The Last Lecture - Randy Pausch

Are we only enlightened when we see death in our eyes?

Heard of Randy Pausch before?
I hadn't too, until a few days back.
He was a dying professor who was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and had only a few months left to live. He died on July 25th 2008, but not before he had inspired millions with his last lecture.

I took time out and watched this inspirational video about him giving his last lecture and left feeling pretty much overwhelmed by the lessons that lie within his 76 minute speech. Don't hear it from me, because I will not do his awesome speech any justice at all.

See and hear it yourself, and I'm sure you will agree with the simple and yet utterly true issues that he mentioned in his lecture.

I would say the first 30 and last 15 mins hold the gist of the entire video, so you could just view those parts if it does not engage you. Or, you could view the shortened version of the lecture, but it just contains partial excerpts, and not everything.

He talked about our childhood dreams, and if you take some time and reflect upon, I think that is the time when we all really dared to dream big. When you hold no fear, and when you are every bit of an intrepid explorer.

Somehow, I can't help but feel its uncannily similar to the book, The Alchemist, even though I'm only halfway through reading it. They both talk about having dreams when we were young, but somehow when we grow up, the dreams dissipate, dilute, and we are led to believe that the dreams are impractical and impossible.

In the video, Randy shared his childhood dreams with everyone, and how he went about achieving them. He realized most of them, and even for those that got away, he benefited much from the process, something which he defines as the "head fake" in the video.

When Randy Pausch talks about the head fake, he's talking about football. When he was a child, he wanted to play in the NFL. He had other dreams too like being in zero gravity, being like Captain Kirk, winning stuffed animals at the amusement park and being an imagineer at Disney. But, being in football taught him so much more than just the three point stance or how to read a play. Football teaches players things like, "Teamwork, Sportsmanship, Perseverance...etc." That's the head fake. Kids go into something like football because they enjoy it. But, they get out of it life's lessons that they will carry with them once their days of playing football are over.

At the end of the lecture, Pausch posed a final question to the audience.

“Have you figured out the head-fake?” he asked.

A ‘head-fake,’ he explained earlier, occurs when someone is taught a deeper lesson under the pretense of learning something simple — when a high school football player learns determination, teamwork, and perseverance while seeming to learn a proper three-point stance, for instance.

Give up?

“It’s not about how to achieve your dreams,” Pausch said. “It’s about how to lead your life.”

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I was impressed by the way he spoke, the insight he provided, and the optimism and mindset he had, even when facing death. He was charismatic and earnest, and I felt it.

To say that was a brilliant lecture would be too massive an understatement. I had noticed the way he spoke too. You do not have to keep speaking to engage the audience. Sometimes, momentary pauses and lowering of tones will do so much more to get your point across.

He shared tons of invaluable advice, and to sum it all up for you:


*Experience is what you get when you didnt get what you wanted.

*Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things.

* Loyalty is a two-way street.

* Never give up.

* You get people to help you by telling the truth. Being earnest. I'll take an earnest person over a hip person every day, because hip is short term. Earnest is long term.

* Apologize when you screw up and focus on other people, not on yourself.

* Get a feedback loop and listen to it. ... Anybody can get chewed out. It's the rare person who says, oh my god, you were right. ... When people give you feedback, cherish it and use it.

* Show gratitude.

* Don't complain. Just work harder.

* Be good at something, it makes you valuable.

* Work hard.

* Find the best in everybody. ... No one is all evil. Everybody has a good side; just keep waiting, it will come out.

* And be prepared. Luck is truly where preparation meets opportunity.


Source:

AC - Life Lessons and the Randy Pausch Head Fake Theory
The Tartan - Randy Pausch: How to achieve your dreams
Excerpts from Dr. Randy Pausch's Last Lecture
Wikipedia - Randy Pausch