Tim Minchin is a multipotentialite if ever there was one. He’s a singer, an actor, a songwriter and a musician. He’s an accomplished comedian and a poet.
He’s also an author of books. You don’t have to dream (subtitled ‘Advice for the incrementally ambitious’) is the fourth tome released under his name and his first non-fiction book.
Billed as a ‘celebration of life, art, success, kindness, love and thriving in a meaningless universe’, this book comprises three graduation speeches Minchin made while receiving honorary degrees from the University of Western Australia and the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) in Perth, as well as the Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts in London.
The three speeches, delivered at graduation ceremonies between 2013 and 2019 contain homespun advice, Minchin-style. They’re accompanied by wry, clever illustrations by Andrew Rae.
In the first speech, Minchin dispenses advice such as “don’t seek happiness”, “remember, it’s all luck”, “don’t rush” and “respect people with less power than you”. He also exhorts us to exercise (“there is an inverse correlation between depression and exercise”) and encourages us to thoroughly examine our own opinions.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with these pearls of wisdom and some of them are delivered in an amusing way (“Happiness is like an orgasm: if you think too much about it, it goes away,” he writes) but there’s very little here that we haven’t all heard before.
The second speech is similar in tone; Minchin speaks of the importance of being authentic, of kindness and opines that “comparing yourself to others in any area of your life is poison”.
Again, while Minchin’s counsel is sound, there’s nothing new or ground-breaking here.
Like the first two, the third and final speech contains elements of self-help and advice. The lessons conveyed are not as universal as those in the first two, with this section pertaining to people who want to become actors.
The reader is told that even if one becomes successful as an actor: “Success doesn’t mean what They think it means. And even if you get the type of success that They think is success, it won’t necessarily be for the best.”
The pressures of fame and the loss of anonymity can be gruelling, Minchin warns.
“To state the obvious: I observe among my friends no correlation between wealth and happiness or fame and happiness,” he writes.
Once again, pretty standard stuff.
To be clear, You don’t have to have a dream is not a terrible book. There’s nothing especially wrong with it and it’s obvious the speeches would have worked well at a graduation ceremony.
But what works as a speech to a particular audience in a specific setting (in this case, fellow graduates and university staff on graduation day) does not necessarily translate to a compelling book.
And it’s a bit cheeky to expect people to pay the best part of $40 to buy a book of old graduation speeches made in the 2010s – particularly when you can already watch them on YouTube free of charge.
Read: Book review: Milk and Honey: 10th Anniversary Collector’s Edition, Rupi Kaur
In the end, You don’t have to have a dream seems like a bit of a cash-in – an easy way to release a book without much effort, at a time of year when people are looking for Christmas stocking stuffers.
You don’t have to have a dream, Tim Minchin
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 9781761620058
Format: Hardback
Release date: 10 September 2024
RRP: $36.99
