Taylor Swift: 'So let’s just keep dancing like we’re the class of 22', NYU - 2022

18 May 2022, Yankee Stadium, New York City, USA

Hi, I’m Taylor. Last time I was in a stadium this size, I was dancing in heels and wearing a glittery leotard. This outfit is much more comfortable. I would like to say a huge thank you to NYU’s Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Bill Berkley, and all the trustees and members of the board, NYU’s President Andrew Hamilton, Provost Katherine Fleming, and the faculty and alumni here today who have made this day possible.

I feel so proud to share this day with my fellow honorees, Susan Hockfield and Félix Matos Rodriguez, who humble me with the ways they improve our world with their work. As for me, I’m 90% sure the main reason I’m here is because I have a song called “22.” And let me just say, I am elated to be here with you today as we celebrate and graduate New York University’s Class of 2022. Not a single one of us here today has done it alone.

We are each a patchwork quilt of those who have loved us, those who have believed in our futures, those who showed us empathy and kindness, or told us the truth even when it wasn’t easy to hear. Those who told us we could do it when there was absolutely no proof of that. Someone read stories to you and taught you to dream and offered up some moral code of right and wrong for you to try and live by. Someone tried their best to explain every concept in this insanely complex world to the child that was you as you asked a bazillion questions like, how does the moon work and why can we eat salad but not grass?

And maybe they didn’t do it perfectly. No one ever can. Maybe they aren’t with us anymore. In that case, I hope you’ll remember them today.

If they are in this stadium, I hope you’ll find your own way to express your gratitude for all the steps and missteps that have led us to this common destination. I know that words are supposed to be my thing, but I will never be able to find the words to thank my mom and dad, my brother Austin, for the sacrifices they made every day so I could go from singing in coffee houses to standing up here with you all today because no words would ever be enough. To all the incredible parents, family members, mentors, teachers, allies, friends, and loved ones here today who have supported these students in their pursuit of educational enrichment, let me say to you now, welcome to New York. It’s been waiting for you.

I’d like to thank NYU for making me, technically, on paper at least, a doctor. Not the type of doctor you would want around in case of an emergency. Unless your specific emergency was that you desperately needed to hear a song with a catchy hook and an intensely cathartic bridge section. Or if your emergency was that you needed a person who can name over 50 breeds of cats in one minute.

I never got to have a normal college experience per se. I went to public high school until 10th grade and then finished my education doing homeschool work on the floors of airport terminals. Then I went out on the road for radio tour, which sounds incredibly glamorous, but in reality it consisted of a rental car, motels, and my mom and I pretending to have loud mother-daughter fights with each other during boarding, so no one would want the empty seat between us on Southwest. As a kid, I always thought I would go away to college, imagining the posters I would hang on the wall of my freshman dorm.

I even set the ending of my music video for my song “Love Story” at my fantasy imaginary college, where I meet a male model reading a book on the grass, and with one single glance, we realize we had been in love in our past lives. Which is exactly what you guys all experienced at some point in the last four years, right? But I really can’t complain about not having a normal college experience to you, because you went to NYU during a global pandemic, being essentially locked into your dorms and having to do classes over Zoom. Everyone in college during normal times stresses about test scores, but on top of that, you also had to pass like a thousand COVID tests.

I imagine the idea of a normal college experience was all you wanted too. But in this case, you and I both learned that you don’t always get all the things in the bag that you selected from the menu in the delivery service that is life. You get what you get. And as I would like to say to you wholeheartedly, you should be very proud of what you’ve done with it.

Today, you leave New York University and then go out into the world searching what’s next. And so will I. So as a rule, I try not to give anyone unsolicited advice unless they ask for it. I’ll go into this more later.

I guess I have been officially solicited in this situation to impart whatever wisdom I might have to tell you things that have helped me so far in my life. Please bear in mind that I in no way feel qualified to tell you what to do. You’ve worked and struggled and sacrificed and studied and dreamed your way here today. And so you know what you’re doing.

You’ll do things differently than I did them and for different reasons.

So I won’t tell you what to do because no one likes that. I will, however, give you some life hacks I wish I knew when I was starting out my dreams of a career and navigating life, love, pressure, choices, shame, hope, and friendship. The first of which is life can be heavy, especially if you try to carry it all at once.

Part of growing up and moving into new chapters of your life is about catch and release. What I mean by that is knowing what things to keep and what things to release. You can’t carry all things, all grudges, all updates on your ex, all enviable promotions your school bully got at the hedge fund his uncle started. Decide what is yours to hold and let the rest go.

Oftentimes the good things in your life are lighter anyway, so there’s more room for them. One toxic relationship can outweigh so many wonderful, simple joys. You get to pick what your life has time and room for. Be discerning.

Secondly, learn to live alongside cringe. No matter how hard you try to avoid being cringe, you will look back on your life and cringe retrospectively. Cringe is unavoidable over a lifetime. Even the term cringe might someday be deemed cringe.

I promise you, you’re probably doing or wearing something right now that you will look back on later and find revolting and hilarious. You can’t avoid it, so don’t try to. For example, I had a phase where for the entirety of 2012, I dressed like a 1950s housewife. But you know what?

I was having fun. Trends and phases are fun. Looking back and laughing is fun. And while we’re talking about things that make us squirm but really shouldn’t, I’d like to say I’m a big advocate for not hiding your enthusiasm for things.

It seems to me that there is a false stigma around eagerness in our culture of unbothered ambivalence. This outlook perpetuates the idea that it’s not cool to want it, that people who don’t try are fundamentally more chic than people who do. And I wouldn’t know, because I’ve been a lot of things, but I’ve never been an expert on chic. But I’m the one who’s up here, so you have to listen to me when I say this: Never be ashamed of trying.

Effortlessness is a myth. The people who wanted it the least were the ones I wanted to date and be friends with in high school. The people who want it the most are the people I now hire to work for my company. Thank you.

I started writing songs when I was 12, and since then it’s been the compass guiding my life, and in turn, my life has guided my writing. Everything I do is just an extension of my writing, whether it’s directing videos or a short film, creating the visuals for a tour, or standing on a stage performing. Everything is connected by my love of the craft, the thrill of working through ideas and narrowing them down and polishing it all up in the end, editing, waking up in the middle of the night, throwing out the old idea because you just thought of a new or better one, or a plot device that ties the whole thing together. There’s a reason they call it a hook.

Sometimes a string of words just ensnares me, and I can’t focus on anything until it’s been recorded or written down. As a songwriter, I’ve never been able to sit still or stay in one creative place for too long. I’ve made and released 11 albums, and in the process, I’ve switched genres from country to pop to alternative to folk, and this might sound like a very songwriter-centric line of discussion, but in a way, I really do think we are all writers, and most of us write in a different voice for different situations. You write differently in your Instagram stories than you do your senior thesis.

You send a different type of email to your boss than you do your best friend from home. We are all literary chameleons, and I think it’s fascinating. It’s just a continuation of the idea that we are so many things all the time, and I know it can be really overwhelming figuring out who to be and when, who you are now, and how to act in order to get where you want to go. I have some good news.

It’s totally up to you. I have some terrifying news. It’s totally up to you. I said to you earlier that I don’t ever offer advice unless someone asks me for it, and now I’ll tell you why.

As a person who started my very public career at the age of 15, it came with a price, and that price was years of unsolicited advice. Being the youngest person in every room for over a decade meant that I was constantly being issued warnings from older members of the music industry, media, interviewers, executives, and this advice often presented itself as thinly veiled warnings.

See, I was a teenager at a time when our society was absolutely obsessed with the idea of having perfect young female role models. It felt like every interview I did included slight barbs by the interviewer about me one day running off the rails, and that meant a different thing to every person who said it to me.

So I became a young adult while being fed the message that if I didn’t make any mistakes, all the children of America would grow up to be perfect angels. However, if I did slip up, the entire Earth would fall off its axis, and it would be entirely my fault, and I would go to pop star jail forever and ever. It was all centered around the idea that mistakes equal failure and ultimately the loss of any chance at a happy or rewarding life. This has not been my experience.

My experience has been that my mistakes led to the best things in my life, and being embarrassed when you mess up is part of the human experience. Getting back up, dusting yourself off, and seeing who still wants to hang out with you afterward and laugh about it, that’s a gift. The times I was told no or wasn’t included, wasn’t chosen, didn’t win, didn’t make the cut, looking back, it really feels like those moments were as important, if not more crucial, than the moments I was told yes. Not being invited to the parties and sleepovers in my hometown made me feel hopelessly lonely.

But because I felt alone, I would sit in my room and write the songs that would get me a ticket somewhere else. Having label executives in Nashville tell me that only 35-year-old housewives listen to country music, and there was no place for a 13-year-old on their roster, made me cry in the car on the way home. But then I’d post my songs on my MySpace, and yes, MySpace, and I would message with other teenagers like me who loved country music, but just didn’t have anyone singing from their perspective. Having journalists write in-depth, oftentimes critical, pieces about who they perceived me to be made me feel like I was living in some weird simulation, but it also made me look inward to learn about who I actually am.

Having the world treat my love life like a spectator sport in which I lose every single game was not a great way to date in my teens and twenties, but it taught me to protect my private life fiercely. Being publicly humiliated over and over again at a young age was excruciatingly painful, but it forced me to devalue the ridiculous notion of minute-by-minute, ever-fluctuating social relevance and likeability. Getting cancelled on the Internet and nearly losing my career gave me an excellent knowledge of all the types of wine. I know I sound like a consummate optimist, but I’m really not.

I lose perspective all the time. Sometimes, everything just feels completely pointless. I know the pressure of living your life through the lens of perfectionism, and I know that I’m talking to a group of perfectionists because you are here today graduating from NYU. So this might be hard for you to hear.

In your life, you will inevitably misspeak, trust the wrong person, underreact, overreact, hurt the people who didn’t deserve it, overthink, not think at all, self-sabotage, create a reality where only your experience exists, ruin perfectly good moments for yourself and others, deny any wrongdoing, not take the steps to make it right, feel very guilty, let the guilt eat at you, hit rock bottom, finally address the pain you caused, try to do better next time, rinse, repeat. And I’m not going to lie. These mistakes will cause you to lose things.

I’m trying to tell you that losing things doesn’t just mean losing. A lot of the time, when we lose things, we gain things, too. Now you leave the structure and framework of school and chart your own path. Every choice you make leads to the next choice, which leads to the next, and I know it’s hard to know which path to take.

There will be times in life where you need to stand up for yourself, times when the right thing is actually to back down and apologize, times when the right thing is to fight, times when the right thing is to turn and run, times to hold on with all you have, and times to let go with grace. Sometimes the right thing to do is to throw out the old schools of thought in the name of progress and reform. Sometimes the right thing to do is to sit and listen to the wisdom of those who have come before us. How will you know what the right choice is in these crucial moments?

You won’t. How do I give advice to this many people about their life choices? I won’t. The scary news is you’re on your own now.

But the cool news is you’re on your own now. I leave you with this. We are led by our gut instincts, our intuitions, our desires and fears, our scars and our dreams. And you will screw it up sometimes.

So will I. And when I do, you will most likely read about it on the Internet. Anyway, hard things will happen to us. We will recover. We will learn from it. We will grow more resilient because of it. And as long as we are fortunate enough to be breathing, we will breathe in, breathe through, breathe deep, breathe out. And I am a doctor now, so I know how breathing works.

I hope you know how proud I am to share this day with you. We’re doing this together. So let’s just keep dancing like we’re the class of 22. We’re doing this together.

So let’s just keep dancing like we’re the class of 22. We’re doing this together.

Source: https://singjupost.com/taylor-swifts-speec...

Angie Mangino: 'You don't have to choose between your pratical path and your passionate path', Fordham University - 2025

17 May, Rose Hill Campus, Fordham University, New York, USA

President Tetlow, Father McShane, distinguished faculty, proud families, and most especially, graduating class of 2025: thank you for this incredible honor.

Standing here today at Rose Hill reminds me of my own Fordham journey: from my freshman and sophomore years at the School of Education on 302 Broadway, to my junior and senior years when Lincoln Center opened and became my new academic home. But it's here at Rose Hill where my Fordham story truly came full circle, when I married my husband, a School of Business graduate, in the landmark chapel on this very campus a year after our graduation. Looking out at you now, I'm struck by how much has changed since my own graduation day. But I'm also struck by how much hasn't changed, particularly that mixture of excitement and terror you're probably feeling right now about what comes next.

When I graduated from Fordham, my commencement speaker gave us the usual advice about following our dreams, working hard, and making a difference in the world. All good advice, certainly. But there was something crucial they didn't tell us. Something I wish I had known at twenty-two.

Let me tell you what no one told me: You don't have to choose between your practical path and your passionate path. You can walk both roads simultaneously, and in fact, you probably should.

Let me share my story because I suspect it might sound familiar to some of you.

During my time here at Fordham, I was deeply involved in writing. I worked on the newspaper, spent countless hours on the yearbook staff, and felt most alive when I was crafting stories, conducting interviews, and seeing my words in print. Writing wasn't just what I did; it was who I was. It was my dream, my calling, the thing that made me feel like I was contributing something meaningful to the world.

But when graduation day arrived, I did what so many of us do. I looked at my student loans, thought about my family's expectations, and convinced myself that writing was a luxury I couldn't afford right away.

“I'll get stable first,” I told myself. “I'll find a real job, get on my feet, and then I'll pursue writing seriously.”

So I became an office manager. It was a good job: steady, respectable, with health insurance and a regular paycheck. I told myself this was temporary, that I was just getting my financial foundation solid before I made the leap to my “real” career in writing.

But here's the thing about temporary situations: they have a way of becoming permanent when you're not paying attention.

Years passed. I was married, then became a mother to three children. And with each life change, writing seemed to move further and further away. Not because I loved it any less, but because I had fallen into what I now recognize as “all or nothing” thinking. In my mind, I couldn't be a writer unless I could quit everything else and devote myself to it completely. I couldn't call myself a real writer unless writing was paying the bills.

This kind of thinking is seductive because it feels so logical, so responsible. But it's also a trap.

Now, some of you are pursuing careers that do require intensive, focused commitment. If you're heading to medical school, law school, or other demanding professional programs, your path may look different. But even in those fields, the principle I'm sharing still applies. You can still nurture other interests, contribute to causes you care about, and maintain the parts of yourself that make you whole.

What I didn't understand then is that you don’t build your career overnight, and dreams don't require you to burn every other bridge to pursue them. I could have been building my writing career incrementally. I could have been freelancing on weekends, pitching articles during lunch breaks, building a portfolio one piece at a time.

Instead, I put my dream in a box labeled “someday,” and convinced myself that someday would come when all the stars aligned perfectly.

The truth is, someday never comes on its own. You have to create it, piece by piece, choice by choice.

When I finally did start writing professionally, I began exactly the way I could have begun right after graduation: with small freelance assignments, building relationships with editors, learning the business side of writing while still maintaining other sources of income. Yes, it took me longer than it could have, but that journey taught me resilience, gave me life experiences that enriched my writing, and showed me that there's no single “right” timeline for success.

The gradual approach that I thought was impossible at twenty-two turned out to be not just possible, but ideal. It allowed me to develop my skills without the pressure of needing every article to pay the rent. It let me build a network of contacts over time. It gave me the luxury of being selective about the projects I took on.

Most importantly, it meant I was actually doing the thing I loved instead of perpetually preparing to do it someday.

So here's what I've learned that I want to share with you today: Your dream doesn't need permission from your circumstances. It needs you to start where you are, with what you have, right now.

This doesn't mean you should be reckless. Take that office job if you need it. Pay your student loans. Be responsible. But don't let responsibility become an excuse for abandoning the things that make you feel most alive.

Let me be specific about what this looks like in practice. If you want to be a filmmaker, commit to creating one short video every month on your phone. Post it online. Learn from feedback. If you want to start a nonprofit, volunteer two hours every Saturday morning while you're earning steady income elsewhere. If you want to be an entrepreneur, spend Sunday mornings for the next six months developing your business plan and building your network.

The beautiful thing about living in 2025 is that you have the tools for pursuing your passion that have never been more accessible. You can build a writing career through online platforms, develop a photography business through social media, start a consulting practice through networking sites, or launch a creative project through crowdfunding, all while maintaining another source of income.

The key is to stop thinking in terms of either/or and start thinking in terms of both/and.

You can be both practical and passionate. You can be both responsible and risk-taking. You can be both building security and pursuing dreams.

But here's the crucial part: you have to be intentional about it. Your passion won't develop all by itself. You need to carve out time for it. Even if it's just one hour every Sunday morning at first. You need to treat it seriously, even if no one else does initially. You need to invest in it consistently, even when progress feels slow.

Some of you might be thinking, "But what if I fail? What if I'm not good enough? What if it doesn't work out?"

Here's another thing I wish someone had told me at twenty-two: failure isn't the opposite of success; it's part of success. Every article I pitched that an editor rejected taught me something about my craft and the industry. Every small freelance project I completed, even the ones that didn't pay much, helped me build skills and confidence.

The real failure would have been to never try at all.

As you leave Fordham today and step into whatever comes next, I want you to remember that you are more capable than you know, more resilient than you think, and more creative than you've probably had a chance to fully explore yet.

You don't have to figure everything out today. You don't have to choose between security and dreams. You just have to start. Start small, start imperfectly, but start.

Take the job that pays the bills, but don't let it consume your soul. Pursue the practical path, but keep your passionate path alive too. Be responsible adults, but don't let adulthood kill your dreams.

The world needs what you have to offer. Not someday, not when you're perfectly prepared, not when all your ducks are in a row. The world needs it now, in whatever form you can give it, even if it's just one small step at a time.

Congratulations, Class of 2025. Your Fordham education, deeply rooted in Jesuit principles has prepared you to think critically, to question deeply, and to contribute meaningfully to this world. These values remind us that success isn't just about personal achievement. It's about how we use our gifts to serve something greater than ourselves.

Now do all of it: the practical and the passionate, the secure and the uncertain, the dreams and the day jobs.

Believe me. Your future self will be happier if you do.

Thank you. Congratulations.

Source: https://therepublicofletters.substack.com/...

Declan Fay: 'But now you all have a blank page', Eltham High Valedictory - 2023

Declan Fay speaking at a different event

16 November 2023, Eltham, Melbourne, Australia

Thank you teachers, parents, students, and younger siblings who really wish they were at home playing Fortnite.

So you’re probably sitting there with a lot of questions? What score will I get for VCE? What will I do next year? Who is this slightly overweight, balding comedy writer standing in front of us, when Olympian and tour de France winner Cadel Evans went to our school? Cadel may have won the Tour de France, but has he ever written a joke that made the head of the abc have to front a senate estimates enquiry? (Unfortunately, I can’t tell you that joke, because your school hasn’t paid me yet).

I finished school in 1997. A time before google, when you if you liked someone you couldn’t just google a picture of them. It was a time before bluetooth, when people on the street who looked like they were talking to themselves were actually talking to themselves.

It was a time when mobile phones were the size of house brick and no one had them. Kids definitely didn’t have them, so if you liked someone, you had to find their number in a giant book, hope you had the right house, and then speak to their actual parent and beg to speak with their child. Then if they weren’t there you had to leave a message and hoped they call back when you’re still at home. To organise one date it could take three months and series of panic attacks.

So when I finished school, I had no idea what I wanted to do. So I did the one course you do when you don’t know what to do, Arts. I didn’t even really know what Arts was, I just knew I liked some of the subjects and there was a subject where you all you had to do was watch movies. The other big plus is you only had to go for eight hours a week. That kind of appealed to me. 

When I told my dad I was going to do arts, he looked like I’d just dragged a dead animal into the lounge room. And he said, “Why don’t you be a vet” This was a strange because I had no interest in being a vet. And I hadn’t done any of the subjects you needed to do to be a vet. The total extent of my experience with animals was our cat. And I didn’t even like our cat. I still don’t like cats, they just seem arrogant and aloof.

It turns out my dad wanted to be a vet, but he hadn’t done it, so now he wanted me to do it.

So I don’t want to teach any lessons, because I feel like you’re probably sick of people teaching you things, so I’ll just give pieces of advice that might or might not help…

And the first piece of advice that may or may not help is: Please don’t do something because someone else wants you to do it. You won’t be happy, then you won’t do well at it, and then you’ll resent them, and it’ll make Christmas really awkward every year. And I know all about awkward family Christmases, because I come from a family of Irish people who never discuss their feelings, until they drink too much. That’s actually my second piece of advice if you find yourself at an Irish  Christmas, the second they crack out the whiskey and start singing Danny Boy, get the hell out of there.

So I started this Arts degree, and I wasn’t really enjoying it. You’d turn up and do one class in a massive theatre, then leave and never see those people again for another week. It was incredibly lonely.

And then one day I was walking out of the uni and I saw a sign which said, “Do you think you’re funny?” It was auditions for a comedy show at the university called the Melbourne University comedy review.

I walked into the audition and I was not a confident performer, and the first thing we had to do was stand in a circle and tell a funny story. It got to my turn to speak and I just froze, and I tried to speak and it was like the bit that connected my brain to my mouth short circuited, and I just kind of mumbled. The others were looking at me like is this guy, okay. I tried to speak again, does this guy have serious bowel problem.

Then I did what any mature person does who’s embarrassed themselves in front of a room of strangers… I ran out of the room. So In was standing at the mirror, And I thought if I don’t go back, I’ll never go back to a comedy audition. Plus, I’d already embarrassed myself. There wasn’t anything to lose, so I decided to go back.

Then they partner us off, and no one came near me. I didn’t blame them. Most people were probably thinking I don’t want to be with that weird sweaty guy who’s just emitting random sounds in the corner. But I get the last guy who’s left over, and he’s a really quiet guy. And before we can plan anything we get called up on stage. And this guy goes it’ll be alright, just whatever happens.

But as soon as I get up there, I completely freeze, and this guy looks at me like, “please just do something”. To this day, I don’t know why I did this, but I panicked and looked around and then did this. (*Make a very loud screech like a bird dying). And this guy looks at me like, “What are you doing?”

And then he must have panicked, because he looks around, and then goes, (*SIMILAR LOUD BIRD SCREECH). And suddenly we were two twenty year old guys squawking at each other like two animals doing some weird mating dance.

And it gets to the end and no one has laughed, if anything people were just a little bit frightened.

There was this long awkward silence, until this one girl in the corner laughed. And she goes (make nasal blocked nose laugh)… she did one of those laughs where it sounds like you nose is trying to squeeze out your brain… And that caught onto the guy next to her… who also laughed, and that caught onto the girl next to him who had one of those embarrassing laughs, and she went… (MAKE SNORT LAUGH SOUND)… And everyone knows the snort laugh is the worst laugh. If you make that noise at a party, call an uber and go home. Because you are are never coming back from the snort laugh.

But suddenly everyone in the room started laughing. And In that moment I realised everyone was nervous, it’s just that people have different ways of showing it. Some people get loud, some people get quiet, some people flap their arms and squark like a dying bird. And in that moment I just stop worrying about what everyone was thinking and I thought, I’ve got nothing left to lose here. And something just shifted in me and I thought don’t leave the room. And that’s the power of a great joke, or a big laugh, it can change the whole energy of the room, it can change the worst moment of your life into one of the funniest moments of your life. And for the rest of the audition I was like a different person, and the audition finished.

I got a phone call a few days later and I got in. And my paranoid brain thought maybe they don’t think I’m funny, maybe they just thought we’ll get that guy and if we get bored we’ll poke him and he’ll make a weird nose.

But I did that show, and I found the place I fitted in. You kind of know when you find it. You feel excited to go there. You like being there, and you don’t want to leave.

Another piece of helpful advice that you can take or leave, is whatever you decide to do, there will be moments where you massively stuff up, but don’t give up, and don’t do what I did and run out of the room, because I’ve thought alot of times if I didn’t go back, I may never have ended up in comedy, writing television.  Those stuff ups are the best chance to learn, the best chance to laugh, and they often make for the best stories at the end. 

And the next piece of helpful advice…  comedy has taught me is to never lose your sense of humour. Even in the worst moments of your life, there will be a time where you can laugh about it down the track. Mistakes are the best chances to learn and often end up making for the best stories down the track.

So we did that show. And it was one of the best experiences of my life.  And one night me and some of the other people in our show go out to the comedy festival. And everything was sold out. There was one show that still had seats. It was a show none of you would know but it was called Brian Munich and friends, and it is simply one of the most bizarre things i’ve ever seen. But it made me laugh so hard, I had tears running down my face.

But after the show I waited out side the door of the theatre. I didn’t even tell my friends I just pretended to go to the toilet and said I’d see them in the bar. But I waited until the main came out and said, That’s the best thing I’ve seen. And then I said, how do you become a comedy writer, and he said just keep writing everyday. And he gave me his number number and said to call I ever wanted to talk about comedy.

So I took his advice. As I said, this was a time before google, so I would go to a local cafe and look at the newspaper and just write jokes, stupid ideas, anything… I’d buy one coffee and stay as long as I could before it got weird.

I stayed in touch with Jason, and five years later I got a phone call from him, and he was the new head writer of the biggest comedy show on TV. A show called Rove. And asked me if I wanted to write for the show. And that was how I got that first comedy writing job. And I’ve been working as a comedy writer ever since.

So here’s a list of helpful suggestions you can take from that… If you ever see something you like on stage, in a book, or just someone doing some you like, don’t be afraid to go up and tell them, because you make art to connect to people. And because performers are incredibly needy people, who need affirmation. 

And don’t be afraid to ask questions, “How did you get into this?”, “How did you come up with that?” Nine out of ten people of them will try to help you.

These days you can google advice about how to do anything. A few months ago I googled, how to boil an egg. And I still stuffed up the egg. But nothing beats going up and asking someone for advice. Nothing beats an actual human connection. Google won’t ever be the head writer of a comedy show and offer you a job. Or at least I hope not.

And just keep working on your thing, even if you don’t have a job in the area, keep practising, keep doing it, so when the opportunity comes along you’ll be ready.

So I think back to that moment where I saw the poster on the wall for the auditions, or when I waited outside the comedy show. And this is hopefully my last piece of possibly helpful advice:

There will be a moment some time in the next few years when something catches your eye, a poster for an audition, or person in a class, or a show you go to, or something you see online, and don’t be afraid to trust that moment, or take that detour, or go up to that person who has inspired you, because you have no idea where it will take you. Maybe it’ll just be a good conversation or maybe lead to a whole other unexpected chapter of your story.

Finally when we finish writing something, whether it’s an episode, a series, or a comedy festival show, you’re always exhausted. But then there’s a moment you have to write your next thing. Usually it’s when I need money. But there’s a moment you open your laptop, and you stare at a blank page. Actually the first thing I see is my desktop which has 900 files on it, I am useless at filing things. But after I’ve gotten past that, I open a blank page. And it’s the single most thrilling and terrifying moment. Because you could put anything on it, and you could tell any story you want. For the last few years, you’ve all written your own story. Some of you will have loved that story, some of you might not have loved it, some of you may not know how you feel it about it, and some of you might just be relieved it’s over.

When you started at this school you probably weren’t even in control of of your story. Your parents may have chosen the school, teachers may have encouraged you to certain subjects, friends may have influenced you. But now all you have a blank page. And you can fill it with any story you want. And it doesn’t have to be perfect straight away. The first episode of Ronny Chieng:  International student had 32 different drafts and I still reckon it could be better. But the important thing is, you tell a story the story only you can tell. And a story you can be proud of.

Finally, be grateful to your parents, because one day you will need to borrow money off them. Houses are not getting any cheaper.

So that’s pretty much it, thank you for letting me share my story with you.


Declan is a guest on episode 54 of the podcast, talking about school visits and comedy writing generally