417 days…. or 600,000 thousand minutes.

This is said to be the projected amount of time it takes to be considered an ‘expert’ at something. You may know it as the ‘10,000 hours rule’. This equates for the average person, who would practise their chosen skill for roughly 90 minutes a day, for 20 years to completely master their skill.

Lads… if we do the maths, on average a third of our lives are spent under the covers, which roughly means you are all already an expert at something even though you might not have known it. This does not leave much time for much else to master in your life time. It could be a sport, it could be a language, it could simply be making a sandwich. One thing you simply can’t master is all three. Time matters men, time matters.

The blues award helps recognise the work people put into their skill and though not the most prestigious award in the school, certainly is not an easy feat. The blue award is not just a physical piece of fabric, it’s what went into earning that little piece of fabric. It obviously does not take 10,000 hours to achieve a blue award, but it certainly can’t be achieved within a sole day. It takes time. So, what I want you to leave this auditorium thinking about is what do you want more than anything else? What do you dream about? What do you visualise yourself being?

As a junior, I used to look up to the guys with the paragraph of white writing on their blazers, nowadays I am inclined to be more inspired by some of the guys around me who may only have 1 or 2 blues, but have truly devoted to their skill and are well far on their way to mastering that something that they passion. Quality not Quantity again wins.

‘If a man is called a Street Sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well’ – Martin Luther King Jr.