I posted about Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture before.
If you haven’t watched it, please go do that now. You won’t regret it.
Yesterday morning Amazon delivered a copy of the book of the lecture. I had decided on the spur of the moment to make the most of the long holiday weekend and fly to Aix so I took the book with me on the plane. Finished reading it this morning. It was a GREAT read. Randy Pausch, for those of you who don’t know this story is a computer scientist who gave a lecture on the “Last Lecture” series at his university. (The idea of the “Last Lecture” is to deliver the lecture you’d deliver if it were to be your last ever). In Randy’s case, he was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer before delivering the lecture, so it really is his last lecture.
The lecture is about how to live life. How to live life abundantly. It’s a true inspiration. And the book covers the same ground but adds some other ideas on the same subject. I’m pretty much in tune with this thinking. I’m a positivist. In fact, one of my colleagues this week put it nicely “You’re ALWAYS bloody positive!” Oh well, hey, I took it as a compliment!
So what lessons did I take from the book that were new to me? The one that hit home was “Ask”. I’m not good at that. Randy tells a great story about going to Disney with his family and his dad saying how great it would be to ride the monorail train up front with the driver. He said to his dad that as he had worked as an Imagineer he knew the secret of how to get to do that and did his dad want to see? Sure, his dad said. So Randy went up to the driver and said “Excuse me, could we ride up front with you?” Sure, said the driver.
Randy’s dad was astonished but Randy said “I said it was a trick. I didn’t say it was a hard trick”.
Ask. You might receive.
Heroes Not Zombies 
Dr. Bob,
You are right. As we say in bluegrass, this is extra good.
Dr. B
My husband says, “If you don’t ask, the answer is always, ‘No’.” With this attitude, we have seen and experienced some amazing things because he is always willing to ask, and often with a kid-like eagerness and curiosity that also opens doors.
How inspiring Randy Pausch is! If you liked “The Last Lecture”, another fantastic memoir I just read and highly recommend is “My Stroke of Insight” by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. Her TEDTalk video (ted.com) has been seen as many times as The Last Lecture I think, and Oprah did 4 shows on her book, so there are a lot of similarities. In My Stroke of Insight, there’s a happy ending though. It’s an incredible story! I hear they’re making it into a movie.
Thanks for drawing my attention to this Jessie. In one of those synchronicity moments, my daughter, Amy mentioned this very TED talk to me just the other day! Time to go and watch it I think!