The Last Word

By Samuel Crump | Posted: Monday March 16, 2026

My name is Sam and I’m very honoured to be a prefect this year.

I’m going to start my last word with an exercise that I want all of you to do. I’m not going to ask you to do much; all you need to do is close your eyes.

So, with your eyes closed, imagine yourself in 20 years. Except, unlike many exercises like this, I want you to imagine yourself in a bad situation — the worst situation possible. Imagine that in 20 years you haven’t accomplished any of the things that you wanted to accomplish. Maybe you're still living at your parents’ house. Imagine you don’t have a job, you don’t have any social life, you have neglected your health, and you're overweight and sick as a result. Imagine you have nothing going for yourself at all. You have no purpose. Imagine that you’re a failure. You have lived a life of comfort, and now you are suffering the repercussions.

One day, as you are living this life that you hate — keep your eyes closed — you happen to come across a picture of you when you were in high school. As you're looking at this photo, you start thinking about how much you would give to be able to go back in time. How much you wish you were able to go back to when you were younger so that you could do the right things instead of taking the easy way out every time. Imagine how you would desperately pray for a second chance.

Now open your eyes. You have just been given that chance. Right now, you have just been blessed with the opportunity to actually try and make this different this time. Out of all the people who have regretted their pasts, you have been the only one to get a second chance.

So, now that you have been given that chance to prevent that reality from happening, I’m going to give you some advice on how to do that — how to help you create a future for yourself that you are happy with.

This is the main idea: hard actions get good results, and easy actions get bad results.

And to illustrate this idea, I’m going to use this diagram. On the left we have you, represented by this person here, and on the right we have your goal. You can choose what this goal is for you. Maybe it’s completing that internal work that's due soon. Maybe it’s finally applying for a job. Maybe your goal is to lose weight or put on muscle. Maybe for some of you Year 13s, it’s organising your date for the formal coming up in May. You get the idea.

Whatever your goal is, there are two possible ways that you could get to this goal. The first option is to get started on it now and make progress every day. Now although this is uncomfortable at first, you make steady progress and eventually you realise that the entire process wasn’t even that much work if you actually apply yourself. The second option, on the right, is to delay doing the thing — tell yourself that you’ll do it tomorrow and that you can relax right now.

As you would expect, the first option gets you to your goal. Now that you’ve done the hard work, the rest of the way is easy. Not only does this option get you to your goal the fastest, but it is actually the most rewarding because you can feel proud of the work that you have done, and you now have way more time to do the fun things.

The second option gives you a very different result. As the diagram shows, if you avoid the discomfort and put off doing the work, you make it so much harder for yourself to get to the goal, and eventually it becomes impossible to achieve. What used to seem so achievable now takes far more effort.

The point of this diagram is really to show one thing: you only make progress when you’re willing to be uncomfortable. If you’re trying to do anything valuable, hardship is inevitable. And staying comfortable often only leads to results that you’re not happy with. Like I said before, hard actions get good results, and easy actions get bad results.

So boys, when you face a decision to take the easy way out instead of doing the hard things that actually get results, I would encourage you to remember that exercise that we did a couple of minutes ago. Keep this diagram in mind.

It’s a tradition at Otago Boys’ High School to end the Last Word with a quote, so I thought I’d quote one of, if not the most influential texts ever written — a book of timeless wisdom that has been passed down for thousands of years, one of the only books to reach billions of people: the Bible, which says,

“No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it."