There is a meme out there crediting Bill Gates with giving the following advice to high school students:
1. Life isn't easy — get used to it.
2. The world is not concerned about your self-esteem. The world expects you to do something useful for it BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
3. You will not earn $20,000 a month once you leave school. You won't be vice president of a company with a car and phone available until you've managed to buy your own car and phone.
4. If you find your teacher rude, wait until you have a boss. He will not feel sorry for you.
5. Selling old newspapers or working while on vacation is not beneath your social standing. Your grandparents have a different word for it: they call it opportunity.
6. If you fail, it's not your parents' fault. So do not whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
7. Before you were born, your parents weren't as critical as they are now. They only got that way from paying your bills, washing your clothes and hearing you say they're "ridiculous." So before saving the planet for the next generation wanting to fix the mistakes of your parent's generation, try cleaning your own room.
8. Your school may have blurred the distinction between winners and losers, but life isn't like that. In some schools, you don't repeat more than a year and you have as many chances as you need to get it right. This looks like absolutely NOTHING in real life. If you step on the ball, you're fired... STREET!!! Do it right the first time!

9. Life is not divided into semesters. You won't always have summers off, and it's unlikely that other employees will help you with your tasks at the end of each term.
10. Television is NOT real life. In real life, people have to leave the bar or the club and go to work.
11. Be nice to those students that others think are assholes. There is a high probability that you will work FOR one of them.".

Now I don't know if Bill Gates really said any of that and I don't disagree with any of those statements, but I can't help but think that students hearing it will quickly tune it out as more of the same old same old and think, "Okay boomer."

I think a more useful lesson can be learned from Gates' actual career. Find something you love doing, get really good at it, then find a way to get people to pay you for it. We know Gates loved programming. When he stepped down from CEO, he stayed on as a technology advisor for it was the technology he loved.

Now, I could rant at length about the way Gates found to get people to pay him for his software work. I feel he was instrumental in creating the software update and maintenance hell we now accept without question. If only updates resulted in improvements instead of a need for maintenance. But this essay is about advice so I will move on.

Farley an engineer once received the following advice from his boss, "Every job requires you to be a salesman. No matter how good you are at your job, you have to be able to sell yourself." Farley hated sales and marketing. He preferred to focus on doing good engineering. Alas, he knew his boss was right.

As a consultant he found that finding a solution for the customers' problems was not nearly as hard as getting them to accept the solution. The problems existed for a reason and the reason usually was that someone was benefiting from doing things the wrong way. The person benefiting was often the person tasked with finding a solution. They hired Farley not to solve the problem but to tell them what they wanted to hear.

Farley concluded that every job didn't so much require salesmanship as it required being an entertainer. You might think those are the same, but there is a difference in motivation. Farley preferred thinking of himself as an entertainer. Salesmen are doing what they do to make money for themselves. Entertainers care most about pleasing their audience. Once Farley got his customer enjoying his company, they were more willing to accept his solutions.

Life should not be just about making money. It should be about helping others. Entertainment certainly helps. That's not such bad advice, is it?