Inspiration Speech

My friend sent me this inspirational speech...so I thought I'll share it with everyone

Enjoy


Life and How to Survive It

Below is a speech to the graduating class of 2008 at NTU
convocation ceremony last week by Adrian Tan, a
litigation lawyer and the author of The Teenage
Textbook. Read it! It's hilarious but very meaningful.



I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee
Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for
inviting me to give your convocation address. It's a
wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here
for ten minutes without fear of contradiction,
defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean
and more so as a husband.

My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way
except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She
corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert
skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising
at home during conversations between her and me.

On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I
spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make
my living being disagreeable.

Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our
matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a
litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is
always the wife.

And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to
the men: when you've already won her heart, you don't
need to win every argument.

Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of
you may already be married. Some of you may never be
married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will
enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many,
many times. Good for you.

The next big milestone in your life is today: your
graduation. The end of education. You're done learning.

You've probably been told the big lie that "Learning is
a lifelong process" and that therefore you will continue
studying and taking masters' degrees and doctorates and
professorships and so on. You know the sort of people
who tell you that? Teachers. Don't you think there is
some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the
business of learning, after all. Where would they be
without you? They need you to be repeat customers.

The good news is that they're wrong.

The bad news is that you don't need further education
because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may
come as a shock to some of you. You're in your teens or
early twenties. People may tell you that you will live
to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life
expectancy.

I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the
term to mean the average life span of a group of people.
But I'm here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what
you expect from your life.

You may be very happy to know that Singapore is
currently ranked as the country with the third highest
life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and
tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in
those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one
thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless.
There's very little danger of any of our citizens having
their pulses raised by watching us play in the World
Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a
gentle and restful nap.

Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years.
Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while
Singapore women live more than five years longer,
probably to take into account the additional time they
need to spend in the bathroom.

So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you'll
have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to
live long and prosper.

Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping
dead when they're 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite
possibly just after finishing their convocation. They
would be very disappointed that they didn't meet their
life expectancy.

I'm here to tell you this. Forget about your life
expectancy.

After all, it's calculated based on an average. And you
never, ever want to expect being average.

Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward
to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family.
You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to
find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much,
where your responsibilities are so much.

That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to
it, it will be an awful waste.

If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You
will be living your life according to boundaries set by
average people. I have nothing against average people.
But no one should aspire to be them. And you don't need
years of education by the best minds in Singapore to
prepare you to be average.

What you should prepare for is mess. Life's a mess. You
are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not
fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life
happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad
things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by
moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.

Don't expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just
live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in
time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you
are physically the fittest you will ever be in your
entire life and you are probably looking the best that
you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is
all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.

What does this mean for you? It is good that your life
is over.

Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you
the many wonderful things that you can do when you are
free.

The most important is this: do not work.

Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its
very nature, it is undesirable.

Work kills. The Japanese have a term "Karoshi", which
means death from overwork. That's the most dramatic form
of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more
subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit,
your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there's
nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust.

There's a common misconception that work is necessary.
You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They
tell you they are "making a living". No, they're not.
They're dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing
lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and,
at worst, harmful.

People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work
lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The
slogan "Arbeit macht frei" was placed at the entrances
to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense.

Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing
something you hate so that you can spend the small
remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may
never reach that end anyway.

Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find
something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again.
You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it,
and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in
itself.

I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a
litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I
didn't do that, I would've been in some other type of
work that still involved writing fiction – probably a
sports journalist.

So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I
don't imagine you will need to look very hard. By this
time in your life, you will have a very good idea of
what you will want to do. In fact, I'll go further and
say the ideal situation would be that you will not be
able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this
time you should know what your obsessions are. If you
enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior,
you might become a teacher.

Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you,
become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a
restless enthusiasm. If you don't, you are working.

Most of you will end up in activities which involve
communication. To those of you I have a second message:
be wary of the truth. I'm not asking you to speak it, or
write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or
impossible to do those things. The truth has a great
capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that
the closer you are to someone, the more care you must
take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there
is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There
is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth,
without thought to the consequences. It takes great
maturity to appreciate the value of silence.

In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know
it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never
fool the person in the mirror.

I have told you that your life is over, that you should
not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I
now say this to you: be hated.

It's not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who
hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to
the human race has been hated, not just by one person,
but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it
has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused,
murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.

One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it's
often the case that one is hated precisely because one
is trying to do right by one's own convictions. It is
far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be
accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one
will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the
average. That cannot be your role. There are a great
many bad people in the world, and if you are not
offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is
a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.

The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.

I didn't say "be loved". That requires too much
compromise. If one changes one's looks, personality and
values, one can be loved by anyone.

Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may
seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to
happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false.
Modern society is anti-love. We've taken a microscope to
everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It
far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than
otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love
requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only
kind of work that I find palatable.

Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration,
learning, attraction and something which, for the want
of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone,
we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We
learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We
celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.

Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is
also important to choose the right person. Despite
popular culture, love doesn't happen by chance, at first
sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly,
sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It
is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers
every storm.

You will find, that when you have someone to love, that
the face is less important than the brain, and the body
is less important than the heart.

You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your
love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be
loved back. Its value is to inspire you.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure
when it comes to loving someone. You either don't, or
you do with every cell in your body, completely and
utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes
you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.

Don't work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love
someone.

You're going to have a busy life. Thank goodness there's
no life expectancy.