The Last Lecture

What would you say if you knew you were dying? What message would you want to communicate? What could encapsulate a life that has been lived well and that will possibly end too soon? How do you take the ordinary-ness of life and make meaning out of it for someone else?

The most recent Time Magazine's 100 Influential People issue profiled Carnegie-Mellon's computer science genius Randy Pausch. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer with a relatively dim diagnosis. Randy Pausch is more than a visionary in the field of virtual reality. He delivered "The Last Lecture" in September of 2007 and the 70 minute lecture can be seen on YouTube (if the link doesn't work, go to www.youtube.com and search for "Randy Pausch" and click on the video that's called "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams--it's listed as 1:16 in length). It is funny and pointed and warm and thoughtful and amazing. What it isn't is self-pitying. He talks about his childhood dreams (playing in the NFL, being Captain Kirk on Star Trek, working for Disney), about his current projects and meaning (if any) of leaving a legacy, and about enabling the dreams of others. It's that last bit that I found so profound. For all his amazing work in virtual reality, the projects that he's developed, the influence he's had, he is at the core a teacher. He is impossibly enthusiastic and infinitely passionate about what he does and it never shows more than when he's talking about his students and what he's doing with them and what they're accomplishing. He talks about a "head fake"--when you are ostensibly working on one thing, but learning another, something I completely believe in. So many times you're supposed to be teaching social studies or coaching soccer, but those things are just the vehicles for must more profound lessons of friendship, discipline, responsibility, perseverence, etc. He firmly believes that fun is an absolutely necessary part of life and learning.

He is also a devoted husband and father, who delivers a great "head fake" at the end of the lecture. When I think about what I would want to say about my life and life in general, I feel that nothing would be profound enough. Randy Pausch spends a little over an hour essentially talking about very simple things. Loving life. Loving what you do. Enabling the dreams of others. How you can get the first 2 by doing the 3rd. He is at his most inspirational when he talks about what others, often his students, are accomplishing. Wow. You don't need to be a virtual reality genius, or be dying to accomplish this. It's the idea that by looking outward, by not searching for fulfillment or happiness that you find exactly that, that is the most profound.

The Last Lecture is also available in book form, which I suppose would be good, but the YouTube video, in my opinion, delivers a bigger bang just because you get to see him in action. He is still doing well, according to internet information. For the sake of his children, his wife, and the hundreds of students whose lives he will touch, I truly hope he beats this.