[Applause]
just pick up my pens you can’t forget
the staff these days
so thank you that I was thinking the
other day actually the last time I did
any kind of public speaking was in this
very Hall approximately 21 years ago
because when I was a student here I was
a key member of the literary society at
Delphi still gay and the school debating
team pretty geeky on it but actually
found being involved in those roles did
help me somewhat in my time at school
firstly I found that it gave the bullies
something tangible to focus on and
secondly it helped me develop my
confidence for speaking in front of
crowds like this now obviously it was 20
years ago when max first fell in touched
me a few months back to invite me to
take part in these talks I jumped at the
opportunity and then has it dawned on me
my confidence sort of ebbs away a little
bit both at stage it was too late to
pull out so I’m here now
thankfully I’m on quite familiar
territory so hopefully things will go
okay if not I’ll just start sniffing the
marker pens
so as it said in my introduction I Ellis
traitor and being an animator before
that and I spent the best part of my
life really
drawings I thought what I’d do is start
by doing a drawing I was born in the 70s
so I’m going to draw a space hopper so
just big round ball essentially oops
with nobody handles seem to remember and
for some reason they have a really scary
face like a kind of kangaroo and
myxomatosis I’ve seen from that but so
gonna have a nose donkey teeth and it
looks something like that I seem to
remember anyway it’s a very rough
rendition of a space over now I’m gonna
color it in so those of you with OCD or
a poncho for being tidy might want to
look away at this point because I’m
gonna do this ah whoops I’ve gone over
the lines those of you who don’t know
Sir Kenneth Robinson he’s a sort of
educational consultant or guru and he’s
a brilliant raconteur he’s exceptionally
witty and he kind of carries his quiet
charisma which is why I’ve chosen to
plagiarize him tonight and in his talk
he focuses on at one point how children
just seem to plow into problems totally
unafraid of making any mistakes and
that’s how they learn and he uses one
anecdote to illustrate this and he sent
us on his son’s nativity play and the
three wise men are about to go on stage
and as they go on stage they get that
order slightly muddled but they carry on
regardless the first boy goes up like
his mentee and he approaches Mary and
Joseph and the newborn baby Jesus and he
hands out his box and says I bring the
gift of gold then the second boy goes up
a little bit early he gets on stage and
he says I bring myrrh so then the final
boy arrives realizes they’re going bit
out of sync but doesn’t matter he
carries on he goes that presents his box
and says Frank sent this
now it is pretty funny I like that isn’t
it to see why I stole it now so
basically what mr. Kenneth Robinson
concludes from this humorous episode is
that if you’re not prepared to be wrong
you can’t come up with anything original
now the same is true of children’s
drawings and I’ve got an example here if
I can operate this thing there we go
right so I know this is probably a bit
small for you but this is a portrait of
me which was done by my daughter and
given to me last Father’s Day you can
see there says daddy at the top now the
first thing you’ll probably notice about
this image I hope you’ll notice is that
it looks nothing like me right
for a start I don’t know why but I’ve
got a shot of vertical turquoise hair i
goodness knows why my hands and feet
seem to look like tarantulas that have
wilted in the Sun I’ve got a second head
growing out of my torso and the less we
say about the Slender Man in the
background here the better
so obviously I’m teasing I love this
picture and what it shows is a bold and
carefree attempt to try and capture what
my daughter believes is my essence my
personality either that’s all she needs
serious psychiatric treatment
but as Kenneth Robinson says if you’re
not prepared to be wrong you’ll never
come up with anything original case in
point right there now in a way our
education is a bit like that we happy
sorts of guidelines that are laid out
for us and then we work our way until we
get to what’s Olivia a chosen career at
the end now I remember back in the fifth
form the careers advice I received and
there was this initiative called s Co
Morris B which i think is still going
today
and basically it involved people’s
having to fill out various
questionnaires lots of multiple-choice
boxes to tick and in sit an interview
then all the data’s collated fit into a
big machine and you basically wait to
have your fortune told and the results
have rendered out and it tells you the
career you’re going to do now with me I
didn’t just get one career option on her
I got to and this is absolutely true
this is what it said I was given the
choice of either being a diplomat
pretty snazzy or a car mechanic
now you couldn’t get two more in
Congress career paths if you tried
diplomat or car mechanic I’d not sure
what I was meant to take away from that
whether I was going to get a call from
the United Nations and certainly be
whisked away to North Korea to fix the
alternator on Kim jong-un’s Fiat Punto
or I don’t know it made no sense to me
the truth of the matter is I was a
teenager I didn’t have the first clue
what I wanted to be I was too concerned
about getting a wedgie from an ex house
debating competition they were troubling
times now admittedly there are careers
which have a specific vocational point
to them and you have to fulfill certain
qualifications and attain certain skills
to get to that career – for instance she
is one she wants to be a vet basically
and she’s doing chemistry maths and
biology and she’s currently scouring the
country looking for a university so she
can study there once it’s finished or it
sounds now that level of focus and
determinations extraordinary for a
six-year-old girl
so obviously I’m joking she’s 17 but I
think she did make up her mind about
being a vet when she was six and I’m
sure now lots of you here tonight who
also have a firm grasp on what you wanna
do when you leave this school and you’ll
be currently equipping yourselves with
the skills and the qualifications to
achieve that that’s great but then
there’s the other end of the spectrum
where I dwelt and there’ll be a few deer
here tonight as well he fall into that
category who are more like concussed
hamsters wandering around the labyrinth
you’ll know who you are because you’ll
be the ones giving serious consideration
to doing a degree in English literature
I’m teasing because oh sorry
I warned of you I was there in fact I
distinctly remember finishing my English
degree and they think it’s myself right
what am I going to do with this I still
don’t have the answer to that question
by the way in case you’re wondering but
I do remember my very last English
tutorial and my cheater was trying to
reassure the students about our career
prospects and you say not to worry
because statistically ninety percent of
us would leave with a full-time job you
don’t want on to say that 90 percent of
those candidates would be working in a
fast-food restaurant and then he got up
and left and closed the door and I never
saw him again and that was literally the
last line in my entire academic career
that’s what it all boiled down to this
point this line here all those revision
timetables exercise books ink cartridges
calculator batteries detentions it all
boiled down to that moment now I know
what you’re thinking that’s a very
depressing note to end a talk on but the
good news is I haven’t quite finished
yet but I can’t promise that it won’t
get more depressing where do I go from
here one of the good things about having
such obtuse career options is it
essentially grants you a blank page to
color in all over again so where do I go
I’ll tell you where I came exactly back
here
quite literally my first employment
paycheck was from this very school
obviously I wasn’t a teacher I was too
overqualified for that
I works in the maintenance department
and I remember on my first day I let
slip to the foreman Mike Hancock that I
used to do are a level and so he
responded by thrusting a paintbrush into
one hand a five liter bucket of magnolia
emulsion into the other and said there
you go Picasso go and paint the
classroom block so that was the summer
of 96 for me now if you would ask me
back then if I thought that job would in
any way shape or informed the person I
am today I said no not at all
although I did learn some pretty
spectacular new swearwords off the crew
but the truth is it’s very easy to
overlook menial jobs that we often take
just to make ends meet but the fact of
the matter is while they may not be
along the lines of what we want to do
they nevertheless play an integral part
in how we get there so take for instance
the modern classical composer Philip
Glass I’m sure some of the music
students here would have heard of him
but people who haven’t heard of him
would certainly have heard one of his
many film scores now he didn’t receive
his first professional commission till
he was 41 before that he worked in a
steel mill in his hometown and then as a
taxi driver in New York now he said that
he was driven for his curiosity for life
and that any dis about trumped any
distinct he might have had for working
and if we look at Harvey Pekar the
American comic writer he proves that
being in the employment doldrums can
actually be a great catalyst for
creativity a lot of his stories and
characters are based on the real-life
characters he met every day in his
dead-end job as a filing clerk at the
local hospital I myself made my first
short film when I was in-between temping
jobs having just moved back into my
parents house in my early 20s after
splitting up with my girlfriend happy
days
so you know there is like the end of the
tunnel
so basically I then went on to do a
three-month kind of post-grad animation
course in Bristol where I now live and
eventually I started getting some
freelance work as an animator I started
out in children’s TV programs and also I
made some short films that really are
not for children but were a lot of fun
to make anyway and unfortunately the
budget and the funding started to fall
out of the animation market in the UK at
that time so the work dried up when I
was lucky enough to get a full time job
at a digital agency doing animation for
children’s and educational apps and
games and stuff like that then it’s
complete Scott more more involved the
job seemed to become more perfunctory
than creative so I decided to take
another drastic diversion and I quit my
full-time job and I decided to go back
to being a freelancer and working
children’s illustration and it was the
best decision I’ve ever made
providing I don’t open my bank
statements now I’ve got another example
for you of one of my illustrations for
my book there you go so the good thing
about being a children’s illustrator is
that essentially I get to color over the
lines all over again
so here is image from my second book the
Lumberjacks beard is available in all
good book shots and some pretty enough
ones and you can rent it from the
library for free so you don’t have an
excuse so here we see basically the
trees essentially triangles on sticks
the clouds and the shadows are just
scribbles and there’s no way that hefty
lumberjack can live in such a tiny log
cabin so basically everything
technically is wrong with this picture a
bit like my daughter’s image but that’s
what makes it so right basically one of
the hardest parts of my job these days
in fact he’s trying to unlearn all the
constructs that were drilled into me
when I was a student like perspective
and scale and things like that so that’s
the lumberjack beard now
there’s one last thing one last diagram
I want to draw because basically
wondering where am I going with this I’m
not sure myself but think what I what
the gist of what I’m getting out is that
it’s okay
to color over the lines metaphorically
speaking at any given point in your
career and hopefully this diagram will
show that that’s my plan
so we’ve got two converging lines like
that this is a time line denoted with T
I was listening in some lessons and
basically here is the wide end the early
stages of our stage of our life we have
a breadth of options a plethora of
opportunities laid out before us and
being children we can color it in as
liberally as we like it doesn’t matter
where kids it’s fine no one cares but
then as we get a bit older and a bit
more self-conscious we start to Curran
bit more tightly now I turned 40 a
couple of weeks ago so technically that
puts me with current medical advances
the way they are hopefully about halfway
down this timeline that’s me right and
as you can see my options have narrowed
considerably okay but what you can’t see
what this diagram doesn’t show you this
it just beyond this halfway point
there’s this Phantom Zone here now this
is what I call the midlife crisis
territory right
so here anything goes literary whoo it’s
like being a kid again no one cares is
brilliant you go over lines it doesn’t
matter that’s like a veritable Jackson
Pollock right there and what that
represents is things like messy divorces
impromptu motorbike purchases an
unhinged desire to take out a second
mortgage and start your own art design
juice bar all those things fix your arms
do okay then after that we keep coming
in and the lines get narrower and
narrower our pen starts to run out of
ink you can read a metal into that if
you want and then eventually we get to
full stop at the end a finite black dots
now I’m sure you can guess what that
represents
if not I’ll make it a bit easier for the
ones with less imagination I did warn
you if I get more depressing so
basically that black dot I think is the
only kind of truth on this whole chart
everything that precedes it is one big
blank coloring book which is ready to be
filled in either with diligent precision
or big bold sprawls either way you’re
not going to be scored out of ten you’re
not going to get given a gold star
you’re not gonna get marked down for it
it’s I think the only parameters that
really matter are the ones that measure
how content we are any given point on
this timeline it’s very easy to perceive
a given career as a goal or destination
that we set out to achieve but in my
experience the problem with having goals
is that goal posts inevitably shift and
sometimes they just disappear entirely
so I think the key is just to not regret
a moment of how we get there so you may
as well be as neat or as messy as you
like
thank you
just pick up my pens you can’t forget
the staff these days
so thank you that I was thinking the
other day actually the last time I did
any kind of public speaking was in this
very Hall approximately 21 years ago
because when I was a student here I was
a key member of the literary society at
Delphi still gay and the school debating
team pretty geeky on it but actually
found being involved in those roles did
help me somewhat in my time at school
firstly I found that it gave the bullies
something tangible to focus on and
secondly it helped me develop my
confidence for speaking in front of
crowds like this now obviously it was 20
years ago when max first fell in touched
me a few months back to invite me to
take part in these talks I jumped at the
opportunity and then has it dawned on me
my confidence sort of ebbs away a little
bit both at stage it was too late to
pull out so I’m here now
thankfully I’m on quite familiar
territory so hopefully things will go
okay if not I’ll just start sniffing the
marker pens
so as it said in my introduction I Ellis
traitor and being an animator before
that and I spent the best part of my
life really
drawings I thought what I’d do is start
by doing a drawing I was born in the 70s
so I’m going to draw a space hopper so
just big round ball essentially oops
with nobody handles seem to remember and
for some reason they have a really scary
face like a kind of kangaroo and
myxomatosis I’ve seen from that but so
gonna have a nose donkey teeth and it
looks something like that I seem to
remember anyway it’s a very rough
rendition of a space over now I’m gonna
color it in so those of you with OCD or
a poncho for being tidy might want to
look away at this point because I’m
gonna do this ah whoops I’ve gone over
the lines those of you who don’t know
Sir Kenneth Robinson he’s a sort of
educational consultant or guru and he’s
a brilliant raconteur he’s exceptionally
witty and he kind of carries his quiet
charisma which is why I’ve chosen to
plagiarize him tonight and in his talk
he focuses on at one point how children
just seem to plow into problems totally
unafraid of making any mistakes and
that’s how they learn and he uses one
anecdote to illustrate this and he sent
us on his son’s nativity play and the
three wise men are about to go on stage
and as they go on stage they get that
order slightly muddled but they carry on
regardless the first boy goes up like
his mentee and he approaches Mary and
Joseph and the newborn baby Jesus and he
hands out his box and says I bring the
gift of gold then the second boy goes up
a little bit early he gets on stage and
he says I bring myrrh so then the final
boy arrives realizes they’re going bit
out of sync but doesn’t matter he
carries on he goes that presents his box
and says Frank sent this
now it is pretty funny I like that isn’t
it to see why I stole it now so
basically what mr. Kenneth Robinson
concludes from this humorous episode is
that if you’re not prepared to be wrong
you can’t come up with anything original
now the same is true of children’s
drawings and I’ve got an example here if
I can operate this thing there we go
right so I know this is probably a bit
small for you but this is a portrait of
me which was done by my daughter and
given to me last Father’s Day you can
see there says daddy at the top now the
first thing you’ll probably notice about
this image I hope you’ll notice is that
it looks nothing like me right
for a start I don’t know why but I’ve
got a shot of vertical turquoise hair i
goodness knows why my hands and feet
seem to look like tarantulas that have
wilted in the Sun I’ve got a second head
growing out of my torso and the less we
say about the Slender Man in the
background here the better
so obviously I’m teasing I love this
picture and what it shows is a bold and
carefree attempt to try and capture what
my daughter believes is my essence my
personality either that’s all she needs
serious psychiatric treatment
but as Kenneth Robinson says if you’re
not prepared to be wrong you’ll never
come up with anything original case in
point right there now in a way our
education is a bit like that we happy
sorts of guidelines that are laid out
for us and then we work our way until we
get to what’s Olivia a chosen career at
the end now I remember back in the fifth
form the careers advice I received and
there was this initiative called s Co
Morris B which i think is still going
today
and basically it involved people’s
having to fill out various
questionnaires lots of multiple-choice
boxes to tick and in sit an interview
then all the data’s collated fit into a
big machine and you basically wait to
have your fortune told and the results
have rendered out and it tells you the
career you’re going to do now with me I
didn’t just get one career option on her
I got to and this is absolutely true
this is what it said I was given the
choice of either being a diplomat
pretty snazzy or a car mechanic
now you couldn’t get two more in
Congress career paths if you tried
diplomat or car mechanic I’d not sure
what I was meant to take away from that
whether I was going to get a call from
the United Nations and certainly be
whisked away to North Korea to fix the
alternator on Kim jong-un’s Fiat Punto
or I don’t know it made no sense to me
the truth of the matter is I was a
teenager I didn’t have the first clue
what I wanted to be I was too concerned
about getting a wedgie from an ex house
debating competition they were troubling
times now admittedly there are careers
which have a specific vocational point
to them and you have to fulfill certain
qualifications and attain certain skills
to get to that career – for instance she
is one she wants to be a vet basically
and she’s doing chemistry maths and
biology and she’s currently scouring the
country looking for a university so she
can study there once it’s finished or it
sounds now that level of focus and
determinations extraordinary for a
six-year-old girl
so obviously I’m joking she’s 17 but I
think she did make up her mind about
being a vet when she was six and I’m
sure now lots of you here tonight who
also have a firm grasp on what you wanna
do when you leave this school and you’ll
be currently equipping yourselves with
the skills and the qualifications to
achieve that that’s great but then
there’s the other end of the spectrum
where I dwelt and there’ll be a few deer
here tonight as well he fall into that
category who are more like concussed
hamsters wandering around the labyrinth
you’ll know who you are because you’ll
be the ones giving serious consideration
to doing a degree in English literature
I’m teasing because oh sorry
I warned of you I was there in fact I
distinctly remember finishing my English
degree and they think it’s myself right
what am I going to do with this I still
don’t have the answer to that question
by the way in case you’re wondering but
I do remember my very last English
tutorial and my cheater was trying to
reassure the students about our career
prospects and you say not to worry
because statistically ninety percent of
us would leave with a full-time job you
don’t want on to say that 90 percent of
those candidates would be working in a
fast-food restaurant and then he got up
and left and closed the door and I never
saw him again and that was literally the
last line in my entire academic career
that’s what it all boiled down to this
point this line here all those revision
timetables exercise books ink cartridges
calculator batteries detentions it all
boiled down to that moment now I know
what you’re thinking that’s a very
depressing note to end a talk on but the
good news is I haven’t quite finished
yet but I can’t promise that it won’t
get more depressing where do I go from
here one of the good things about having
such obtuse career options is it
essentially grants you a blank page to
color in all over again so where do I go
I’ll tell you where I came exactly back
here
quite literally my first employment
paycheck was from this very school
obviously I wasn’t a teacher I was too
overqualified for that
I works in the maintenance department
and I remember on my first day I let
slip to the foreman Mike Hancock that I
used to do are a level and so he
responded by thrusting a paintbrush into
one hand a five liter bucket of magnolia
emulsion into the other and said there
you go Picasso go and paint the
classroom block so that was the summer
of 96 for me now if you would ask me
back then if I thought that job would in
any way shape or informed the person I
am today I said no not at all
although I did learn some pretty
spectacular new swearwords off the crew
but the truth is it’s very easy to
overlook menial jobs that we often take
just to make ends meet but the fact of
the matter is while they may not be
along the lines of what we want to do
they nevertheless play an integral part
in how we get there so take for instance
the modern classical composer Philip
Glass I’m sure some of the music
students here would have heard of him
but people who haven’t heard of him
would certainly have heard one of his
many film scores now he didn’t receive
his first professional commission till
he was 41 before that he worked in a
steel mill in his hometown and then as a
taxi driver in New York now he said that
he was driven for his curiosity for life
and that any dis about trumped any
distinct he might have had for working
and if we look at Harvey Pekar the
American comic writer he proves that
being in the employment doldrums can
actually be a great catalyst for
creativity a lot of his stories and
characters are based on the real-life
characters he met every day in his
dead-end job as a filing clerk at the
local hospital I myself made my first
short film when I was in-between temping
jobs having just moved back into my
parents house in my early 20s after
splitting up with my girlfriend happy
days
so you know there is like the end of the
tunnel
so basically I then went on to do a
three-month kind of post-grad animation
course in Bristol where I now live and
eventually I started getting some
freelance work as an animator I started
out in children’s TV programs and also I
made some short films that really are
not for children but were a lot of fun
to make anyway and unfortunately the
budget and the funding started to fall
out of the animation market in the UK at
that time so the work dried up when I
was lucky enough to get a full time job
at a digital agency doing animation for
children’s and educational apps and
games and stuff like that then it’s
complete Scott more more involved the
job seemed to become more perfunctory
than creative so I decided to take
another drastic diversion and I quit my
full-time job and I decided to go back
to being a freelancer and working
children’s illustration and it was the
best decision I’ve ever made
providing I don’t open my bank
statements now I’ve got another example
for you of one of my illustrations for
my book there you go so the good thing
about being a children’s illustrator is
that essentially I get to color over the
lines all over again
so here is image from my second book the
Lumberjacks beard is available in all
good book shots and some pretty enough
ones and you can rent it from the
library for free so you don’t have an
excuse so here we see basically the
trees essentially triangles on sticks
the clouds and the shadows are just
scribbles and there’s no way that hefty
lumberjack can live in such a tiny log
cabin so basically everything
technically is wrong with this picture a
bit like my daughter’s image but that’s
what makes it so right basically one of
the hardest parts of my job these days
in fact he’s trying to unlearn all the
constructs that were drilled into me
when I was a student like perspective
and scale and things like that so that’s
the lumberjack beard now
there’s one last thing one last diagram
I want to draw because basically
wondering where am I going with this I’m
not sure myself but think what I what
the gist of what I’m getting out is that
it’s okay
to color over the lines metaphorically
speaking at any given point in your
career and hopefully this diagram will
show that that’s my plan
so we’ve got two converging lines like
that this is a time line denoted with T
I was listening in some lessons and
basically here is the wide end the early
stages of our stage of our life we have
a breadth of options a plethora of
opportunities laid out before us and
being children we can color it in as
liberally as we like it doesn’t matter
where kids it’s fine no one cares but
then as we get a bit older and a bit
more self-conscious we start to Curran
bit more tightly now I turned 40 a
couple of weeks ago so technically that
puts me with current medical advances
the way they are hopefully about halfway
down this timeline that’s me right and
as you can see my options have narrowed
considerably okay but what you can’t see
what this diagram doesn’t show you this
it just beyond this halfway point
there’s this Phantom Zone here now this
is what I call the midlife crisis
territory right
so here anything goes literary whoo it’s
like being a kid again no one cares is
brilliant you go over lines it doesn’t
matter that’s like a veritable Jackson
Pollock right there and what that
represents is things like messy divorces
impromptu motorbike purchases an
unhinged desire to take out a second
mortgage and start your own art design
juice bar all those things fix your arms
do okay then after that we keep coming
in and the lines get narrower and
narrower our pen starts to run out of
ink you can read a metal into that if
you want and then eventually we get to
full stop at the end a finite black dots
now I’m sure you can guess what that
represents
if not I’ll make it a bit easier for the
ones with less imagination I did warn
you if I get more depressing so
basically that black dot I think is the
only kind of truth on this whole chart
everything that precedes it is one big
blank coloring book which is ready to be
filled in either with diligent precision
or big bold sprawls either way you’re
not going to be scored out of ten you’re
not going to get given a gold star
you’re not gonna get marked down for it
it’s I think the only parameters that
really matter are the ones that measure
how content we are any given point on
this timeline it’s very easy to perceive
a given career as a goal or destination
that we set out to achieve but in my
experience the problem with having goals
is that goal posts inevitably shift and
sometimes they just disappear entirely
so I think the key is just to not regret
a moment of how we get there so you may
as well be as neat or as messy as you
like
thank you
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