Tim Minchin: 'Being an artist requires massive reserves of self-belief', WAAPA - 2019

21 March 2019, WAAPA, Perth, Western Australia, Australia

I am hugely grateful and more than a little embarrassed to be honoured like this. This institution puts out proper extraordinary artists. I was only here for two years, and yet my contemporaries include Graeme Blevins and Tommy O’Halloran and Ben Vanderwal and Libby Hammer and Troy Roberts and James Sandon and Grant Windsor and these incredible people who’ve found a level of craft I wouldn’t be able to approach in my wildest dreams. In this tent alone, there are artists who I swear you’ve put here just to make me feel like the hack that I am. I feel the same as I did when the jazz students used to come and watch our “commercial music” ensemble performances: mildly embarrassed and very threatened. And then the added cruelty of holding the event in a circular room full of mirrors: I’m not much good with the piano but I’m very good with subtext, you bastards, I know you’re telling me to take a good hard look at myself.

With a head like mine, you learn to try not to.

So this week I’m staying at the Crown Metropole hotel. It’s not my usual vibe, but the theatre I’m playing in is right there, and besides if I stay with my parents, the kettle wakes me up at half past six and I’m not having that. Anyway, presumably because my tour is attracting punters, the hotel management upgraded me, so I’m staying in some kind of penthouse suite thing. It’s about the size of my house, and feels like I’m living in an Italian furniture show room. There are just so many couches. I’m staying there on my own, yet I counted, and you could have 90 people comfortably sitting in my hotel room. I don’t know what it’s for. It’s a room built for the sole purpose of making Wankers feel like Legends. Trump would love it, you know.

When you first walk into a room like that, you initially feel really excited, but it is genuinely gross and quite miserable to stay there. That’s worth knowing, I guess, if your plan is to be a Rockstar or a famous actor. It’s not only lonely at the top, but populated by unnecessary chairs. Put that on a fridge magnet.

My time here at WAAPA was quite hard actually. Being an artist requires massive reserves of self-belief, and coming to a place like this is incredibly testing. Of course, I know now that the 2 years I spent here feeling unbelievably bad about myself were simply training for the subsequent 8 years where I felt even worse. Watching beautiful beautiful Graham Wood play piano and just wanting to give up… wanting to cut my fingers off and feed them to a swan, taught me… well, not to. I guess. It was the beginning of a lesson I’m still trying to learn: that comparing yourself to others, in any area of your life, is poison.

It was also hard here because I had really good friends in the acting course, and they were all wandering around in black tights and shagging each other and looking fabulously sweaty, while I was wandering around with the other pianist in my year, who was a sweet guy, but deeply depressed, and every day just reminded me how we were going to be poor for life and that there was no point.

And it was hard because – like you – I was making coffees and pouring beers to pay my rent.

But mostly, it was hard because music had always just been fun to me. Music was a thing you did at parties to pick up girls. It was something I did when I was stressed or sad. It was an escape; I could – and still can – fall asleep playing the piano, and wake up seconds later wondering how my fingers got to where they’d got. And coming here, it was work, suddenly. I had to practice. (The first year I was here remains the only year I ever actually practiced piano. Russell Holmes will confirm I certainly didn’t do any practice in second year. Somewhere a few weeks in it became clear we both preferred just hanging out and chatting.)

But I am so grateful for the two years I spent here. It is impossible to measure the value of what that diploma gave me. Much of what they were teaching me I couldn’t get at the time, but unconsciously, I put the info on some shelf in my brain to be picked up and properly examined later, when I had more time and was feeling less stubborn. I learned musical tools, performance tools, I learned to respect time, I learned to listen, I learned resilience. I learned that dominant 13th shape that is also a minor 6/9 and a dominant 7 sharp 5 sharp 9 and a major 7 sharp 11 and it’s the best shape in the world and Matilda is built on it. I never learned to read music. I don’t know whose failure that is. I’m gonna say Paul Pooley. Is he here?

I guess I’m trying to say to the students here: I know these places can be hard, but keep going. You won’t actually know what you’re really learning until years later. Just listen, keep your humility and stay tough.

Right, if this were a graduation ceremony, my role here would be to give career advice to the graduates. It’s not, but I guess I’ll try to give advice anyway, because I’m quite old now, and giving unsolicited advice is what old white guys are supposed to do. I’m gonna mansplain the arts to you.

It’s actually surprising to me how often I get asked for career advice. Young musos and actors, and parents of stagey little kids… they go, “how do you get a career like you?” And I mean, I get it. I so clearly remember in my teens and twenties thinking, what’s the trick? There must be a trick. But it still takes me aback that they ask me, because my career is so clearly such an absurd fluke. I mean, I simply got lucky. And not lucky like, I was on the bus and I got my umbrella confused with the umbrella of a guy who turned out to be the husband of a record company exec… There was no single moment of luck, nor a series of lucky events. I mean, it’s a fluke because it turned out that having my weird combination of attributes allowed me to make some stuff that happened to find an audience in a particular place and time.

And that’s the short and long of my advice really: there is no trick. You can’t have a career like mine. It’s mine. You have to have your career.

To expand upon that platitude, I’ll tell you three things I reckon are important if you’re serious about a career in music or theatre or dance or film. All three of these are total clichés, but perhaps worth reiterating.

Firstly: you have to get good. Get really good. No short-cut, no business technique, no amount of self-promotion or nice business cards, none of it means anything, really. You just have to be really, really good at what you do. Ideally, be the best. And that takes hours and hours and hours. Time when your mates are taking pills or smoking cones, time when other people are having holidays. You don’t get to have a good work-life balance. It means being a bit obsessed. And if you’re lucky, it won’t suck because you love it. And if you don’t love it, stop now. Don’t do it as a job. There are many more important jobs than being a muso or an actor, or at least as important, get one of those and play music as a hobby.

But if you’re going to do it, you simply have to spend all your time and all your energy and all your money getting good. Sorry.

There is however, a little loophole in this advice. Which is that how you define ‘what you do’ is up to you. I am the best in the world at what I do. Without a doubt. And I can say that confidently, because the number of people I’m competing with is zero. The thing I am best in the world at, is being a science-obsessed, uber-rhymey polemicist pianist singer satirist wanker. I am really, really good at that job. I am the king of Minchinland, population: this idiot.

So be really, really good at what you do. And figuring out what that is also takes hours and hours and hours. I’m sorry.

And this is related to my second bit of advice, which is:

You have to be authentic. Actors, you might authentically look like a Hemsworth and authentically love going to the gym. But I promise, as someone who has been involved in casting on both sides of the couch: all anyone wants to see is you. We want to see how you play the character, how you bring you into a character.

My career began in my late twenties when I finally stopped trying to be what I thought other people wanted from me. I was trying to get acting agents, getting headshots and cutting my hair, changing my name to Timothy, as if that crap ever changed anything. I was trying to get the silliness out of my songs in the hope that I could get a record deal. I was separating all the things I am, because I had identified what I thought was the marketplace available to me, and was trying to be various products that might be consumable. The minute, the minute, I stuck everything I am on the stage… the moment I wore what I wanted, said what I wanted, put together a show that had me doing weird poems and monologues and playing jazz and pop and rock, the moment I got authentic, my life changed.

I’m an odd example, obviously, because I’ve always been obsessed by trying to do lots of different things. But the lesson stands anyway. Your career, whether you wanna be a triple threat on the west end, or a film actor, or a session percussionist: don’t make the mistake of thinking that little old you is not interesting to the world. You have lived a unique life, consumed a unique suite of ideas, marinated in a unique combination of songs and artists and influences. You will have something that no one else has, and identifying that is your key to a beautiful career. And that career might mean you are dirt poor your whole life, or it might mean you get to be a massive star. But it won’t matter, because you won’t be trying to be something that you’re not.

And the third bit of advice: Be kind. Just be kind. To everyone. Always. (Actually you don’t have to always be kind upwards. You’ll come across people above you – a director or producer, a studio boss, an A&R dude – who are arseholes. You’re allowed to tell them to f-off.) But basically you should always be kind. It seems so obvious, but it’s amazing how many people fail to understand its importance. Be kind to the monitor guys, be kind to the fly-mech, be kind to the ushers and the merch people, the gaffers, the make-up artists, be kind to your fellow performers. Whatever happens. Even if there is feedback screaming in your in-ears, even if the air-con doesn’t work in your trailer and you’re freezing, even if you’re under huge pressure and you’re under-slept and working days and gigging nights and you haven’t written a speech you have to write and you’re starving and all you want is some poached eggs and a flat white delivered to your furniture store hotel room but you’ve accidentally left your “do not disturb” sign on the door so the waiter just doesn’t deliver your breakfast for an hour and then when he does, he spills your flat white onto your poached eggs… even then, be kind. If in doubt, double down and be kinder. Not only will it make your life better, but it is really good career advice. The musicians I’m working with on this tour are some of the best players in the country, but that’s only half the reason we sought them out. They are just really, really lovely people. So just be kind. It will bite you on the ass if you’re not. And yes, there are successful arseholes – I’ve worked with a couple of the most famous of them – but, who wants to be one of them? It’s gross.

Music is not magic to me. Being a musician is not particularly romantic. Songwriting is a craft you get better at by doing it over and over again, just like cooking or surgery or painting or sex or handstands. Our ability to make art that resonates correlates very closely to our experience in life. I’m back at authenticity now. We carry our scars and our defeats and victories into how we express ourself. We bring all our experience, all our hours, all our self-loathing and self-love into our craft. At least we should.

Thank you so much for having me.

Tim Minchin: 'You've always wanted to be an actor', Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts - 2015

9 November 2015, Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts, United Kingdom

Not the easiest guy to follow.

I knew Dennis (Kelly) would say something amazing so I made mine rhyme a bit. Not properly just, like, free versey. And it's too long. But like most of what I do it makes up for in internal rhyme what it lacks in brevity.

I'm sorry, it's a bit actor-centric, but I know a lot of you are actors, and I knew Dennis would talk a lot about the other stuff.

So this is a poem I wrote yesterday called 'You've Always Wanted to be an Actor'.

You’ve always wanted to be an actor,
And your friends and you say to each other,
“I want to act because I think story-telling is vital to culture”, or
“I want to act so I may hold up to society a mirror”,
And there’s truth in that,
But let’s be honest, you really want to act
Because it’s really fun, and you quite like being clapped.

So you go to Drama School,
And you learn about shedding your skin
And inhabiting your something something
And you get your head screwed up by Stanislavski
And then recalibrated by Mamet
Or the other way round,
And you learn to scuttle across a stage like a lizard
And to caw like a crow,
And to let yourself go,
And to sing and tap,
And to cry on cue,
And you make all your mistakes,
You have sex with your classmates (and then y’stop doing that),
And you learn to find the rhythm of the bard,
So that every iamb shines but doesn’t creak,
And you work really hard, and change the way you speak
And you… become slowly aware of these relentless waves
Of self-confidence and self-loathing that come and come and come
(And you think the waves will smooth out when you have success
But they don’t and they won’t so the only solution is to
Worry about them less.
Just by the way.)

So you graduate drama school and that’s amazing, brilliant, amazing
And – as you should be – you are proud,
And at the graduation ceremony you watch two clowns
Standing on the set of their mutual fluke
Reading speeches that they wrote the day before,
And you think, “if those idiots can succeed, anything is possible”,
Which is true, in a way,
But not in a way that should necessarily give you confidence,
Due to the randomness… of… well, Dennis.
Look at him.
God does clearly play dice with the universe.

And so, off you go and you get an AGENT. Yippee!
And – oo – let’s say, just hypothetically,
You’re really good-looking.
You’re beautiful.
And you’ve been blessed lets say with hot genes,
You stay slim easily
You go to the gym easily
You have those well-spaced eyes and high cheekbones
And one of those lovely big mouths that kids seem to have these days
And you have found that if you stand still in front of a camera
And look just past the shoulder of the DOP,
And think about a…. cup of tea… or a tricycle…
And the light hits your well-spaced eyes and your high cheekbones just perfectly,
Then we, the audience, will read into your stillness
Grief, or pride, or piety. (Wow)
And you’re also an amazing actor…
A truthful, intelligent actor,
Hard working and skilled etc
But that’s not so much the point,
Because… B eauty.

So you get a role in an indi film.
I mean first you do an advert for cheese,
And a co-op at the King’s Head
(which, although you don’t know it at the time,
Will be the last theatre board you ever tread),
And then a guesty on Coronation Street, yay
And then an arc on Holby City, hooray
And… THEN a supporting role in an independent film
That ends up at Cannes and is seen
By a Rudin or a Weinstein,
And gets distributed across the USA
And so [click] you sign with an agent at CAA,
And a manager at, I dunno, somewhere,
And they tell you that you “should move to LA
Because you will have more opportunities here”,
But it’s clearly because they
Won’t get paid if you’re doing a play
At the fucking National. Will they?
(Just by the way.)

So you do. You move to LA
And you’re sharing a bungalow in Silverlake
With a Canadian actress who thinks everything happens for a reason,
Which you also believe, because no one has ever pointed out to you
That that is a stupid thing to think. (Just by the way)

And as is the tradition,
You struggle for a year,
Coffee shop job between auditions
And then, yes!
You get a well-paid job playing a sexual assault victim on
Two episodes of Season 25 of
Law and Order – SVU
And you buy an SUV and you move into a mid-century-
Modern rental in West Ho,
With a friend of a friend who has a band:
Four banjos, a cellist, and a DJ –
Who once played Coachella
And a YouTube vid of one of their audience members
Choking on a corn dog went viral so now they’re quite popular.

And then, yay, during your second pilot season in LA,
When you’re missing the drizzly comfort of the UK spring
And your mum’s on the phone telling you to
Come home, darling, just come home,
You audition for a new NBC “dramady” –
For a “character who doesn’t say too much in the pilot, but-
Great script, and 16 great writers, and-
They’ll definitely write more for your character after the pilot, so” –
After six-call backs and weeks of anxiety
And after being filmed with the star to test for your “chemistry”,
You get offered the part,
And you –
Little you, bullied in high school for having spotty skin,
Told by your primary teachers that you need to pull your head in
And stop showing off,
Little you who lived with 4 people in a flat in Wood Green,
And worked and worked on your craft and you didn’t give in –
You have a role in a fucking US network television pilot,
And you do not hesitate to sign it:
The contract that says if it goes to series
You will be committed 39 weeks a year for up to eight years.

And yay! They make the pilot,
And it gets picked up,
And it goes to series,
And so…
Your weeks start with a 4:30am pickup on a Monday,
And the crew is great and the cast is great
And although half of your day is
Spent in your trailer,
And it’s more boring than you’d foreseen,
You’re in pretty much every scene,
Generally doing something with a computer
Slash Bunsen burner
Slash non-specific screen
In the background,
So you’re always on set.
And inevitably, by week’s end,
Production has fallen behind 6 hours,
So you don’t actually get
Off set
For your weekend until 2am on a Saturday morning,
And you sleep all Saturday,
And on Sunday you learn your sides,
And reset, rolling, speed… and action!

And that’s fine.
Cos the series is a hit!
And you’re on the telly,
And the newspapers in the UK
Write about you saying some thing you don’t remember saying,
And the Daily Mail comments on your hair and your abs and your arse,

And when it goes to Season 2, and the ratings go higher,
You get a pay rise and now you’re making a million quid a year,
And you are proper famous,
And you are friends with proper famous people,
And you know Sandra and George and Bono and Elon Musk,
And you buy a fenced-in house in the hills with a pool,
And you’re single, but, y’know, that’s cool.
You find it hard to meet people, because, y’know,
They come to you with so many assumptions about who you are,
About your hair and your abs and your arse.

And then after season 3,
When the show’s not quite so hot,
And the ratings start to drop,
The network gets the writers to simplify the script,
Cut expenses, cut the complex bits,
And on they forge, churning out the eps,
Motivated by nothing but $$$,
And every year, the ratings go down a bit more,
The show loses it’s edge a bit more,
The ideas get a bit more
Repetitive,
And your character is always saying the same shit,
And you can’t remember the last time
You cared about a line,
The last time you expressed an idea
That had any value. What. So. Ever.

And one Sunday, you have some of your famous friends around,
For a drink,
These beautiful, kind, generous Americans,
You do adore them …
But whom you always feel you can’t quite reach,
Personalities like a left-over pudding that has cling-wrap
Pulled so tight across the bowl
That you don’t notice it’s there at all until you go to dig in
And your spoon bounces off.
And so you’re sitting by your pool with these kind, cling-film friends,
And the thought enters your head
That you’d really like to walk down the street to have a drink at a pub,
But you can’t, because you’re too famous to leave your house.
You can’t leave your house.

This is not a warning, to be clear,
If that becomes your story, you’ll be sweet.

I wrote that because in ten years,
When those of you who don’t end up being
Knightly, or Laurie, or Cumbers,
When you have done a hundred jobs,
And, like the boxer, you
Carry the reminder of ever glove that blah blah blah
You’ve borne the slings and arrows of outrageous… tweets,

I hope you remember that in our game,
Success doesn’t mean what they think it means.
And even if you get the type of success
That they think is success,
It won’t necessarily be for the best.

The people I knew at your age,
The folks with whom I built sets and rigged lights
And acted and drank and dreamed,
They are…. Everything.
Mike is one of the finest drama teachers you would ever meet,
Jenny gathers the memories of the elderly and turns them into plays
And Brian makes puppets,
And Christine runs a theatre company that tells stories of refugees,
And Tommy is a vet,
And Iggy makes music with Aboriginal Elders,
And Trossy is a mum,
And Justo has a millions children, and paints, and is a barrister
(oh you should hear his voice, it’d be like being defended by Lear)
And Toby’s a pirate,
And Bec runs an events company, and…

To state the obvious
I observe among my friends
No correlation
Between wealth and happiness,
Or fame and happiness.

The happy ones work hard, generally
And they are generous, generally.
And they generate, generally, valuable ideas.

Which is your job, (just by the way):
To put into the world valuable ideas.

So look for stories that are worth telling
And lessons that need teaching,
And tell them and teach them,
And stay passionate,
And I’ll see ya at the pub.

Lots of love.”

Speakola is a home for all types of speeches, both famous and non famous. The commencement speech is one of the most popular genres. Tim Minchin delivered a classic at University of WA in 2013, 'Life is Meaningless'. Click photo to listen/read.

Tim Minchin: 'It’s an incredibly exciting thing, this one, meaningless life of yours', UWA - 2013

17 September, 2013, University of Western Australia, Australia

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 presume, to inspire their salespeople to greater heights, they’d forked out 12 grand for an Inspirational Speaker who was this extreme sports dude who had had a couple of his limbs frozen off when he got stuck on a ledge on some mountain. It was weird. Software salespeople 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 arrived in the morning hoping to learn about better sales technique 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’s not going to get it, is he? Cos 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 rhyme scheme in a cookbook: you won’t find it and you’ll bugger up your soufflé.

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, cos… well I’ve never really had what most would call a proper 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 38 – bestow upon you nine life lessons. To echo, of course, the 9 lessons and carols of the traditional Christmas service. Which are also a bit obscure.

You might find some of this stuff inspiring, you will find some of it boring, and you will 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 not making sense.

So listen up, or you’ll get lost, like a blind man clapping in a pharmacy trying to echo-locate the contact lens fluid.

Here we go:

1. You Don’t Have To Have A Dream.
Americans on talent shows always talk about their dreams. Fine, if you have something that you’ve always 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 meaninglessness of your achievement, you’ll be almost dead so it won’t matter.

I never really had one of these big 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 that 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.

2. Don’t Seek Happiness
Happiness is like an orgasm: if you think about it too much, it goes away. 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 Australophithecus Afarensis got eaten before passing on their genes.

3. Remember, It’s All Luck
You are lucky to be here. You were incalculably lucky to be born, and incredibly lucky to be brought up by a nice family that helped you get educated and 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 were still lucky: lucky that you happened to be made of the sort of DNA that made 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 the 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 going to lectures while 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.

4. 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 well, therefore you’re not overwhelmed by existential angst. You can’t be Kant, and you don’t want to be.

Play a sport, do yoga, pump iron, 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. And don’t smoke. Natch.

5. Be Hard On Your Opinions
A famous bon mot asserts that opinions are like arse-holes, in that everyone has one. There is great wisdom in this… but I would add that opinions differ significantly from arse-holes, in that yours should be constantly and thoroughly examined.

We must think critically, and not just about the ideas of others. Be hard on your beliefs. Take them out onto the verandah and beat them with a cricket bat.
Be intellectually rigorous. Identify your biases, your prejudices, your privilege.

Most of society’s arguments are kept alive by a failure to acknowledge nuance. We tend to generate false dichotomies, 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 grads 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, 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 not a body of knowledge nor a system of belief; it is just a term which describes humankind’s 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 – 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% of this room just bristled is further evidence still. The fact that that bristling is more to do with politics than science is even more despairing.

6. Be a teacher.
Please? Please be a teacher. Teachers are the most admirable and important people in the world. You don’t have to do it forever, but if you’re in doubt about what to do, be an amazing teacher. Just for your twenties. Be a primary school teacher. Especially if you’re a bloke – we need male primary school teachers. Even if you’re not a Teacher, be a teacher. Share your ideas. Don’t take for granted your education. Rejoice in what you learn, and spray it.

7. Define Yourself By What You Love
I’ve found myself doing this thing a bit recently, where, if someone asks me what sort of music I like, I say “well I don’t listen to the radio because pop lyrics annoy me”. Or if someone asks me what food I like, I say “I think truffle oil is overused and slightly obnoxious”. And I see it all the time online, people whose idea of being part of a subculture is to hate Coldplay or football or feminists or the Liberal Party. We have tendency to define ourselves in opposition to stuff; as a comedian, I make a living out of it. But try to also express your passion for things you love. Be demonstrative and generous in your praise of those you admire. Send thank-you cards and give standing ovations. Be pro-stuff, not just anti-stuff.

8. Respect People With Less Power Than You.
I have, in the past, made important decisions about people I work with – agents and producers – based largely on how they treat wait staff in restaurants. I don’t care if you’re the most powerful cat in the room, I will judge you on how you treat the least powerful. So there.

9. Don’t Rush.
You don’t need to already know what you’re going to do with the rest of your life. I’m not saying sit around smoking cones all day, but also, don’t panic. Most people I know who were sure of their career path at 20 are having midlife crises now.

I said at the beginning of this ramble that life is meaningless. It was not a flippant assertion. I think it’s absurd: the idea of seeking “meaning” in the set of circumstances that happens to exist after 13.8 billion years worth of unguided events. Leave it to humans to think the universe has a purpose for them. However, I am no nihilist. I am not even a cynic. I am, actually, rather romantic. And here’s my idea of romance:

You will soon be dead. Life will sometimes seem long and tough and, god, it’s tiring. And you will sometimes be happy and sometimes sad. And then you’ll be
old. And then you’ll be dead.

There is only one sensible thing to do with this empty existence, and that is: fill it. Not fillet. Fill. It.

And in my opinion (until I change it), life is best filled by learning as much as you can about as much as you can, taking pride in whatever you’re doing, having compassion, sharing ideas, running(!), being enthusiastic. And then there’s love, and travel, and wine, and sex, and art, and kids, and giving, and mountain climbing … but you know all that stuff already.

It’s an incredibly exciting thing, this one, meaningless life of yours. Good luck.

Thank you for indulging me.

Tim Minchin's acclaimed musical, Matilda, is crurrently touring Australia. You can purchase tickets here.