If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself. The dreams will come to you.” And so ended one of the most rewarding hours I’ve spent in front of a TV screen thanks to my New York-based cousin Lorraine who inspired me to watch the video.
Thanksgiving Day has come and gone, and despite there being no exact Filipino holiday as this, pre-Christmas festivities exude a similar joyous sentiment. As many others who have come across his “last lecture,” I will be thinking of Dr. Randy Pausch, a 46-year-old computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University dying of pancreatic cancer, throughout this season of thanksgiving.
Two months ago, Pausch delivered what the Wall Street Journal called “the lecture of a lifetime.” Pausch is a well-known computer scientist specializing in virtual reality and entertainment technology who once worked as an “Imagineer” for Disney. However, this last lecture was not about technology, but about living one’s childhood dreams and enabling the dreams of others. For Pausch, this included working as a consultant for Disney’s Aladdin project, being in zero gravity, writing a World Book Encyclopedia entry, and winning gigantic stuffed animals at amusement parks.
Pausch’s September appearance was his goodbye to students and Carnegie Mellon with one last lecture called “How to Live Your Childhood Dreams.” The “last lecture” series has become an honored tradition on campuses worldwide. Top academics are asked to think deeply about what matters to them, and then give a hypothetical final talk — i.e., “what wisdom would you try to impart to the world if you knew it was your last chance?” Pausch’s condition made his talk all the more poignant, and he was greeted with a standing ovation even before saying a word. “Make me earn it,” he said — and then he did.
The video of the lecture exploded in media frenzy all over the web soon after, including an appearance on Oprah. Pausch’s words will also be immortalized. Jeffrey Zaslow, the Wall Street Journal columnist who introduced the world to Pausch, is writing a memoir based on the last lecture. The book auction ended last week with Hyperion, the publishing arm of Walt Disney, inking a deal with an advance said to be worth $6.75 million.
Despite having just undergone surgery and chemotherapy, Pausch radiated great health and a remarkable sense of humor. He began simply enough by quoting his father who always told him, “When there is an elephant in the room, you introduce it.”
Pausch pulled up on an overhead screen a trio of CAT scans that showed the 10 tumors in his liver and spoke about his doctors’ prognosis that he had three to six months of good health left. “That is what it is,” he said simply. “We can’t change it. We cannot change the cards we are dealt — just how we play the hand.” He continues, “The greatest thing of cognitive dissonance you will ever see is the fact that I am in really good shape. In fact, I am in better shape than most of you.” (Pausch then gets on the ground and starts doing pushups.) “So anybody who wants to cry or pity me can down and do a few of those, and then you may pity me.”
As a BusinessWeek article put it, “Most of us go through our lives using no more than a small fraction of our potential. Pausch teaches us how to more effectively tap into the vast reservoir of unused talent and energy that resides deep within each of us. That is no small feat. In a world filled with distractions and frustrations, it often takes a tragedy to move us to action. By sharing his personal ordeal with us, Pausch created the urgency so many of us require to awake the human potential that is so frequently wasted.”
Pausch spoke about brick walls that often appear in the path of every accomplishment. “Remember, the brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough.”
In a cruel twist of fate, Pausch’s cancer arrived just as he was making revolutionary contributions to his academic discipline. Three small children, aged five, two and one will be fatherless. I dare say that if this had happened to me, I’d be crippled with fear and anger. Pausch, however, doesn’t dwell on why this happened to him. In one of the funniest moments of the lecture, Pausch seems to invoke religion, but deflects. “I have achieved a deathbed conversion. I just bought a Macintosh.”
Pausch shows slides of his family, including a tribute to his father and mother.
“The best story I have about my dad — unfortunately my dad passed away a little over a year ago — and when we were going through his things, he had fought in World War II, and when we were going through his things, we found out he had been awarded the Bronze Star for Valor. My mom didn’t know it. In 50 years of marriage, it had just never come up.
“Mothers are people who love even when you pull their hair. When I was here studying to get my PhD. and I was taking something called the theory qualifier, which I can definitively say is the second worst thing in my life after chemotherapy. I was complaining to my mother about how hard this test was and how awful it was, and she just leaned over and she patted me on the arm and she said, we know how you feel honey, and remember when your father was your age he was fighting the Germans.
“After I got my PhD., my mother took great relish in introducing me as, this is my son, he’s a doctor but not the kind that helps people.
“When I was in high school I decided to paint my bedroom. (Shows slides of bedroom.) I always wanted a submarine and an elevator. And the great thing about this is (shows slide of quadratic formula painted on wall) — what can I say? They let me do it. And they didn’t get upset about it. And it’s still there. If you go to my parent’s house, it’s still there. And anybody who is out there who is a parent, if your kids want to paint their bedroom, as a favor to me, let them do it. It’ll be OK. Don’t worry about resale value on the house.”
Pausch relentlessly goes on to share other lessons. Gratitude: When he won tenure, he took his entire research team to Disneyworld for a week. “Don’t give up,” he stresses. He was initially rejected both to study at Carnegie Mellon University and to work for Disney, but he persisted and succeeded. “Help others. Be good at something. Learn to give a proper apology. Find the best in everybody. You might have to wait a long time, sometimes years, but people will show you their good side. 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.”
Pausch’s lecture may not be new, but what makes it hits the mark is its utter sincerity. “I’ll take an earnest person over a hip person every day,” he says, “because hip is short term. Earnest is long term.”
Pausch’s wife originally did not want him to give the lecture that changed his life, what little of it pancreatic cancer has left him with. They had just moved to Virginia to be closer to her family, and she preferred that he unpack and spend time with their kids. Neither had any notion that Pausch’s speech and Zaslow’s column about it would change outlooks, parental philosophies and bedrooms in America, Asia, India, South Africa and countries beyond.
Pausch, in fact, lost a bet with someone who predicted an overflow crowd.
“Who wants to see a dying man?” he asked. “It’s a beautiful warm day in September.”
Pausch has never taken himself seriously, and he won’t let anyone fawn over him now that he’s been given a timeline that likely ends before Father’s Day.
“The talk’s not for you,” he tells a weeping audience at the end. “It’s for my kids.”
It was that sort of hour, happy and sad, touching and true. So go out, be thankful, and watch what is becoming the most widely disseminated lecture in the history of any university to date.
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Thanks for writing! Comments and questions are welcome. If you need a copy of Pausch’s transcript, email me at stephaniecoyiuto@yahoo.com or visit http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/. Pictures are taken from Pausch’s website.