Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

In my experience, too many people find too little joy in life. I know life is hard, I’ve mentioned that before, but life is also an exhilarating journey filled with family, friends, and fun. In The Last Lecture, I felt like I met a man, Randy Pausch, who understood how to live.

Randy Pausch was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and told he had three to six months to live. He decided to use what little time he had left to give his last lecture – Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. During the lecture, Professor Pausch talked about dreaming dreams as a child, climbing over brick walls to achieve some of those dreams, and enabling others to do the same.

The book is both the extended version of his lecture and the story surrounding it. The book was not at all about dying. Instead it was about living life the way, I think, it was meant to be lived. I found myself moved by almost every chapter. Perhaps it’s just me. Like Pausch, I am a husband, father, teacher, and computer scientist. I’ve also achieved some of the things I dreamed of as a child, including being a husband and father, teaching, and programming for profit. Maybe the book was so powerful because of that, but I’d like to think that anyone could learn from the lessons in it.

Unfortunately, I know better. I’ve read some of the negative reviews of this book and I’m sad. There are many who just don’t get it. Many who think achieving your dreams is cliche, trite, or quaint. Many who do what they’ve always done and/or what they think others expect them to do. There is so much more to life and so much less at the same time – I wish everyone could see that.

I do have one warning. Pausch was admittedly arrogant (a jerk) and did have a very healthy ego. He chooses to explain his thoughts by talking about some of his achievements. I think this was a powerful way to accomplish the task at hand, but everyone may not read it the same way.

It has been a long time since I read a book that moved me as much as The Last Lecture. It reminded me once again that I need to be painfully aware of what little time I have and all of the opportunities I have to explore during that short time.

As a parent, one part of the book (and lecture) hit me especially hard.

Anybody out there who is a parent, if your kids want to paint their bedrooms, as a favor to me, let them do it. It’ll be OK.

Even as I paste that quote here, I find it hard to control my emotions. You’ll have to read the book to see if it has the same impact on you.