for Sykes, who wrote this book and whose work was wrongfully attributed to Gates so often that Snopes.com had to get in on the rumor mill and post the list itself with correct attribution. This list is telling no one to accept defeat. It’s putting you on your guard, warning you that, at every turn, obstacles in life will try to defeat you, and it’s how you handle these situations – whether you are able to build a future despite the unfairness that you face and whether you are able, at the end of the day, to say that you knew life would be challenging and you still chose to pursue your dreams anyway – that will define your life.
-Hope Swedeen
When have you faced challenges that have made you think “life’s not fair?” How have you found the motivation to pursue your goals despite the obstacles life has thrown your way?
RSS Feed