You Don’t Have To Have A Dream: Tim Minchin’s ‘science-loving, pragmatic-progressive, reality-romantic’ view

In the 48 hours before Tim Minchin got to his feet in front of 225 graduating students at UWA, he sat down and poured out a speech about nine life lessons — a funny, whimsically brutal examination of what begets a meaningful existence. He didn’t really think about it being heard by anyone outside that room at the time — he can’t remember if he knew it was being recorded — but once online, the 2013 speech went swiftly viral. A couple of hundred million views later and the relatively off-the-cuff address turned into an important moment in Minchin’s creative career; the proliferation of his “science-loving, pragmatic-progressive, reality-romantic worldview” to a global audience. “Probably a pretty good argument for not thinking about s..t too much,” he drolly notes now. But recently, Minchin has found himself thinking a lot more about that speech, as he wrote his first non-fiction book — a collection of three commencement addresses, with new introductions to put them in the context of his life at the time and the wisdom gained since. You Don’t Have To Have A Dream, from which the book draws its name, is the first of the life lessons Minchin advocated as he was presented with an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters (he has three honorary doctorates, which he jokes makes him “indisputably the greatest Dr Minchin ever” despite his father and grandfather being surgeons). Next weekend, he’ll head home to Perth to kick off a national speaking tour in support of the book; several events have sold out. Telling young people they don’t need a dream might seem a cheeky thing, Minchin admits, especially from someone who has achieved so much. After all, Minchin, a UWA graduate himself, wrote the musical Matilda, which won seven Olivier Awards, has released countless songs, performed to numerous sold-out venues, including the Royal Albert Hall and The O2 Arena in the UK and the Sydney Opera House, played Judas Iscariot in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar, and acted in several film and TV projects, including Upright, opposite House Of The Dragon’s Milly Alcock, which he also co-wrote. But as Minchin points out, he’s not anti-ambition; he just advocates a smaller target. “Americans on talent shows always talk about their dreams,” Minchin says, in that viral UWA speech. “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. 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.” In the book’s introduction for the UWA speech, Minchin notes that were he making it today, he’d have the same worldview but he’d also “certainly feel compelled to bang on about the corrosive influence of social media on social cohesion”. As he speaks to STM from London, on his way to tape a morning show segment, Minchin has been off social media since early this year. Is his book, with its themes of kindness, compassion and critical thinking, partly a rallying call against the ills associated with online platforms? “I think any book is an antidote,” Minchin says. “I remember thinking, I know I have got to do this (quit social media) but I’m not going to be able to. Until one day, I just did. And now here I am, eight months later, and the main thing I do is read more books. My concentration has come back, my love of fiction, and my distress has gone down. “It’s not a magic wand. I mean, the world is distressing, and you shouldn’t bury your head in the sand, so I still read the news. But I just don’t need to hear everyone’s biased, weird hot take on everything. I don’t need to read everyone’s fury.” Books may be a balm, but Minchin admits wondering what would become of his. It’s a nice artefact, sure. It will make a thoughtful gift. But is it destined to sit gathering dust on a shelf somewhere? Even as he sat at a signing table at Waterstones with a line of 250 snaking through the bookstore, Minchin wasn’t sure. “But what’s made me feel really optimistic is … that my boy, who is 15 and has never been interested in my work, started reading it and he really likes it,” Minchin says, sounding chuffed. “He’s never watched Upright, he’s never seen Superstar, he doesn’t listen to my music — kids don’t like their parents stuff and nor should they — but Sarah (Minchin’s wife) tells me he keeps coming in and wanting to reflect on it.” Between his son’s engagement with it, the book’s designer’s 13-year-old daughter keeping it by her bed and a rave review from British radio host Chris Evans, nearing 60, Minchin is starting to think the appeal extends beyond uni grads. “Maybe it’s just a nice, gentle thing that reflects a humanist world view, and maybe we don’t get loads of nice, gentle things that reflect a humanist world view with some gags,” he says. It took Minchin some years and a proposal from Penguin Random House that included illustrations by Andrew Rae to agree to the book. “The reason I eventually did it was because I had these two other speeches and even though they didn’t go as viral, I think they’re just as good, and they have a similar value set underpinning them,” he says. “I suppose it just got to the point where I thought, this will actually be a really beautiful object, rather than just the exploitation of old IP.” Minchin hopes it adds to the world in the same way as the writers of his own formative years, such as Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy) and Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five) — “sort of nerdy people who say big things in not too heavy language”. “I don’t think it’s condescending, but it’s hopefully quite optimistic, even when it’s being demanding,” he says. “Even when it’s saying to be hard on your opinions, or you’re going to die, or whatever, it’s got a lightheartedness. “I think I realised, and I don’t think this is good or bad, particularly, that I’m more interested how we believe things than what we believe … It’s not me asserting a belief, as much as asserting a belief about how I think one should believe; how one should check one’s beliefs. To that end, I think the the speeches stand up.” In the second speech, The Trick, made in 2019 to students at another alma mater, the WA Academy Of Performing Arts, Minchin extols finding your artistic niche and being true to yourself (“the thing I am best in the world at is being a science-obsessed uber-rhymey polemicist pianist singer-satirist w..ker. I am really, really good at that job. I am the king of Minchinland, population: this idiot”). Minchin knows authenticity works, because when he stopped cutting both his hair and the silliness from his songs, his career took off. Still, it is, he feels, “an absurd fluke” and he knows that’s not going to be everyone’s story. “I do think (being authentic) is good advice but I also want to acknowledge that it’s what we call survivor bias — it worked for me and so I’m the one at the podium … That’s just how the world works,” he says. “Unfortunately, when you’re talking from the position of having had “success”, in inverted commas, the story is of struggle and then breakthrough … But that slightly deletes my beautiful 20s, which were, in and of themselves, absolutely gorgeous. I was playing in lots of bands and doing my little plays and musicals that I wrote in the Blue Room, and doing improv with the Big Hoopla and working in cafes. Those weren’t failure years, they were an end in themselves. “But I definitely did not think I was going to be a real artist or make a career out of it. I thought I was too boring, too Perth middle class … That’s what I wanted to say in the WAAPA speech; that you have a unique set of experiences, a unique set of inputs, and if you tap into it, you will have a unique set of outputs.” The book gives insights into some of the ups and downs of Minchin’s work as an artist — which is, he insists, “a Joy-and-a-Privilege™” — from wanting to lop off his fingers after watching the legendary Graham Wood play piano at WAAPA, to losing 18 months of his best work when studio owners binned an animated musical film he was working on in LA. It was in 2015, during his battering Hollywood experience, that he made the third speech in the book, You’ve Always Wanted To Be An Actor, at London’s Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in 2015. In hindsight, Minchin says, he was feeling pretty snarky and it was “probably a bit mean to paint such a dystopian picture of actorly success for the dream-filled Mountview grads”. “I suppose I was attempting to put a bit of stuffing in the mattress onto which so many of them would inevitably have to fall,” he writes in the introduction to the speech. “I’ve learned since then that it’s best not to do that too much. There are worse things than young eyes full of stars.” After all, Minchin believes that young people can help to change the world with the help of some well-established tools, including constant assessment of their own beliefs, being willing to change in the face of new information, and relying on data, not feelings. He’s optimistic that a deep-thinking, fact-based approach can overcome social media’s tendency to corral people into “close-minded extremes”. “I feel like the knowledge that we’re in bubbles, and that these bubbles get worse the more time you spend online and drive you a bit mad, is a conversation this year, in a way that definitely wasn’t five years ago,” Minchin says. “Our generation was sideswiped by this tech, and our kids are brought up with that anxiety, but they’re ahead of us. They’ll solve it.” You Don’t Have To Have A Dream by Tim Minchin, published by Penguin, is out now. A Conversation With Tim Minchin is on at Perth Concert Hall at 2pm and 7.30pm on September 29. Limited tickets available, see perthconcerthall.com.au.