The Last Lecture

Carnegie Mellon University had a last lecture series for professors: "If you had to give one last lecture before you died, what would it be?". Randy Pausch was a professor of computer science and human computer interaction and design at CMU. His last lecture was truly a last lecture, he was dying of pancreatic cancer. His lecture was titled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams". This is a very inspirational speech and every person (techie or not) should see this video.

Randy Pausch passed away in 2008. He was a big name in virtual reality and created a 3D programming environment called Alice geared towards attracting girls to computer science. I had heard about this video, but never saw it until Fall 2009, when I invited NN to be a guest speaker in my class and she brought this up. I have seen this video a number of times since then and I love it.

Obviously I love the lessons:
  1. Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things. They are meant to keep the "others" (those who don't want them badly enough) away
  2. When you are screwing up and nobody is saying anything to you anymore... that means they gave up
But most of all I loved his deathbed conversion to Macintosh!!!! Watch this video if you can and if you are like me keep some Kleenex handy :-)


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dil ne tumko chun liya hai..........

To Be or Not To Be?

Saawariya