“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”
–Randy Pausch
For those of you who don’t know, Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch has been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. He gave his now famous “Last Lecture” on Sept 18, 2007. The lecture made it onto You Tube and thanks to the miracle of the internet, it has propagated throughout the world and touched many people’s lives, including mine.
This weeks Parade magazine ran an excerpt from his book titled appropriately enough, “The Last Lecture“.
From an interview on the Amazon.com page for his book:
regarding his current health…
Pausch: The tumors are not yet large enough to affect my health, so all the problems are related to the chemotherapy. I have neuropathy (numbness in fingers and toes), and varying degrees of GI discomfort, mild nausea, and fatigue. Occasionally I have an unusually bad reaction to a chemo infusion (last week, I spiked a 103 fever), but all of this is a small price to pay for walkin‘ around.
What kind of person do you want to be?
Amazon.com: You talk about the importance–and the possibility!–of following your childhood dreams, and of keeping that childlike sense of wonder. But are there things you didn’t learn until you were a grownup that helped you do that?
Pausch: That’s a great question. I think the most important thing I learned as I grew older was that you can’t get anywhere without help. That means people have to want to help you, and that begs the question: What kind of person do other people seem to want to help? That strikes me as a pretty good operational answer to the existential question: “What kind of person should you try to be?”
I’d like to touch on the childlike sense of wonder. I don’t believe I’ve met anyone in person that exhibits it, but I do know a few people who are close. However, I have read about one person who kept his childlike sense of wonder, curiosity and mischievousness. That would be noble price winning physicist, Richard Feynman.
Here is Professor Pausch’s last lecture:
