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Dr. Randy Pausch, a famous virtual reality professor, died on Friday, July 25, 2008 of pancreatic cancer. He was 47.
My condolences go to his wife, Jai, his three kids, Dylan, Logan, and Chloe and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University. And all the millions of people across the world who got to know him few months before he died.
If you did not know him, please note that he was someone you should have known.
Sometimes, some people are born just for an act. In the case of Dr. Randy Pausch, he did a whole lot of things in computer science. But he will primarily be remembered for a speech he gave at Carnegie Mellon University after he found out he was going to die. The speech was called “Last Lecture.”
It was a lecture series where great thinkers answer the hypothetical question of what one would like to say if one were to find out that death was coming. When Professor Pausch gave his lecture, it was a real scenario for him because his doctors had given him six more months to live.
In the speech, Dr. Pausch said a lot of things about living rather than dying. The most important thing he said was about the metaphorical brick walls that stop us from achieving our goals in life.
If you did not pick anything from his life, his book or his speech, please do remember this. It is the golden nugget of his life - as well as ours:
“Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.”
Here are some other nuggets from Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture:
1.) “Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.”
2.) “It's better to fail spectacularly then to pass along and do something which is mediocre.'"
3.) “Never lose the child-like wonder.”
4.) "When you're screwing up and nobody's saying anything to you anymore, that means they've given up on you."
5.) Be good at something; it makes you valuable.
6.) "It's cool to meet your boyhood idol. It's even cooler when he comes to you to see what you're doing in your lab."
7.) “If you live your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself, and the dreams will come to you.”
May his good soul rest in peace.
