I love finding videos like this, motivational speeches are actually useful for me as I found out years ago. I remember sitting in an auditorium at an awards ceremony for Durham Universities Aim Higher scheme - bored out of my mind. It was the night before a huge school trip to France so me and my friends were overly excited, we had just had our taster day at Sixth Form which had further confused me about life in general because A Level Physics suddenly didn't seem as fun as it had seemed on paper and here I was sat in a room with a guy in front of me just pacing up and down, silent.
No-one in the room spoke, they just watched this guy pace. Sometimes he would make eye contact mostly he wouldn't and then suddenly he started shouting at us. He started shouting at us about life, and what we wanted to accomplish and how we were going to do it, where we were going to study, what we were going to study and how that would eventually effect our lives. Then he just stopped and started pacing again.
I wish I could tell you why he did that, and he did give us an explanation that I've since forgotten, something about waking us up to reality? All I know is it worked.
When he started speaking normally we all couldn't take our eyes off him, we were hanging on his every word about his life growing up in a rough area of London where most people had written him off. He told us of how that chip on his shoulder spurred him to make his life what he wanted despite all odds being against him and that's exactly how we should approach life. His speech was articulate, he spoke in a manner that demand respect and attention and I don't know I just remember going home and researching everything I could about sixth form and my different options. So whatever he set out to do worked for me.
Ever since then when I need a bit of motivation I research my favourite actors/writers/directors and see if they've ever given a commencement speech, sometimes a motivational speech needs to be given at the beginning of your degree as well as the end. At the moment my favourite is Christian Borles not the most well known actor off broadway but a well rounded one at least.
The downside to this approach is it only works well if you already have a goal you need to be motivated to fulfil and the flaw in my plan is I don't know what that goal is. One of the things the AimHigher scheme equipped me with was the ability to plan out my life, my plans ranged from being a chemical engineer, to being a rollercoaster engineer, getting a music scholarship and attending the Royal School of Music to being a playwright and director. Not having a plan is terrifying for a person who has literally been planning their life on paper in lovely colour coded tables and charts, yet the plan always falls through.
The upside to not having a plan is that you weigh your options, and the fact that plans in the past have failed even though you have given them full credence even if just for a day, just means there is one less misleading possibility in the world and you are one step closer to finding the right one.
So now I'm reading, reading about writing (The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth) a great book poking fun at Shakespeare and his methods, musical theatre composition (Sondheim on Music by Mark Eden Horowits) an insight to the technical composition of Steven Sondheim, composition for film (Soundtrack Nation by Tom Hoover) a compilation of interviews with top film composers. Watching movies and documentaries, The Sherman Brothers showing the lives of the top disney composers behind Mary Poppins, Jobs a Steve Jobs biopic, The Pixar Story an amazing insight to an incredible creative company, Waking Sleeping Beauty the story of Disney animation and Six by Sondheim because I need to keep the theme of Sondheim running here.
This is a very long way of saying I'm still here, I'm still working but right now I don't have much to show for it other than a fountain of currently useless knowledge about people who have already done what I want to do.
