The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch With Jeffrey Z
Life Lessons From a Professor With a Death Sentence
Aug 3, 2009
In The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. As a husband, father of three young children and professor of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, he sees an opportunity where most would see a reason to despair.
The Diagnosis is the Catalyst
He decides to use this diagnosis as a way to become a message of how to live your life with dignity, honor and truth. His goal is to use this “last lecture” to pass on his knowledge of life to his children when he is no longer around to do it in person.
The Message
In The Last Lecture’s 207 pages from cover to cover, Pausch manages to lay out a step by step path to achieving our dreams using his own experiences as a son, educator, husband and father. The average person, given this opportunity, might consider it daunting.
Pausch’s approach is full of common sense ways of looking at life and its many challenges such as, “Just because you’re in the driver’s seat doesn’t mean you have to run people over”, a quote credited to his father. He states, “…if you offer wisdom from a third party, it seems less arrogant and more acceptable.”
Randy Pausch’s ability to recall the significant moments in his life and express those to his audience makes this lecture easy to relate to. The reader comes away with a renewed sense of direction in life and positive thinking with phrases like, “Brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.” Pausch talks about what it means to teach by “head fakes” and to learn about humility, “experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.”
The Take-Away
The Last Lecture is more than just a book about not taking life for granted or reaching for the stars. Rather, it provides the reader with practical ways to take charge of life, to be a leader every day and to show character, courage and depth as a human being.
At the end of the book, Pausch has reached his final goal, leaving a legacy of truth and wisdom to his children and love to his wife in a touching summation. Pausch succeeds, in his last message, in doing what human beings everywhere desire with eloquence, honesty and emotion. The book is a quick read, but worth many returns.
Readers will not only relate to Pausch and his life lessons in a lecture, but they will come back again and again to revisit his wise anecdotes and tried and true experiences. Everybody needs a “Dutch uncle”. Whether the reading audience is comprised of professors, political leaders, stay-at-home moms, or grocery store clerks, everyone can learn about how to deal with life by reading The Last Lecture. This may be the most beautiful aspect of the book, after all “If there’s an elephant in the room, introduce it.”
Published 2008 by Hyperion Books. ISBN: 978-1-4013-2325-7
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