By : Syed Saddiq
I don’t understand the jealousy by some attempting to discredit Tun M by alleging that his UN General Assembly speech was all scripted and not prepared by him. That he merely was parroting what was given to him by the PTD officers.
I have had the privilege of working with Tun M & throughout my experience, he is the master of his own work.
When we ran the weekly Policy Talk for Tun M (prior to election), we initially scripted his whole speech. Facts and figures, sentence by sentence. After sending our draft to him, he told us that he needed some time to go through it. We thought our work was done. To our surprise, he came back with another hand-written draft, altering almost everything we wrote. Our draft was filled with red lines and “please include this” memos everywhere. It was as if he was marking a paper 😅 I have been writing speeches for so many politicians and corporate leaders before this, but Tun M truly takes the cake.
It did not end there. We saw that he omitted one important line in his speech, so we added it in without notifying him. I personally thought that it wasn’t something he would notice as it wouldn’t change the content of his speech. Again, to our surprise, when he was LIVE on FB, he paused and said, “I think you got this wrong. I don’t remember adding this in”.
Demi Allah, my face immediately turned red in shame. How can he notice something so unnoticeable? How much of a perfectionist is this man?
From the second session onward, we ended up just preparing talking points and did not bother scripting the whole speech as we knew that he preferred to talk without a script.
He writes his own speeches,
He writes his own blogposts,
He even does a lot of the research work on his own.
It truly was challenging working with Tun. We knew that we had to give him our best, and almost always, out best was never enough😅 What i learnt was invaluable. I’ll never trade the experience for anything else.
It is because of that experience, i feel compelled to tell the story behind Malaysia’s most notorious perfectionist, our beloved Tun Mahathir.
I can only wish that i’d be like him one day, inshaallah. – TTKM –
(Artikel ini adalah pandangan peribadi penulis dan tidak semestinya mewakili pendirian TTKM-Editor)
