By Ramith Dheerasekara  In conversation with World Champion of Public Speaking 2014 Dananjaya Hettiarachchi, he spoke about some of the things he did while he was a student. This included him being the Vice Captain of the school football team and at the interschool sports meet too. This interview was streamed live on the Little Stars Facebook page and was conducted by my students and me.   Could you please tell us where you think you’d be today if you hadn’t gotten into public speaking? Professionally, from an educational perspective, I studied HR (human resources), so I would have either worked in a company or had a career as an HR professional, or I would have been a dancer. It’s definitely one of those two things. For three years, I competed professionally in ballroom dancing – when I had hair! I had a big passion for it. Your speeches are absolutely phenomenal and have inspired many people. Would you mind speaking about your motivations? When I was a kid growing up, I really wanted to express my creativity, and that’s where my motivation came from. Spoken word is just a medium for me to express myself. If you look at how humans are different from every other animal in the animal kingdom, you’ll see that we are a creative and cerebral species that have an innate need to express ourselves. I always wanted to put my ideas, thoughts, and philosophy into some format; public speaking was just one format, and that’s how I got into public speaking and that’s my motivation – just to create. How much of your time do you spend on your hobbies? I’ve got plenty of time for hobbies. I have this philosophy of working 20% of the time. I value the quality of work rather than quantity, so I do 20% of work which brings me 80% of the results. I have managed to fine tune my approach to my craft and in my field, and I have now got 80% of the time to follow my hobbies – which is currently me chasing after my kids, but after I do that, I spend a lot of time learning from other people, as that’s really my hobby. I love having conversations with people that know more than me; I like challenging certain myths and philosophies. My friends are all about challenging each others’ views of the world; that’s what I love, for people to come and tell me something that counters my narrative. That’s a very good way to spend your time. So my number one hobby right now is finding people and narratives that challenge me, and that’s what I spend a long time doing. Many people have different outlooks on life. What’s yours? I initially thought there was an ultimate purpose and hidden meaning to life, one which everyone needed to find. But, eventually I figured that life is meaningless and that there was no grand purpose. Like the famous Christopher Hitchens said: “When you’re born, you get shot out from your mother’s womb like a cannonball and go hurling towards a door with rusty nails on it. You’re going to be in pain, but there’s no way to stop that.” But between getting shot out and landing on a bunch of nails, you get some time, and it is in that time that you become something. So, there’s no grand purpose or meaning to life, but there is one to you! If you can find your meaning and purpose in the time that you’ve got, then you’ve achieved what 90% of the world is unable or not privileged to achieve. Today, a lot of people don’t have the luxury of following their dreams; a lot of people don’t even have the opportunity to think about their purpose in life because their lives are so hard. All they can do is wake up in the morning and work 15/16 hours a day just to put some food on the table. So following a dream and asking oneself what their purpose in life is are luxuries. If you have been given that luxury and the inner environment supports you to follow your dream, which stems from peace of mind, that’s an opportunity only about 0.5% of the world has. I think you should grab it and embrace it, rather than finding a grand general purpose to life; find out what’s in it for you, your purpose and meaning. Thank you very much for your time. Just one small request before we wrap up. Could you recite a small part of “I see something in you”? I’ll repeat my favourite line from the speech: I see something in you, but I don’t know what it is.