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Life Lessons. Career Navigation. What we can learn from Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture, Professor at Carnegie Melon University. |
In 2006, Randy was diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer. He has pursued cancer treatments but in August of 2007, he was told that it spread to his liver and spleen and that he will only have a short time to live, approximately three to six months.
With this knowledge, Randy delivered his “Last Lecture” as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University to some 400 colleagues and students.
The Last Lecture inspires everyone to assess themselves and the career and life path that they are on, career or otherwise. We have listed six of Randy’s life lessons that offer guidance for those planning their career path.
1. Anything is possible if you live your life well
2. Remember your childhood dreams
3. Have a sense of fun and wonder
4. Are you a Tigger or an Eeyore?
5. Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.
6. Don’t complain, just work harder
Randy’s lecture was so inspiring it attracted international media and subsequently was featured on the Oprah Show in October 2007. Since then the Last Lecture has been widely distributed and downloaded as a YouTube favourite.
Randy Pausch is a Professor of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design at Carnegie Mellon, where he was the co-founder of Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). He was a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow.
He has done Sabbaticals at Walt Disney Imagineering and Electronic Arts (EA), and consulted with Google on user interface design. Dr. Pausch received his bachelors in Computer Science from Brown University and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author or co-author of five books and over 70 articles, is the director of the Alice (www.alice.org) software project, and has been in zero-gravity.
