I happened to listen, yesterday, to a guest lecture by the BBC Chief of the Journalism Foundation, Andrew Wilson. Wilson was a former student of Ilford County High School, completed his A-levels there, and left for Cambridge in 1986. He is now a sort of chief mentor for the new and budding journalists working for the BBC.
The lecture was unique in many ways; even my son said so while we were traveling back from school after the talk.
At this GCSE awards function, I was expecting the former student to wax eloquent on how he had risen from an East London school to a position of power and prestige as a senior figure at the BBC. Instead, it was entirely different.
It was interesting to hear him refer to the grammar school as “County High”, which might have been the way the school was commonly known in his day.
He reflected on those times by recounting how he had to wait in a queue for half an hour at a red telephone box just to speak to a school friend for two minutes. He spoke about how books were their main source of nourishment, rather than mobile phones, Skype, or Facebook messages.
He said he had recently been speaking to a young journalist who had been working for the past six years and was looking for inspiration to do some creative work. Andrew told him that there is no such thing as magical creative work; it comes only through hard work and mastering the details. The journalist replied, “Why didn’t you tell me that in the beginning?” Andrew fashioned his entire talk around this kernel of wisdom.
Instead of demonstrating his own knowledge, Andrew borrowed the collective wisdom of many others. The way he did it was fascinating. He used a technique called crowdsourcing.
Crowdsourcing is a new tool for public speakers, especially serious ones. They circulate the title of their lecture through social media such as Facebook and Twitter, inviting opinions, experiences, and ideas related to the topic. They then design their speech around these responses to make it useful, relevant, and appealing to the audience.
Critics argue that this kind of crowdsourcing can lead to groupthink, mediocrity, and majoritarian bias. Andrew, however, avoided these pitfalls by carefully selecting only those ideas that his own experience, maturity, and judgment could endorse.
Andrew Wilson posted a question on Facebook and Twitter along the following lines:
“Given your experience in life, what advice would you give a sixth-form student about what really matters in life?”
He received about 160 replies from Twitter and Facebook. They included responses from teachers, solicitors, bankers, doctors, scientists, and people from almost every walk of life.
He distilled the meaning of these responses and categorised them into five broad themes: Family, Friendship, Success, Life, and Values. According to the respondents’ collective wisdom, these are the five pillars of adult life.
Talking about family, he said that what emerged most strongly was that family matters more than anything else. Equally important are the stories of our families. He narrated the story of an MP who spoke about his grandfather, who had lived in a prefabricated house in Hackney at the age of thirteen, joined the trade union movement at sixteen, and campaigned for educational rights from the age of eighteen. That was his grandfather’s story. It reminds us that each of us has stories about our parents and grandparents—stories worth cherishing if only we care to own them.
The second important theme was friendship. Andrew quoted his son, who said that five close friends are better than five hundred on Facebook. Fewer is often better than many. Quality matters far more than quantity.
The third theme was success. What brings success in life?
Andrew quoted a senior journalist who said that he did not realise until he was thirty-eight that success comes through hard work and attention to the smallest details. The big achievements happen only when the small things are done consistently and well. No matter how talented a person may be, success does not come without hard work. There is simply no substitute for it.
The harder you work, the luckier you become. Luck is merely the moment when years of hard work and dedication finally reveal themselves.
David Beckham’s countless hours of practice on Wanstead Flats, day after day, in rain or shine, were the real reason behind the magnificent goal he scored against Greece.
When Andrew joined the BBC, he imagined glamour, excitement, incredible creativity, and the joy of working for such a great institution. Very soon, however, he realized that 99 percent of the job consisted of repetitive hard work, and that much of what people called creativity was simply the outcome of disciplined effort. Another employee, who had worked there for six years, expressed his disappointment by saying, “Why didn’t you tell me that in the beginning?”
The fourth theme was life itself.
No one is asking you to be better than everyone else. Stop stressing. Stop worrying about what other people think.
Your life is the movie you are creating, and, in reality, very few people are interested in watching it as closely as you imagine. Failure is not necessarily a bad thing. It teaches resilience, provided you learn the right lessons. Sometimes the ability to remain resilient in defeat is more valuable than victory itself.
Andrew mentioned a leading psychologist who suggested that, by the age of twenty-one, much of a person’s outlook on life is already formed—their ideas, values, political views, the music they enjoy, the books they read, and even the kinds of people they are drawn to. They often spend the rest of their lives reinforcing these patterns.
I would only add the phrase, “It generally happens so.”
Andrew also said that waiting to be discovered or recognised is largely a waste of time. It may never happen, and life is too precious to spend waiting. That waiting game is not real living.
He then spoke about four different ways of approaching life: the prisoner, the passive observer, the professor, and the participant.
The kind of life we lead depends on which model we choose.
The prisoner merely serves the sentence and waits to get out.
The passive person simply drifts through life.
The professor behaves as though everyone else is fortunate merely to be in his presence.
The participant throws himself fully into life and engages with it wholeheartedly.
Many people achieve success yet remain unhappy. They continue searching for fulfillment and happiness. According to Andrew, genuine fulfillment comes only through connecting with other people, and the secret of that connection lies in the ability to listen.
He observed that 99.9 percent of people are poor listeners. They dominate conversations because they are eager to speak, impress, and display their knowledge.
Whether in lectures, negotiations, marriages, friendships, or everyday relationships, the real skill is listening. If we truly understand what listening is and learn how to practice it, success is almost guaranteed. It may well be the single most important life skill.
Finally, he concluded by saying that a young person’s future depends on how they make other people feel, how well they listen, how they treat others along the way, how they contribute to society, and how willingly they pass the baton on to the next generation.
On our way home, my son sat quietly beside me in the car. He was thoughtful because some of his own views on life differed from those expressed by the speaker. He remarked that he wished he had recorded the lecture.
I smiled and told him that I had recorded it on my phone.
He immediately took the phone, checked the recording, typed in a title, and named the clip simply:
“LIFE.”
KR Matcha
** Andrew Wilson is in the middle of the photograph
