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Don't work. Be Hated. Love Someone.

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.

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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.

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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
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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.

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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 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, 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.

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