Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams __LINK__
And we're not going to talk about things that are even more important than achieving your childhood dreams. We're not going to talk about my wife, we're not gonna talk about my kids. Because I'm good, but I'm not good enough to talk about that without tearing up. So, we're just gonna take that off the table. That's much more important.
Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
All right, so what is today's talk about then? It's about my childhood dreams. And how I've achieved them. I've been very fortunate that way. How I believe I've been able to enable the dreams of others. And to some degree, lessons learned. I'm a professor. There should be some lessons learned. And how you can use the stuff you hear today to achieve your dreams or enable the dreams of others. And as you get older, you may find that enable the dreams of others thing is even more fun.
The "last lecture" of the title was called "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," and Randy Pausch delivered it at Carnegie Mellon University in September 2007, a few weeks after being given a terminal cancer diagnosis. Pausch refers to his own childhood dreams several times throughout the lecture and lists some of them. He wanted to experience zero gravity, play in the National Football League, write an article for the World Book Encyclopedia, win a big stuffed animal at an amusement park, and work for Disney as an Imagineer. He also cherished some impossible dreams, such as being Captain Kirk in Star Trek.
Having told the audience about these dreams, Pausch then spends some time elaborating on what happened in each case. Generally, he found that he had to modify his childhood dream in adulthood, but he was able to achieve some approximation of it. Even the dream of being Captain Kirk changed to the reality of meeting William Shatner, the actor who played Kirk. In the case of writing an article for the World Book Encyclopedia, he achieved his dream, and he even says that the editors actually "badgered" him for the article. Pausch concludes with the message that if you live your life in the right way, your dreams will come true of their own accord. 041b061a72