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Why was Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture titled, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”? How did Pausch manage to achieve his six childhood dreams?
Randy Pausch had six childhood dreams: Winning the biggest stuffed animals at the carnival, playing in the NFL, writing an entry in the World Book Encyclopedia, being Captain Kirk of Star Trek, experiencing zero gravity, and becoming a designer or “Imagineer” at Disney. In “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” he explained how, in various ways, he achieved them all.
Keep reading to learn about Pausch’s lecture, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.”
Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture was titled, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” Always an imaginative child, Pausch had six dreams: Winning the biggest stuffed animals at the carnival, playing in the NFL, writing an entry in the World Book Encyclopedia, being Captain Kirk of Star Trek, experiencing zero gravity, and becoming a designer or “Imagineer” at Disney. In various ways, he achieved them all.
Stuffed Animals
Pauche’s “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” speech began with his early childhood. When Pausch was young, he and his father took pride in winning giant stuffed animals at carnivals and amusement parks. Carrying around a giant stuffed animal won in a game of skill, such as shooting at cutouts of ducks or tossing rings at bottles, always drew admiring looks.
There were only two requirements for becoming the envy of the carnival: a pocket full of change and a long reach, which helped during the ring toss (you could lean toward the target and throw). Pausch says he never cheated, although he amassed so many stuffed animals and posed in so many photos with them that others sometimes doubted he’d won them all.
He displayed some of them at his Last Lecture and invited audience members to take them afterward—he didn’t want his wife to have to deal with the clutter of oversize stuffed animals after he died. After the lecture, he learned that a female student with cancer had taken one of them, an elephant. Pausch found it appropriate because cancer was so often the proverbial elephant in the room.
The NFL
The second dream in “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” was about the NFL. As a nine-year-old, Pausch wanted to be an NFL football player. While he didn’t play professionally, he said he learned more from not achieving that dream than from some other dreams he did achieve.
Three important lessons he learned from playing in a youth league coached by a former Penn State linebacker were:
- Fundamentals: You can’t accomplish anything unless you learn the basics first. His coach had the team practice their skills without any footballs on the field—because even when you have 22 players on the field, only one is touching the football at any given time. There are many roles to be learned.
- Feedback: When you know you’re doing something badly, but no one is criticizing you, it means people have given up on you. That was the advice an assistant coach gave Pausch after a practice in which the coach had pushed him hard. Your critics are often the ones who care about you and want you to improve.
- Hard work: While authorities often urge parents and coaches to build children’s self-esteem, that’s not something you can give them. They develop it only when they confront something they can’t do, and work hard until they can do it. Pausch’s coach taught him that if you work hard, you’ll be able to do things tomorrow that you can’t do today.
Although Pausch thought he was learning football, he was learning how to live.
The World Book
Pausch loved the World Book Encyclopedia and pored over it as a child. Buying it, along with regular updates, was a great expense for his parents, but to him, it was a “gift of knowledge.” He always wondered about the experts who wrote the entries, particularly the obscure ones in Volume Z; his dream was to be invited to write an entry.
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- What Randy Pausch's philosophy of life was
- How a professor with only months to live recounted his life's experiences and lessons
- How a computer science professor ended up on a secret project with Disney
