“Why bother?”Speech for Academic Awards Ceremony, February 2007

When I was here in this auditorium years ago as a student, I remember feeling that certificates were great, but at the same time, a visible token of an invisible victory. Certificates crumple over time, but it seems like awards are hardly ever about a piece of paper. Instead, I think what today’s winners are being congratulated on, is their attitude and habits.

When you think about it, with Valentine’s Day around the corner, those attitudes and habits of faith and perseverance seem like the same features of meaningful long-term relationships. In some way, I think that your perceptions about your grades often mirror those you hold about love and success. Thomas Edison said that, “Success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration,” and someone else once said, “Love is 90% responsibility.” The hard work is not an optional barrier.

Somewhere along the way, I think it becomes pretty clear to anyone that love is not about flowers and cards, and success is not about spotlights and glory. You’ve heard it many times before, mainly because it’s true, and it doesn’t get any sexier any time it’s repeated, but it seems like success is about a whole lot of really unglamorous moments. In my mind I pretty much boil it down to three basic concepts.

The first one is this: physically speaking, I could kiss anyone in this auditorium right now – I’m not going to, so don’t get scared, but theoretically, I could. Yet it wouldn’t mean anything. It would take time to search for the person; and get to them enough to decide if I even wanted to kiss them, if that kiss would be reciprocated, whether it was just lips pressing together or something more. On the same note, you can study your books for four hours a day - but if your heart’s not into it, if you have no larger motive for carrying out those actions, the physical tasks are empty and hollow.

The only way that kissing, or studying, becomes meaningful is when there is justified desire behind it. In my own moments of academic apathy, I remember thinking, “Well, I don’t have to get good grades.” Nothing is an obligation unless you decide it to be so. And the reason that we are applauding these people sitting up the front is that they took the tougher paths regardless, which in my opinion speaks directly to their ability to persist, persist, and persist.

After all, academic excellence requires faith that all the questions you ask in class, all the reading you do, all the homework you give up time with your friends to complete – are all worth it. Like with anything: practice, discipline and motivation are prerequisites for ending up at the final destination. Endurance means adopting a mantra that says someday, what now seems difficult, will eventually be easy.

So, my first point is that there are no shortcuts to anywhere worth going: actions with empty intentions are meaningless. This ties into the second point: you get what you give.

At some point, in some class, we’ve all heard some teacher chirp, “There is no such thing as a stupid question.” To be honest, I think there is such thing. Yet I can see why teachers say this, and I agree with where they’re coming from: if you don’t ask the question, you’re not going to get an answer. And the answers are right there waiting for you to find them. If you don’t experiment, you don’t find out things that you really need to know in order to succeed, whatever your definition of success may be.

When I look around my own life, I can see that the friends which now hold jobs that they enjoy, invested huge amounts of time and energy into finding out what they love. They exposed themselves to a broad range of opportunities. You weren’t asked for anything when you entered this world, but when you spend your time working on something that you can leave behind, something that’s bigger than you are, somehow everything feels different. Better.

And the same applies to school – you need a reason to be here. If you’re not working towards anything that you genuinely care about, life is a lot more boring than it has to be.

These award winners have mastered a skill that you really need when your parents and teachers aren’t around at university: you need the ability to download your own future into your mind. You have to take these images you have of your best path forward and implant them into your mind so that each of your decisions and actions is pitched in that direction. You’re the only one who knows what you even really, really like, when it comes down to it, and so you’re the only who can write your own life to your own liking. If you don’t define it, you can’t find it.

The third concept links the other two together: success is about compromise. Like I said, the successes that we are celebrating today are not about the certificates. Those are pieces of paper that will be gathering dust in your attic in less than a few years, in some cases,

less than a few days. I think that the habits that earned those pieces of paper are what matter: those habits lead to happiness.

When I see a wedding, I always wonder when it is that the couple actually got married. I mean, I know it’s not the second they say, “I do.” It’s not as though two magic words cause lightning bolts to flash and suddenly, the union is announced. Even before this couple steps foot into the church, I mean, they’re already married… in the way that really matters, at least.

The same applies when you step into an exam. You’ve already got your mark before you head into that room, because the exam itself is not the moment when suddenly all that knowledge floods into you.

The real exam is actually when you have to choose whether to listen to your teacher in class or start daydreaming; when you have to decide whether to talk on the phone for another hour or say goodbye and start your homework. As someone once said, the real moment of success is not apparent to the crowd.

And it’s my harsh opinion that if you’re not willing to take the risk, then in some ways you don’t truly deserve the reward. Like I said, real achievements are very personal. While teachers and peers can help, and influence you, and do their bit, it’s ultimately up to you.

It is not your school’s job to put you into university. It’s not your school’s job to make sure you get good grades. Your school will provide the opportunity but you take it up if you want it. What you do, or fail to do, is your responsibility, and yours alone.

Persistence is a habit, and I think the younger you begin to cultivate it, the more rewards it will bring you later on. You don’t break up with your girlfriend or boyfriend the first time you have a fight. If you’re playing a sports game, you don’t get off the field the first time the opponent scores. And you don’t stop studying the first time you fall short of your own expectations – say, you cram really hard and you don’t do as well as you thought you would on a test: you either give up or hit the books even harder the next night.

To have persistence, you have to care about the outcome. It comes back to how what you learn in school is not about school. Yes, it’s safer not to want anything and just to remain on autopilot. It’s when you start taking chances that life becomes scary, it’s when you start reaching further, that you find the chance of losing your balance. But in my opinion, school, and life, can become kind of boring, kind of quickly, if you’re not aiming for something.

So, when you look at it that way, it doesn’t seem like we’re just applauding these award winners for what they’ve achieved here in school. If you can link those three concepts together, you can see that these students have grown the attitudes that people need in order to build careers, raise families, and find relationships: there are no shortcuts to anywhere worth going, you get what you give, and compromise is essential to success.

My applause goes to all the smaller achievements that added up to this moment - the nights at home studying instead of going out; the hobbies sacrificed; the phone calls cut short. Only they know how much work they have truly put in, and those are the opinions that matter.

I’m pretty sure that at some point, each of them would have had at least a brief moment of indulging in some kind of apathy: “It’s too hard. It’s too much effort. It’s too much sacrifice. Why bother?”

And as I see it, you bother because if you don’t, you’re missing the whole point of why we are here in the first place.