Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

Randy Pausch delivers an wonderfully inspirational lecture on achieving your childhood dreams. What makes this lecture so powerful, is that the speak is terminally ill. He is not only an entertaining speaker, but has a powerful message on not just achieving your own childhood dreams, but also helping to enable the dreams of others.

He tells his own list of childhood dreams and goes through them discussing how we accomplished them or in some cases, found more valuable learning from his experience trying. One of the points he makes that stand out, is that he says brick walls are there to remind us of how bad we want something. That's such a great statement. Our willingness to find a way, is often directly tied to how bad we want the accomplishment.

After he talks about his own dreams, he talks about the importance of enabling the dreams of others and how powerful that can be. He was a professor, instructing students in the technical field of virtual reality. He gives a great example, when his students immediately reach his expectation of them, yet he still says to press on. We all need to feel that there is more to obtain, to see how much we can or will push ourselves.

He says you can't always get their alone, sometimes you need help. His advice is to always tell the truth, be earnest, apologize when you screw up and focus on others not yourself - this is words we can all live by. Even in the middle of his speech, he takes a poignant moment to recognize his wife and have the audience sing Happy Birthday to her. What a wonderful speak and a man who may not have it all figured out, but certainly leaves a legacy with what he did discover.