In this episode, I sit down with Jo Groves to revisit one of the most unconventional commencement speeches of the last decade: Tim Minchin’s 2013 address at the University of Western Australia.
Minchin offered nine life lessons that are funny, provocative, and occasionally counterintuitive: you don’t have to have a dream, don’t make happiness your goal, remember how much of life is luck, exercise, be hard on your opinions, be a teacher, define yourself by what you love, respect people with less power than you, and don’t rush.
Jo and I unpack each of these ideas and explore why they still resonate more than a decade later. Along the way, we talk about ambition, uncertainty, humility, health, curiosity, power, purpose, and the strange pressure we place on ourselves to have life figured out.
It’s a conversation about taking life seriously without taking yourself quite so seriously, questioning some of the advice we’re usually given, and perhaps discovering that a meaningful life doesn’t require a perfect plan.
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