The Last Lecture
Professor Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon University gave his last public lecture entitled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” (click title to see Google video of it).
Although Professor Pausch has been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer (see his blog), he gives an excellent lecture on living your life to its fullest and achieving your dreams. Be sure to take the time and watch it - it’s definitely worth it. It’s amazingly upbeat and inspirational.
Pay attention to the “head fakes”.
I wonder if he saw the biggest head fake of them all…One of his themes is enabling the dreams of others. He spends his career striving to make it easier for anyone to become a programmer. He first enables the dreams of 1 student, then 50 students, and now with Alice he will touch potentially millions. But, he will never instruct or touch more than he will with this lecture. This lecture is something everyone can take something from…not just wannabe/potential programmers. Anyway, maybe I’m looking too much into this irony (or ‘head fake’) but it is definitely there.