To keep moving forward: Speech made at the National English Speaking Championship 2014

I was walking down a twilight street and only the moon could be seen as vivid as daylight. The road was rough and it was blurry. Suddenly Cheshire cat appeared in front and winked at me, saying “I have a solution to that problem of yours. Just swap foreign debt instead of government deficit. It’s just as easy as that”. How bizarre an instance. And gosh, his smile was as sarcastic as I almost thought that I have become that naive Alice, lost in the Wonderland.

7 o’clock in the morning, the alarm struck and I woke up from the most enlightening dream in years. Getting up hastily to write down what he’d said, for dreams fade away so quickly. I really didn’t want to let go of the instruction the cat had given me. I was stuck writing my thesis on some annoying debt thingy, for a long while. As you probably have figured out, I am an economics student. Whatever.

This occurrence of dream was a combination of imagination and knowledge. If I hadn’t known what actually foreign debt or those jargons meant, I wouldn’t understand the hint Cheshire cat had been conveying me in my dream. If I couldn’t imagine a cat talking to me, I wouldn’t encounter Cheshire. Thus, imagination and knowledge build on each other. As you learn more, you broaden your imaginational sphere. And as you imagine more the knowledge you have obtained becomes more yours. Thus these two should be like a nexus that is inseparable in order to become a powerful union unless you choose only one of’em.

However, what the cat instructed me in my dream was gonna get wasted unless I do something with it. It had no value until I act to that very idea, to make it real. To embody it. If you don’t act proactively even if you have the knowledge and that precious creative mind, they will all go to waste, just as if I had forgotten that dream of mine.

As you see, whatever knowledge you have obtained and whatever ideas you have created in your imagination, unless you use that, apply that and accomplish that, it will remain an illusion or will get lost. Just like the highest bidder in an auction suffers the winner’s curse, the education we gained through hard work and imagination we had in our creative minds will have no value on it’s own.

Now try imagining an auction where there will be no winner’s curse. The higher you bid the more benefit you will sow. There will be no limit to it unless you put one. But you will not bid with money, for one thing. You will bid with your imagination, knowledge and foremost of all, perseverance, hard-will. This is the AUCTION FOR FORTUNE.

So let’s bid and I tell you my friends, to “keep moving forward” and bid higher and higher as the most creative and knowledgeable mind had once entrusted us.