The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

Professor Randy Pausch didn’t see his struggle with pancreatic cancer as special.

Almost 49,000 people are diagnosed with the disease every year, and every one of them has an equally sad story to tell about the diagnosis. His story was no different.

But unlike most people diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, Pausch was asked to give a lecture about his life and what it’s meant to him so far in front of 400 people at Carnegie Mellon University. He had to come up with something to knock their socks off, and he had only three to six months to live, according to his doctor. No pressure.

That day in the lecture hall, he gave his audience a peek into his childhood dreams. While his cancer diagnosis was just another statistic, his childhood dreams were something unique to him. No one has the same childhood dreams.

In his book The Last Lecture, Pausch talks about why childhood dreams are so important to him. It follows his life as a head-in-the-clouds, inquisitive boy, up through his hard work as a computer science student, and finally as a tenured professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Credit: Wikipedia.org

Pausch comes across as undeniably professorial in the book. From the start, he is giving readers a taste of his wisdom, teaching even as he talks about how it felt to receive a terminal cancer diagnosis at age 46.

The Last Lecture is instead a distilled version of all of the knowledge and wisdom he has attained in his 46 years on the planet.

The goal of the book isn’t to make readers feel sorry for Pausch (although one can’t help but feel this way when he talks about how much he loves his wife and three young children, who will grow up without him). The Last Lecture is instead a distilled version of all of the knowledge and wisdom he has attained in his 46 years on the planet.

He has advice about how to get someone to do something nice for you by bribing them with Thin Mints. He has advice about how to give a proper apology. He has advice about why writing handwritten thank you notes gets you through many closed doors.

Most importantly, he has advice about how to realize your childhood dreams.

Credit: R. Nial Bradshaw

For the lecture and the book, Pausch had to make a list of what his childhood dreams were. He explains that as adults we get so caught up in daily life that we forget to step back and think about what drives us and what’s really important.

He explains that succeeding at the dream isn’t important. The work toward the goal, no matter how far-fetched it seems, is the real driving force. Even though Pausch never succeeded in making a couple of his dreams a reality, he put all of his effort into them and gained valuable experience.

What readers take away from The Last Lecture is in this same vein. The book isn’t about one man’s struggle against cancer, or the outcome of his treatment (Pausch died on July 25, 2008). It’s not an overcoming-all-odds story. It’s about making the most out of what you have, and enjoying every minute of the adventure, regardless of how it turns out in the end.

Watch Randy Pausch’s final lecture below: