A great speech – Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

A friend forwarded me this speech by Adrian Tan, the author of the Teenage Textbook (1988), at NTU’s convocation ceremony in 2008.

This message is just so timely for me, as I’m in the pensive, reflective mood.

Apparently, this speech has been making its rounds in other blogs, but I’ll just reproduce the transcript of the speech here:

Written by Adrian Tan, author of The Teenage Textbook (1988), who was the guest-of-honour at a recent NTU convocation ceremony. This was his speech to the graduating class of 2008.

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 true 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.

‘he had been groping and grabbing after certainty, as if it were something he could possess.  he had been demanding a security, a guarantee, which is not granted: and which, if granted, would become a prison.’
—-ursula le guin, ‘the dispossessed’

Listening to and believing in your innerself

Being alone, in a foreign land and living alone in the city, I have plenty of solo time. Most of the time stopping the inner chatters is a challenge, because all I have to talk to is myself.

Having been here for 2 years and looking back, I realised that I have followed my intuition/inner voices many times and that proved to be a pretty effective way of living our lives.

Self discovery is one of the main motivations for me to move away and live by myself, for the past 2 years, I have been trying on and off to have very clear communications with my guides and higher self, but I tend to think that they do not communicate with me in the way I wanted them to, maybe I have not grasped the right way of communicating with them. But looking back, I’m sure they have their ways of making sure the messages come through.

When I first arrived in this city, I was a little shocked by the rental rates, it’s not expensive per se, judging by international standard. But coming from a place where public housings are aplenty (and I was in a position to enjoy them), it’s still a substantially higher amount to pay. Friends around me have been suggesting me to get my own place, but the voices inside told me to not move into that, my circumstances then also did not permit me to jump into the property market. Looking back now, I must say, I was lucky, the property prices have dropped by a fairly big percentage since the 2008 economic crisis, which is more than the total rentals I have paid in the pass 2 years or so. Coupled with the drop in interest rates (I would have been locked into a higher interest rate for years), my on paper savings could well be 2 to 3 times the amount I have paid in rentals.

The above is just one of the many examples of how listening to your inner voice and believing in yourself help. “Take that job, even if it’s just a contractual assignment”, “They are noises, just keep on following your own beliefs”, etc.

Just 2 nights ago, I was feeling a little frustrated with certain things, before I went to bed drained and tired that night, I kind of shouted internally “Will you guys talk to me?!”. I drifted into a deep sleep, woke up earlier than usual feeling energised, and while going through the usual internet surfing routine, I found an entry about communicating with your guides, specifically mentioning the method used by me is not the right way of communication, rather it’s the way that will quiet everything down, including the voices from the guides and angels. In that entry, a better way of communication was suggested, and that’s just the way I’m gonna use from now on. 🙂

Yes, my guides and angels, I know you guys are communicating with me, albeit subtly, but I can always feel your presence, and I know I’m receiving the messages, just not as loud and clear as I wanted them to be. I’ll continue to listen carefully to the messages, until a time when we can all sit down and chit chat at my will. Let’s work towards achieving that in the near future, before 2009 comes to an end.

Some thoughts on our working life

The topic of our work came naturally after education. Sometimes I wonder if we are too attached to our work that we let it define who we are. The line between what we do and we as a person is blurred. But is this necessary?

Moving to a different environment helped me to look at this from a different angle, the life outside of work becomes more obvious, and we do not need to be sucked into our work. Work has become something that helps keep the boredom out and I’m pretty happy spending 8 hours a day at it, no more no less. The good thing is nobody is expecting more than that from me. I may not have a very colourful life outside of my work, but not having to work 12 to 14 hours a day already make me feel a lot more alive.

I’m lucky in the sense that, I may not be totally passionate about my work, but my work happens to be something I’m very interested in. So it’s not difficult for me to feel a certain degree of job satisfaction on an average day, more so when I managed to get a tricky issue resolved.

Having said that, work related concerns still bug me from time to time, things like how do I keep up with the market, the changing technologies, will I still be “employable” after 40. Not to mention the occasional restlessness, the feeling that I may be wasting my life doing something I’m not totally passionate about.

On the other hand, I notice there is a group of people who are totally detached from their work. They come in to the work place, do what they need to do for 8 hours, when the time is up, they pack up and go do their own things, work is never on their minds except for that 8 hours on a work day. I wonder is it because their focus is on something more important to them in their lives. Things like their families, children, that DIY project, a side business, and so on. I don’t think I’m one of them though.

A friend is working in a supposedly great multi national corporation, good enough to be the dream job of many people, with an above average salary, yet the restlessness seems to set in more often now. I can’t help wondering why, is it because she is feeling guilty about not spending enough time with the family, especially her very young children? Is she torned between climbing the corporate ladder and being a parent, a wife, etc? is she feeling that she is not doing something meaningful, although the money may be good? is it…..?

If Life is a game, these are the rules

This was a book that I’ve read many years ago. One of the first “self-help” book I bought.

The author described the “10 rule of life”, the “rules” going from learning about our body, to emotions.

Why this is a good read:

Though the word “rule” is used, the tone is not preachy. It shares concepts and ideas in a easy to read format, and it’s easily understandable.

Having said that, what you take away from this reading depends on your perception and understanding of the contents within the book. Not everyone that I know understands the stuff written in the same way.