Composer and comedian Tim Minchin on the beauty of setting your sights a little lower in life

Tim Minchin credits a lot of his success to the fact he’s “not great at taking advice”.

“I’m just f****** lucky – for every one of me, there are 99 people just as talented, who didn’t find the right audience or the right expression of their talent. And there’s a bunch of people who’ve worked harder than me who haven’t got where I’ve got,” he muses.

“I think part of my luck is I’m not great at taking advice – I just didn’t really listen very much.”

This unconventional approach has worked well for the Australian composer and comedian, who is best known for writing the music and lyrics for Matilda The Musical, based on Roald Dahl’s novel. Debuting on London’s West End in 2011 and later transferring to Broadway and touring globally, it won a record-breaking seven Olivier Awards, four Tony Awards, and was adapted into a 2022 film starring Emma Thompson, Stephen Graham and Lashana Lynch.

Musicals might seem like light-hearted work, but Sydney-based Minchin, 48, who describes himself as “a sort of rationalist romantic”, spends lot of his time grappling with larger questions in life.

“I spend a lot of time in this space in my brain, not just thinking about what my values are, but what values are useful in this quite difficult time,” says Minchin, who is thoughtful and contemplative, whose Australian twang is littered with plenty of swearing.

“It’s a difficult time largely because of too much information, [with] social media… The difference between a social media post and art is really about consideration and effort. Everyone seems to think just because they feel something, it’s really important to immediately tell the world.

“I’ve definitely done that – before I got off Twitter, which I did many years ago, I looked back recently, and I’m like: What the f*** did I think I was achieving, just by putting my witty opinions into the world? It’s just another f****** piece of anxiety.”

A lot of Minchin’s ideas on the world – which he offers up as someone who is “not that old, but I’m not that young, so maybe I’ve got some ideas that the average 25-year-old hasn’t really spent much time thinking about” – are distilled in his new book, You Don’t Have To Have A Dream: Advice For The Incrementally Ambitious. It’s a collection of three commencement speeches he’s made in the past – one of which, titled ‘Nine Life Lessons’ and given to students at the University of Western Australia in 2013, has over 5.3m views on the official YouTube video, and who knows how many thousands more via reposts.

For this particular speech, Minchin had no idea it was even going to be recorded before going on stage, let alone how far it would travel. He says this is a “pretty good argument for not knowing too much”, while also admitting the knowledge might not have made too much of a difference to the speech he eventually gave.

“I’m not a person who thinks much about the market – when I make a musical or a show, I’m not thinking: What do they want? I don’t get caught up in received wisdom about what audiences will or will not take, I go: What would I be proud of? What would I love if I were in the audience?” he explains.

“My work isn’t very condescending – sometimes it’s wanky, sometimes it’s pretentious, and sometimes it might not be very good – but I don’t say, ‘Oh little audience, I’ll spoon-feed you what you want’.”

Even now, Minchin doesn’t seem too bothered about pushing his success to the next level and climbing the ranks of fame.

“I don’t need to write another hit, like Matilda,” he says, simply. “I just feel so blessed. I want to write new musicals, but I’m not chasing that. I’ve been so lucky, with all the things I’ve had to do.”

So far, his philosophy of “if I follow my instinct, it’ll work well” has been rather successful for Minchin – with a few bumps along the road, like the ill-fated animated film he was slated to direct, which was shut down after DreamWorks Animation was sold to Comcast.

But make no mistake: “I care deeply about how people receive my work. I just don’t get caught up in the idea that I can second-guess that. If I put my heart and soul into something and really care about it and believe in it, then it usually works out alright. At which point, if someone says ‘you’re a talentless fat f***wit’ I crumble, but it doesn’t affect me next time. Because I just don’t know how else to do it – I have no instinct to try and chase someone else’s definition of what is good, it’s just not in my brain.”

In the very first point in Minchin’s ‘Nine Life Lessons’, he says: ‘You don’t have to have a dream’, instead urging people to be ‘micro-ambitious’, and being passionately dedicated to short-term goals.

The idea of not having to have a dream “speaks to something about my worldview”, Minchin notes. “It’s survivor bias – I can only speak to what worked for me. It does relate to my lack of ability to go, I’m going to try and make an Oscar-winning thing. I know what wins, so I’m going to reverse-engineer some art, based on my knowledge of what usually ends up getting an Oscar.

“I don’t f****** know – gross. How do you make good art backwards? It has to come from story and instinct. And I feel the same – you can’t make a good life backwards, you can’t make a good career backwards. If you’re a tennis player and you go, I want to be a number-one tennis player – there’s actually a really simple thing to do, which is get up at five o’clock every morning, and you f****** play tennis… But most of life doesn’t work like that.

“If you want to be a star, and go, one day I’m going to be a Hollywood star – you’re just not going to be a Hollywood star. It’s a s*** way to think about it, because you’re going to feel like you’ve let yourself down.”

That’s why Minchin advocates for aiming smaller – but not with any less enthusiasm or passion. “You should just think: I want to be really good in my school play, playing third f****** conquistador or whatever, like I’m going to f****** nail third conquistador.”

He continues: “I think there’s a lot of mythology around the idea that what you should do is set your sights on the top of the mountain and not rest until you get there. But maybe there’s f****** mountain passes that you would have missed?”

It all goes back to the idea of micro-ambition: “It’s about passion – not because you’re going to end up there, simply because surely it’s a better way to live life, and it’s a better way to have a relationship, it’s a better way to have a friendship. That’s just come from what’s worked for me.”

You Don’t Have To Have A Dream: Advice For The Incrementally Ambitious by Tim Minchin is published in hardback by Ebury Press. Available now.