I just finished reading The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. In case you haven’t heard of him, or his famous lecture, Pausch is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who found out last summer that he had three to six months to live before he died of pancreatic cancer. The university has a tradition of asking professors to give a hypothetical “last lecture,” though in this case, the term took on more meaning. He gave the lecture (“Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”) in September and it quickly made its way around the internet. He has since co-authored a book with Jeffrey Zaslow, based on the lecture. I received the book as a graduation gift and finished reading it today (it’s a slim volume).
The book is full of anecdotes and words of wisdom from Pausch’s years of being a professor in computer science. He really seems to have lived his life to the fullest in a way that most of us can only dream of. Though he can come off a bit arrogant at times (and admits to having a reputation for being so when he was younger) the advice is, of course, good and true advice. I appreciate that he admits to having won the “parent lottery” and was fortunate enough to have parents who taught him about the right thing to do and encouraged him to reach his dreams. Not everyone recognizes how lucky they are in this respect when it is in fact, the case.
The book is full of cliches, but my favorite is the one that appears on the book jacket. “We cannot change the hand that we are dealt, just the way that we play the hand.” Which is true. There are many things about our lives, such as many aspects of our health, that we cannot change. Instead of being upset by these things, it may be more productive to work with them.
What’s striking through the course of the book is how much Pausch loves his wife and kids. I suppose this shouldn’t be surprising, but his passion for his wife, especially really comes through in the book, and you have to admire him for that. It’s sad that they’ve only been married for eight years and have to face something like this. I think I’m over sensitive to this because of my own recent marriage, but I hope to have many more years with my husband (that sounds weird) before we have to deal with anything like this.
