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Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Book Review Pro | Karen Pool
Author : Randy Pausch
Genre : Inspirational
Some professors give talks titled “The Last Lecture” as they consider what matters most to them. When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn’t have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The treatments hadn’t worked. I had months to live. The lecture he gave—”Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”—wasn’t about dying. It was about living: the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because you may find out one day that you have less than you think). It was a culmination of everything he had come to believe.
This book was a way for him to continue what he began on stage. And teach his children what he would have taught them over the next twenty years. None of this was a replacement for a living parent of three children. But engineering isn’t about perfect solutions; it’s about doing the best you can with limited resources. Both the lecture and this book are his attempts to do exactly that.
“Throughout my academic career, I’d given some pretty good talks. But being considered the best speaker in a computer science department is like being known as the tallest of the Seven Dwarfs. And right then, I had a feeling that I had more in me, that if I gave it my all, I might be able to offer people something special. I had a chance here to really think about what matters most to me,”
“What do I alone have to offer? It came to me in a flash. Whatever my accomplishments, all of the things I loved were rooted in the dreams and goals I had as a child and in the ways I had managed to fulfill almost all of them. My uniqueness, I realized, came in the specifics of all the dreams—from incredibly meaningful to decidedly quirky—that defined my forty-six years of life. Sitting there, I knew that despite the cancer, I truly believed I was a lucky man because I had lived out these dreams. If I was able to tell my story with the passion I felt, my lecture might help others find a path to fulfilling their dreams.”
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