Here are some of my notes from a toastmasters CC5 speech I completed recently. This is not my speech, but rather an altered version to make it more suitable for reading

Bad Arguments

What do you want to do when you grow up?

This is a question which you might have been asked many times throughout my childhood. But there are certain times when the answer actually does matter; like high school, or universities (which actually define who you are). However I, myself have never managed to answer it to my own satisfaction.

Genetic Fallacy

Seven years ago, I was finishing up high school. At the time I was thinking about what university program I should enrol in, or in other words “What should I do when I grow up?”. You might think that

  1. Medicine

  2. Law

  3. Accounting

  4. Finance

  5. Engineer

are the typical “Asian” choices which I would choose, but none of them interest me.

They were “boring”. So I consulted the all-knowing all-seeing oracle: Google

Opened the browser, typed in “best career” and there it was. The best career based on factors:

  1. Stress

  2. Workplace

  3. Pay

  4. Future prospects

And there it was, a career which I have never heard of, much less pronounce. There in its absurdity I decided that this would be my future career. This in itself is called: Genetic Fallacy".

Where we attribute a higher source of truth and knowledge to the absolute standard, without considering whether the fact indeed was relevant to me.

That was seven years ago.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

Five years ago I was 19 in my second year of university, and unsurprisingly I was hated my degree. It was at this stage I highly contemplated dropping this degree; and I wasn’t alone. One in four students in the original cohort had already changed concentrations or just dropped out. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I was doing quite well, hence that wasn’t exactly a suitable reason to drop out. That in essence was my justification for staying within my degree.

I reasoned, well so many people would just love to be in the position that I’m currently in. and it is just such a shame if I was to quit simply because I didn’t like it, after all don’t all good things come from things which aren’t so pleasant.

This is the sunk cost fallacy, rather than looking at the towards the future; whether or not I actually wanted to follow this path, I instead only considered what I had invested, which lets face it, has little or no bearing on the real question:

What do I want to do when I grow up?

Relative Deprivation

Where does that leave me today? As I’ve alluded to, I didn’t follow Google’s suggestion, and this very question came up in my recent performance review:

Where do you see yourself in 12 months? or 5 years?

Rightly or wrongly, I answered quite candidly

I don’t know.

I’ve learnt from talking to my parents, and more senior colleagues that this is in fact normal. It seems like many people really had no idea what they wanted to do when they were 24. I only wished more people would’ve told me that earlier!

Maybe you’ll tell me that its okay that I don’t know, that I’m doing great, I’ll be fine. But the reality is I won’t feel that way.

This is simply because talking to other school/university classmates makes me feel like I should know, because they appear to know what they want to do. Its got to stage where it felt like everyone my age knew exactly what they were doing and what they wanted to achieve…except me.

Remarks

I finish here with no real solution to the never end question

What do I want to do when I grow up?

Perhaps in the future, perhaps in 5 or 7 years time I’ll back and realise just how absurd my thought process today was, that I’m all worried and concerned over nothing. Perhaps I’ll choose something entirely different and wonder if I had wasted the first half of my 20s investing in something which amounted in nothing. But regardless, it is clear I still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up…

Evaluation Notes:

Commendations:

  • Natural movement
  • Well paced with movements

Recommendations:

  • Watch your right arm! It is sometimes stiff you’ll need to relax it or place it on your side
  • Some intentional actions will need to be smoothed out.
  • Conclusion was a bit lengthy.
  • Topic could have been a more animated topic to make use of CC5 objectives. This would have made the task easier.
  • Title of the speech was poorly chosen.
  • Arguments could have been constructed better.

Self-reflection:

Compared with what was written above, parts of the speech was lengthened and others were stripped out. There simply wasn’t enough time to focus on the “argument” of the speech which is probably why it felt like a poor title. This is a sentiment which I would agree with. Preparation could have been better. After all I wasn’t even sure if I could get the speech under 7 minutes even just before presenting it. I ended up cutting up the justification portion (ie. the titles of each section) in order to trim it down to a measly 6:45. This definitely could be better.