Andrew (M)'s Reviews > The Last Lecture

I sat down to write my review of “The Last Lecture” on Friday July 25th. Before I started to write, I decided to check Randy Pausch's website for any updates on his condition. He had died that morning at the age of 47. The book, and the lecture itself, now take on new meaning.

For those who aren't aware, Randy Pausch was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. The university has a tradition of inviting professors to give a lecture where they pretend that it is their last chance ever to talk to their students. What would you say? What wisdom would you impart? What are your lessons in life? For Randy, this was not a hypothetical question. Barely a minute into the lecture he introduced “the elephant in the room”: advanced pancreatic cancer that would kill him in a matter of months. With this revelation out of the way, he gave a talk about achieving your childhood dreams and enabling the dreams of others. The lecture was so full of optimism, clarity, hope, humour, and sincerity that the YouTube video went viral and a few months later it was published as a book. “The Last Lecture” contains everything that Randy covered in the lecture, plus some other anecdotes and pearls of wisdom from his life and experience.

Like the lecture, the book is earnest and straightforward. Randy tells a story then gives us the moral in case we missed it. He fills his stories with humour, occasionally laugh out loud. What comes across most strongly is his deep love for his wife and children who he knew he would be leaving behind. It's hard to read this book and not have a good impression of the author. He seems like a great guy, someone that you would love to have as a mentor or friend. I think this is reason that the lecture was such a success; his personality makes a watcher puts more stock in his words. This still comes across in the book, although not as strongly as in the lecture. In fact, without seeing him on video and hearing him speak the words, reading the book can almost get a bit tiring. I recall thinking on a number of occasions: “Ok, we know that you're a really smart guy who works really hard and never gives up, you don't need to keep telling me”.

Some of the advice in the book, especially that which goes beyond what he said in the lecture, can be a bit tough to swallow. For example, his advice to always carry 200$ in cash in your wallet; does he think that only the upper middle class are going to read this book? Similarly, he often speaks of the great mentors, friends, and supporters that he has had through his life; not everyone goes to a university where the professors have such extensive connections to facilitate their student's careers. Finally, his advice to never give up (“Brick walls are not there to keep us out, they are there so we can show how much we want something”) sometimes comes across as as sense of entitlement. He never says to expect something for nothing, but does imply that anything you want to achieve is possible if only you work hard enough at it. Advice like this sometimes crosses the line into sappiness and glurge. Fortunately these moments are fairly rare, and as long as you don't read the book in a single sitting (which is quite possible) then you probably won't feel too overwhelmed.

Interestingly, shortly after I watched the last lecture on YouTube a student of mine asked me a similar question to the topic of the last lecture. What do I consider my most important lesson in life so far? It is quite a difficult question to answer. I'm sure that I don't have the life experience to give a good enough answer, but it's quite possible that this student was bright enough to recognize that and learn something from the incompleteness of my relatively uninformed response. I hope that someday I can have the kind of perspective that Randy shows in the lecture and the book. We need people like Randy, who have a clear picture of what they have learned in life and who are willing to share it. Regardless of whether you or I agree completely with his advice, what shines through is that this was a man who lived his life according to principles that he believed in, and that he thought others would benefit from hearing. His life, lecture, book, and his death remind me of a quote from Dr. Howard Thurman: "Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive”. Even as he lived the last few months of his life, I know that Randy was truly alive.