After This You’ll Change How You Do Everything! – Tim Minchin

in Darker days I did a corporate geek at a conference for this big company who made and sold accounting software in a bid I presumed to inspire their sales people to Greater Heights they'd forked out 12 grand for an inspirational speaker who was this extreme sports guy who had had a couple of his limbs Frozen off when he got stuck on a Ledge on some Mountain it was weird software sales people I think need to hear from someone who has had a long successful and happy career in software sales not from an overly optimistic ex- Mountaineer some poor guy who had arrived in the morning hoping to learn more about sales techniques ended up going home worried about the blood flow to his extremity it's not inspirational it's confusing and if the mountain was meant to be a symbol of life's challenges and the loss of Limbs and metaphor for sacrifice the software guy is not going to get it is he because he didn't know an ass degree did he he should have Arts degrees are awesome and they help you find meaning where there is none and let me assure you there is none don't go looking for it searching for meaning is like searching for a rhyme scheme in a cookbook you won't find it and it'll bugger up your souffle if you didn't like that metaphor you won't like the rest of it point being I'm not an inspirational speaker I've never lost a limb on a Mountainside metaphorically or otherwise and I'm certainly not here to give career advice because well I've never really had what most would consider a job however I have had large groups of people listening to what I say for quite a few years now and it's given me an inflated sense of self-importance so I will now at the ripe old age of 37.9 bestow upon you nine life lessons to Echo of course the nine lessons of carols of the traditional Christmas service which is also pretty obscure you might find some of this stuff inspiring you'll definitely find some of it boring and you'll definitely forget all of it within a week and be warned there will be lots of hokey similes and obscure aphorisms which start well but end up making no sense so listen up or you'll get lost like a blind man clapping in a pharmacy trying to echolocate the contact lens fluid looking for my old poetry teacher here we go one you don't have to have a dream Americans on talent shows always talk about their dreams fine if you have something you've always wanted to do dreamed of like in your heart go for it after all it's something to do with your time chasing a dream and if it's a big enough one it'll take you most of your life to achieve so by the time you get to it and are staring to the into the abyss of the meaninglessness of your achievement you'll be almost dead so it won't matter I never really had one of these dreams and so I advocate passionate dedication to the pursuit of short-term goals be micro-ambitious put your head down and work with pride on whatever is in front of you you never know where you might end up just be aware the next worthy Pursuit will probably appear in your periphery which is why you should be careful of long-term dreams if you focus too far in front of you you won't see the shiny thing out the corner of your eye right good advice metaphor look at me go two don't seek happiness happiness is like an orgasm if you think about it too much it goes away foreign keep busy and aim to make someone else happy and you might find you get some as a side effect we didn't evolve to be constantly content contented Homo erectus got eaten before passing on their genes three remember it's all luck you are lucky to be here you are incalculably lucky to be born and Incredibly lucky to be brought up by a nice family that helps you get educated and encourage you to go to UNI or if you're born into a horrible family that's unlucky and you have my sympathy but you're still lucky lucky that you happen to be made of the sort of DNA that went on to make the sort of brain which when placed in a horrible childhood environment would make decisions that meant you ended up eventually graduating uni well done you for dragging yourself up by your shoelaces but you were lucky you didn't create the bit of you that dragged you up they're not even your shoelaces I suppose I worked hard to achieve whatever dubious achievements I've achieved but I didn't make the bit of me that works hard any more than I made the bit of me that ate too many burgers instead of attending lectures when I was here at uwa understanding that you can't truly take credit for your successes nor truly blame others for their failures will humble you and make you more compassionate empathy is intuitive but is also something you can work on intellectually four exercise I'm sorry you pasty pale smoking philosophy grads arching your eyebrows into a Cartesian curve as you watch the human movement mob winding their way through them the miniature traffic cones of their existence you are wrong and they are right well you're half right you think therefore you are but also your jog therefore you sleep therefore you're not overwhelmed by existential angst you can't be can't and you don't want to be play a sport do yoga pump eye and run whatever but take care of your body you're going to need it most of you mob are going to live to nearly a hundred and even the poorest of you will achieve a level of wealth that most humans throughout history could not have dreamed of and this long luxurious life ahead of you is going to make you depressed but don't despair there is an inverse correlation between depression and exercise do it run my beautiful intellectuals run your opinions a famous Bon mot asserts that opinions are like in that everyone has one there is great wisdom in this but I would add that opinions differ significantly from and that yours should be constantly and thoroughly examined I used to do exams in here just Revenge we must think critically and not just about the ideas of others be hard on your beliefs take them out onto the veranda and hit them with a cricket bat be intellectually rigorous identify your biases your prejudices your privileges most of society's arguments are kept Alive by a failure to acknowledge Nuance we tend to generate false dichotomies and then try to argue one point using two entirely different sets of assumptions like two tennis players trying to win a match by hitting beautifully executed shots from either end of separate tennis courts by the way while I have Science and Arts graduates in front of me please don't make the mistake of thinking the Arts and Sciences are at odds with one another that is a recent stupid and damaging idea you don't have to be unscientific to make beautiful art to write beautiful things if you need proof Twain Douglas Adams Vonnegut McEwen Sagan Shakespeare Dickens for a start you don't need to be superstitious to be a poet you don't need to hate GM technology to care about the beauty of the planet you don't have to claim a soul to promote compassion science is n