Reflections on Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

Randy Pausch was such an inspirational individual that seemed to love life and absolutely loved his career. In his speech, he talked about being a professor at Carnegie Mellon. He was so passionate about everything he was involved in and would go to extreme links to get around the rules if it meant he could be involved in something really great. One example of this he gave was when his students had an opportunity to visit NASA but no teachers were permitted to go, so he read through the rules and noticed that reporters were permitted to attend. You can fill in the rest of the blanks. Randy Pausch was clever in more than one way and one statement he made, which makes sense, was to always bring something to the table and you will fill more welcome.

He talked about hitting brick walls. He stated that brick walls are there for a reason. Randy said, “They let us prove how badly we want things.” This statement is so true in everyday life. We run into brick walls on a daily basis and how you respond to it is the test. He also talked about indirect learning, which he called “head fake” learning. Basically this meant you have to make them think they are learning something else having fun learning something hard.

He didn’t teach with textbooks. In his Virtual Reality class, they had project after project. The students were able to focus on learning to work with each other. He didn’t give them a whole lot of direction with these projects so they wouldn’t be limited on what they could do. They learned from each other and from trial and error. When the students came back from working on their first project, he was so blown away that he really didn’t know what to say. He didn’t want to limit them, so he said, “You did great, but I know you can do better.” This way they can reach for the stars.

In the lessons learned segment of his speech he talked about parents, mentors, and students. He talked about his experiences and gave very good advice. Some of the advice he gave was to never lose childlike wonder, care about others, you can’t get there alone, tell the truth, apologize when you screw up, focus on others, don’t complain but work harder, and be prepared. I think we all can learn lessons from viewing this video. If we follow his advice, I feel we can all live very fulfilling lives.