Monday Morning Inspiration: Randy Pausch

Randy Pausch inspired the world with The Last Lecture.

I made the oddest, most wonderful (and also tragic) discovery recently and I wanted to share it as this week’s Monday Morning Inspiration.

When I first became interested in digital puppetry and started my Machin-X blog, someone told me about a program at Carnegie Mellon University called Creating Virtual Worlds. They suggested trying to get in touch getting with the professor who founded the program because he was incredibly passionate about things like virtual reality and real-time computer graphics. I eventually tracked this professor down online, pestered him a bit and he was kind enough to indulge a bunch of my questions and suggest some really good resources to look in to.

His name was Randy Pausch.

What I didn’t know at the time – and actually only discovered a few weeks ago completely by accident – was that Randy was fighting a battle with cancer and was on the cusp of becoming an accidental celebrity. After he was told he had only months to live he decided to embrace Carnegie Mellon’s tradition of doing “last lectures”, a usually hypothetical exercise where Professors are asked to give the lecture they’d want to if they thought it would be their last. Randy knew that his “last lecture” probably would be his last, so he presented Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.

The lecture was given to 400 faculty and students at Carnegie Mellon, but Randy really did it for his three young children. The lecture – which is really about how to live your life – was recorded, posted online and became a viral sensation that was watched millions of times and generated a ton of media coverage. Randy even gave an abridged version of his talk on Oprah (I really have no how I didn’t hear about all this sooner, except that possibly it was because I lived in Mexico at the time).

Randy sadly passed away last summer, but he spent the final months of his life inspiring millions of people around the world. He didn’t let cancer slow him down and he kept living life. I didn’t know him at all – we just had a very brief exchange of emails – but I wish I had. What an interesting, amazing guy. And what a great gift he left the world with.

If you have an hour or so to spare sometime this week, watch Randy’s Last Lecture. You won’t be sorry.