Prof. Randy Pausch's last lecture

Prof. Randy Pausch's of CMU was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Given below is his inspiring "last lecture" video. Worth watching...

To get the complete transcript of the video, please click here. The video is listed at the CMU website @ http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/multimedia/randy-pausch-lecture.shtml

Given below are some of his quotes picked from the video.

In one practice, my Football coach - Jim Graham - just rode me all practice. He was constantly criticizing me 'You’re doing this wrong, you’re doing this wrong, go back and do it again, you owe me, you’re doing push-ups after practice'. And when it was all over, one of the other assistant coaches came over and said, yeah, Coach Graham rode you pretty hard, didn’t he? I said, yeah. He said, that’s a good thing. He said, 'when you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore, that means they gave up'. And that’s a lesson that stuck with me my whole life. Is that when you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a very bad place to be. Your critics are your ones telling you they still love you and care.

Jon Snoddy: When you’re pissed off at somebody and you’re angry at them, you just haven’t given them enough time. Just give them a little more time and they’ll almost always impress you.

I called up Andy Van Dam - my mentor - and said, "Andy, I just gave a two-week assignment, and they came back and did stuff that if I had given them a whole semester I would have given them all As. What do I do?" Andy thought for a minute and he said, you go back into class tomorrow and you look them in the eye and you say, “Guys, that was pretty good, but I know you can do better.” And that was exactly the right advice. Because what he said was, you obviously don’t know where the bar should be, and you’re only going to do them a disservice by putting it anywhere.

If you’re going to do anything "pioneering" you will get arrows in the back, and you just have to put up with it. I mean everything that could go wrong will go wrong.

I was quite an arrogant young man. Andy, my mentor, once put his arm around my shoulders and said, "Randy, it’s such a shame that people perceive you as so arrogant. Because it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish in life. What a hell of a way to word “you’re being a jerk.”

Syl: "It took me a long time but I’ve finally figured it out. When it comes to men that are romantically interested in you, it’s really simple. Just ignore everything they say and only pay attention to what they do. It’s that simple. It’s that easy."

Get a feedback loop and listen to it. Your feedback loop can be a dorky spreadsheet thing I did, or it can just be one great man who tells you what you need to hear. The hard part is the listening to it. Anybody can get chewed out. It’s the rare person who says, oh my god, you were right. As opposed to, no wait, the real reason is… We’ve all heard that. When people give you feedback, cherish it and use it.