I’ve finally been out of school for as long as I was in it.

School takes ages, doesn’t it? It used to feel almost like a waiting room to me. You get ushered into a room and told to sit quietly for hours at a time and the reading material they’ve laid out maybe isn’t what you would choose for yourself. After what seems like forever, your name is called and you’re finally ushered through the door and on the other side you find… Another waiting room. It’s like a recurring nightmare. I always imagined that once I got to the thirteenth waiting room, I would go through a door that said 18 on it in a red circle. On the other side of the door would be a place called Real Life where I would finally be treated like an adult. I would immediately get into a car, drive it to a casino, order an alcoholic drink and seduce a lady. I was always waiting for Real Life to start.

You often hear people say that life is a journey. They say that you need to have a sense of direction. That you could go far. I actually think those are good metaphors for what life is like. The problem is, when you talk about journeys and directions in 2018 it makes it sound like you know exactly where you’re going and how to get there because you looked it up on Google Maps. Unfortunately, that’s not how life works. When people came up with the idea that life was like a journey, it was more like trying to find your way in the age of Christopher Columbus. Back then, not only did they not have GPS but they hadn’t even figured out how to navigate using the stars.

They used a simple system called dead reckoning. Every day, you wake up on your ship and you look at your compass to see roughly what direction you’re travelling in, and then you throw a random item overboard to see how fast you’re going, and you put a pin in the map where you think you have got to. The next day, you wake up and do the same thing, but this time your starting point is the guess you made yesterday. Eventually your position is a guess based on a guess based on a guess. You know roughly where you are heading but the truth is, you don’t really know whether you’re right until months later when the map says there should be an island on the horizon and you pick up your telescope and hope to God there isn’t just a wide, flat, empty sea.

When I first heard about dead reckoning I thought people must have been lost at sea all the time. It sounds like it would be a miracle if anyone ever ended up where they wanted to go. But the strange thing is that it worked pretty well. You don’t need to know everything about the whole journey. You only need to know three things: which way you’re facing, how fast you’re going, and what you did yesterday. I really like that idea. But there is one big, glaring problem with thinking of life as a journey. It’s the same problem with thinking of school as a waiting room. In fact, almost every time people talk about life, they make it sound as if the entire point of it all is to arrive at your destination and put your feet up. Now I don’t have all the answers but I’m pretty sure the best bit of my life is not going to be the ending.

One of my favourite authors, Fyodor Dostoevsky, put it this way: ‘Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it. Take my word for it, the moment when he was happiest was just three days before the discovery of the New World, when the mutinous crew were on the point of returning to Europe in despair. It wasn’t the New World that mattered. Columbus died almost without seeing it, and not really knowing what he had discovered. It’s life that matters, nothing but life – the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself at all.’

You have done amazing things with your life. You have amazing things ahead of you. This isn’t a waiting room; this is already real life. There is no master plan. On the best days, you manage to find one of those tiny islands in the middle of a huge ocean. Enjoy that moment. It’s incredible to think that you have got exactly where you wanted to go just by heading in roughly the right direction day after day and trying not to be blown off course. Better still, the next day you wake up and it is one of those rare days when you know exactly where you are and you can choose where you go next. You have not reached America yet, but this is the exciting part, out here on the water. Some days you might feel a bit lost, or even lose heart – that happens to everyone. But never doubt what you are capable of. On those days when everything ahead of you looks like an empty sea, all you need to do is look back and you’ll see how far you’ve come.

I gave a version of this talk at Bournemouth School’s 2018 prize giving day.