Some people read "Last Lecture" by Randy Pausch to hear his message about achieving your childhood dreams. Others want to learn his secrets of success as a computer science professor and lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University. And there are those that will read it because they want to see how a man lives while he is dying of pancreatic cancer.
For those of you who don't know the story, the last lecture is a tradition at university campuses in which a professor delivers his thoughts on what he would say to students if this were going to be his last lecture. On September 18, 2007, Randy Pausch delivered what truly is his last lecture. At the time of the lecture, he had just been told he had between three and six months to live.
Randy Pausch doesn't care why people read his story. He uses a teaching method he calls "head fakes", lessons that people think they are learning while they are actually learning something much more valuable. He gives the example of the football coach who teaches his young players about footwork, handling the ball, and making tackles, but they don't realize they are also learning lessons on teamwork and sportsmanship. He warns us to look out for head fakes because they are all around us everyday.
Randy is a humble man who does not believe that his life achievements or the story of his cancer make him different from anyone else. Don't read it expecting a story about staying positive in the face of life-threatening illness, or about his fight. It is not his memoirs. The touching anecdotes he offers about his life teach us lessons about how to live our own lives and achieve our dreams, even the power of helping others to achieve their dreams.
Randy shows us by example the importance of living in the moment. Many times, he and his wife, Jai, could have crumpled in despair and self-pity and spent his last few months that way, but instead they work to focus on today, the day he can play with his children and hold his wife.
If you are one of the six million people who saw the video and thought the book wouldn't offer any new insights, there is a whole chapter just for you. It's entitled "It's about how to live your life." In the same vein as the stories in the lecture, Randy shares by example basic tenets of life and how to live it. There is a section on time management because we are all on limited time, though we may not realize it. Throughout the book, there is a sense of Randy's positive attitude. and a sense of finding joy in each moment. While it's true a few tears well up when reading poignant musings about the quality of his limited time left here, never is there self-pity or remorse.
The book may leave the reader feeling melancholy, but not sorry for Randy, because he has filled his life with love and laughter, family and career. If we are sorry for anyone, it may be ourselves, as we struggle to live life with a fraction of the meaning he has found, yet we have so much more time left to live it, or so we assume.
Read his book or watch his lecture for whatever reason you want. The final truths that he reveals are gut wrenching in honesty. We find ourselves at the last, a receiver of a double head fake, a lesson taught to us when we weren't even watching.
For more information and updates by Randy Pausch:
http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/
As Randy's professional legacy, he is leaving us with Alice, a Carnegie Mellon software teaching tool that allows kids to create animations for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or making a video. All while they are actually learning computer programming. (Did you catch the head fake?) The program appeals to both boys and girls and is available for free download at:
www.alice.org.
"It's not about achievement it's about living."