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Creativity and Achieving Childhood Dreams – Never Too Late
By Deb
Randy Pausch embodies creativity, dreaming big and never giving up, among other admirable attributes. This Professor of Computer Science, Human Computer Interaction and Design at Carnegie Mellon University is an award-winning teacher and researcher, has worked with Adobe, Google, Electronic Arts (EA) and Walt Disney Imagineering, and pioneered the Alice Project (see details on Alice below).
Randy is also dying of pancreatic cancer.
Having only months to live has not stopped him from having fun and living his life to its fullest in the time he has left. Two much-viewed Google videos of his “last lecture” at Carnegie Mellon, one downloaded over a million times as of the end of October, are included in this post.
One is brief, from the Oprah Winfrey Show where Randy reprised an abridged version of his now famous “last lecture.” If you are in a hurry, that’s the one to watch now, but plan on coming back when you have more time to view the complete lecture. The short version is good, but doesn’t begin to have the same impact that the full-length video has.
You will laugh. You will cry. You will be amazed. And you will likely never be the same.
In these videos Randy demonstrates how important childhood dreams are and how crucial it is that we do our best to achieve them while we still can.
Here are a couple of quotes.
- On the elevator door and the quadratic equations painted and written on his bedroom walls, and his parents’ reaction: “They felt that letting me express my creativity was more important than the pristine nature of the walls.”
- On fun: “Never, ever under-estimate the importance of having fun. I am dying soon, and I am choosing to have fun today, tomorrow, and every other day I have left.”
His book of the same title, greatly expands on The Last Lecture, allowing him to delve more deeply into his childhood and to broach emotionally-charged subjects he would not have covered in public without breaking down.
More information about the Alice Project:
Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student’s first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects. In Alice’s interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. For more information, visit Carnegie Mellon’s Alice site here.
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- How to Find Story Ideas In TV Listings
- Story Ideas from the World Around Us
7 Comments »
March 9th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Hi Deb,
it looks like you’re doing better and better.
This post, mmm…
… it was excellent, truly an inspiration.
He choose life, rather than being dead already.
It’s the same choice we all have to make, because our life could be over before his. We just assume we have more time.
I think he can totally get better now.
But if not, what a departure… all the lives that were touched because of him. God Bless his wife and children. What a legacy if he does die, huh?
He choose education and helping others…good stuff!
It also sounds and looks like he already had one heck of a ride in his lifetime so far.
With parents supporting his dreams and creativity. Building his character. It makes a big difference in a persons life.
Thank you so much for sharing.
All the best,
Michael Roeten
March 9th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
You might like to know that Randy has his own page at RandyPausch.com.
His Medical log is here:
http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/news/index.html
All the best,
Michael
March 11th, 2008 at 7:38 am
Michael,
Thanks for your earlier comment and the link to Randy’s sites. Good to hear from you again. Took me forever to get my site moved over to my new host. Sorry for all the down time. Thank you for hanging in there until everything was settled.
Deb
March 12th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Hi Deb,
Truth be told, I just checked in here again, since you did the simpleology blogging post. So, great timing I’d say
:) I’m glad the move worked out.
You know, I’ve thought about the video some more, and there’s something that disconcerts me.
Randy is speaking that he’s going to die.
I hear no hope for his condition, no positive words concerning him getting better. He said he wasn’t going to speak about his family or his religion/spirituality, but doesn’t that kind of go together.
It’s kind of like he ‘owns’ the cancer.
Also, when he sits down, I don’t see a man in peace with himself. But he’s talking about good karma coming your way when you life right.
So, since he seems to life quite a right life,
why wouldn’t he expect good karma to come his way?
He’s still alive, you know… it’s been more than 2 months.
I really liked his time management class (excellent and it’s free!!!)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5784740380335567758
Take care,
Michael
March 13th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Hello again, Michael. Greetings.
The reason Randy didn’t say much about his family is because he was speaking live to an audience and everything to do with his family is emotionally charged. He admits this in explaining why he did what his wife suggested, which was to write a book (with the help of a published author). In a book he could tackle the more sensitive areas of his life.
I was somewhat bothered by his omitting any mention of what is beyond death. It’s possible that, since he is a scientist, he has no belief system beyond science. It’s hard to say until the book comes out in April. See the blog post How to Write a Book on a Bike
I haven’t had time to check out his time management page yet. Umm, when I have the time, I’ll do that. *grin*
Thanks also for the private comments. I’ll give them some thought.
Thank you, as always, for reading my blog and taking the time to interact. That’s what the “new” web is all about. Giving readers their own voice.
If you want to stay in touch with the blog, you can subscribe via email if you don’t have an rss feed reader.
Thanks,
Deb
April 9th, 2008 at 8:10 am
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July 29th, 2008 at 1:29 am
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