Name: ティム・ミンチン UWAアドレス2013 (Tim Minchin UWA Address 2013)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T06:00:33.000Z
Duration: 18 min 17 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

Ladies and Gentlemen please welcome Mr Tim Minchin

In darker days I did a corporate gig at a conference for this big company who made and

sold accounting software in a bid, I presumed, to inspire their salespeople 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.

Software salespeople I think need to hear from someone who has had a long successful

career in software sales not from an overly optimistic ex-mountaineer.

Some poor guy who had arrived in the morning hoping to learn about sales techniques ended

up going home worried about the blood flow to his extremities. 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 a metaphor for sacrifice, the software guy is not going to get it, is he?

Because he didn't do an Arts 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 rhymes scheme in a cookbook. You won't find it and it will bugger up your soufflé.

If you didn't like that metaphor you won't like the rest of it.

Point being I'm not an inspirational speaker. Iíve never ever lost a limb on a mountainside

metaphorically or otherwise and I'm certainly not going 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 itís given me an inflated

So I will now, at the ripe old age of 37-point-nine, bestow upon you nine life lessons to echo

of course the nine lessons of carols of the traditional Christmas service, which is also

You might find some of this stuff inspiring. You will definitely find some of it boring

and you will definitely forget all of it within a week. And be warned there will be lots of

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 echo-locate the

(audience laughs) - Looking for my old poetry teacher.

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 into the abyss of the meaningless of your achievement you'll be almost dead

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. (audience laughs) 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 who encouraged you to

go to uni. Or if you were born into a horrible family that's unlucky and you have my sympathy

but you are 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 child environment would make

decisions that meant you ended up eventually graduated 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. It is also something

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 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 you 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 iron, 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 100 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.

(audience laughs) But don't despair. There is correlation between depression and exercise.

Do it! Run, my beautiful intellectuals run.

Five: Be hard on your opinions. A famous bon mot asserts opinions are like assholes in

that everyone has one. There is great wisdom in this but I would add that opinions differ

significantly from assholes in that yours should be constantly and thoroughly examined.

(audience laughs) I used to do exams in here (audience laughs) - It's revenge.

We must think critically and not just about the ideas of others. Be hard on your beliefs.

Take them out onto the verandah and hit them with a cricket bat. Be intellectually rigorous.

Identify your biases, your prejudices, your privileges. Most of society is 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

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 donít have to be unscientific to make beautiful art,

to write beautiful things. If you need proof - Twain, Douglas Adams, Vonnegut, McEwan,

Sagan and 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 not a body of knowledge nor a belief

system it's just a term which describes human kinds' incremental acquisition of understanding

through observation. Science is awesome! The arts and sciences need to work together to

improve how knowledge is communicated. The idea that many Australians including our new

PM and my distant cousin Nick Minchin believe that the science of anthropogenic global warming

is controversial is a powerful indicator of the extent of our failure to communicate.

The fact that 30 percent of the people just bristled is further evidence still. (audience

laughs) The fact that that bristling is more to do with politics than science is even more