Hello everyone, my name is Arnold, and this is my first of hopefully many speeches. In this speech, I'm going to share a little more about myself and my reasons for joining the toastmasters club.
When I first agreed to do this speech 2 weeks ago, I thought it would be easy, it’s called an "icebreaker" and how hard can it be to break ice. It was only after 9 days of procrastinating not successfully coming up with a draft that I realized breaking ice may not be an easy task. I'm a big believer in my favorite version of Parkinson’s law which states that "If you wait until the last minute to do something, it only takes 1 minute to do." So If the speech is bad, then let's just assume it's because I did it in 1 minute.
To share a little more about myself, apart from the fact that I'm an obvious Barcelona fan, I like to think I'm an amateur philosopher. I got into philosophy because I struggled a lot with existential crisis. I thought there was some big reason why I'm alive and fulfilling that purpose was the main point of my life. In my search for meaning, I went into some rabbit holes reading a lot of books from some very smart philosophers and some books from some people who were more lost than I was.
The turning point for me was when I read an article titled "The Absurd”, by Thomas Nagel that it all kind of made sense. His theory is that life has no meaning and that should not be a problem. If nothing we do in our lifetime will matter in a million years thehn the fact that wouldn't doesn't matter shouldn't also matter at the moment. With this reasoning I try to focus on meaning doing the things that I find fun and interesting because nothing I do will matter in a million years anyways.
On the topic of things I find interesting, I like seeing how people's experiences tend to shape their perspectives. The toastmasters meetings usually give me the opportunity to explore this interest by listening to the speeches and 2-minute table topic stories which people come up with. Because we have very different perspectives we often come up with a diverse set of stories which I find interesting.
“I... useeed useeed to to to speak like like like this” growing up and it made me quite shy and anxious to speak even amongst my friends. Luckily, I've gotten better at speaking, but I am still anxious whenever I have to give speech as you may have noticed. They say practice makes perfect. My goal is to reduce my anxiety and increase my confidence when speaking in public and I believe the toastmaster club can help me achieve this goal.
To conclude, I hope you've learned a bit more about my procrastination tactics, my search for meaning, the football club I support and my reasons for joining the toastmasters club. I'm looking forward to doing many more speeches in the future.
Thank You.