Randy Pausch: The Last Lecture

It’s almost 1am; I just got done watching Randy Paush’s The Last Lecture. Having been diagnosed with brain cancer, this professor of computer science at Garnegie Mellon University gave a talk about life to a group of 500 attendees at the University. The lessons learned can be applied to people of all ages and walks of life.

Randy has some great advice in this piece. You can tell he is incredibly intelligent. And when you combine that kind of intelligence with an ability to speak, educate and socialize, you can truly change the world. I think with this lecture, he has done just that.

Randy’s lecture has generated national attention online (the YouTube video has over 2 million 600 thousand hits) and the print version of this lecture continues to be a best-seller.

My favorite part of the video is his “head fake” analogy. He expalained that when you make people believe they’re having fun and not learning, that’s when you can teach them the most. He’s absolutely right.

Randy emphasized the importance of childhood dreams. One of his biggest dreams was to play in the NFL. Not having totally completed this dream, Randy said that it doesn’t matter, because he’s taken lessons from football that he carried over to his life as an educator.

Telling myself that I would only watch a few minutes of the video, I ended up staying up the entire one hour and 18 minutes to finish this lecture.

Randy is an excellent example of an individual who has changed the world. And he just happened to have played sports as a child. Coincidence? Probably not.

If you haven’t taken an hour out of your life to watch this video yet, what are you waiting for?

Click here to watch it in YouTube.