Book Review: The Last Lecture
I’d been meaning to read the book The Last Lecture for the past few months, finally finding the time to do so on my trip.
Book: The Last Lecture
Author: Randy Pausch with Jeffrey Zaslow
Review: The last lecture was written by a well known virtual reality Carnegie Mellon professor who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the young age of 46. In preparation of his looming death he presented his last lecture about the lessons he learned in life as a memento for his children. The last lecture was given on September 18, 2007 and Randy passed away on July 25, 2008.
I read the book and watched the below video. Having the actual book made for easy reference, but watching the video integrated the emotional, personal element to the discussed topics.
I had a whole handful of favorite points, but decided to only write about the main focus of the lecture here on the CragBaby blog. (I will soon be posting some other thoughts, more business related, on the Wasatch Girl blog).
The lecture’s main topic was Really Achieving One’s Childhood Dreams. Randy’s very first slide listed his childhood dreams with the rest of the slides augmenting how they were completed (or sometimes not completed) and ways to go about turning these dreams to reality (including such topics as being honest and educating oneself for the position desired, etc.) Randy’s goals consisted of the following:
- Being in Zero Gravity – Completed this through an academia project, but creatively thought of a way to be included
- Playing in the NFL – Didn’t achieve, but professed to learn more by never actually making it
- Authoring an article in the World Book Encyclopedia – Completed. He was asked to write this article and can be found in the Virtual Reality Section.
- Being Capital Kirk – Never WAS Captain Kirk, but he met Captian Kirk
- Winning Stuff Animals – Completed
- Being a Disney Imagineer – Completed
His dreams were an impressive list and made me contemplate my life goals. It actually seemed easy for me to rattle off my life goals as they haven’t changed much in the past years, but putting them in writing is always a good exercise. My goals and updates would be the following:
- Feel successful in my career – It is real important for ME to feel successful in my career, NOT to be a partner of someone who is successful. I want to feel like I personally can find a niche in my career. So far I I have been quite fortunate to have my first job being in the venture capital industry and a position that I truly love. However, I have a long ways to go before feeling like my work is of up most importance and directly tied to a company’s / firm’s progress.
- Live Overseas – I would really like to achieve this goal this year. I would love to live in Europe, preferably France, Spain, Italy or Switzerland. However, I would also enjoy living in New Zealand or Hong Kong.
- Be able to fluently speak three languages – Currently I only speak English. =) Language seems to be real difficult for me to grasp as I have studied French and Italian in the past and feel like my little brain doesn’t retain. However, for the past 3 weeks I have been actively studying French again. In fact, you readers will soon see some elementary French blog posts in the near future.
- Continue to travel to a new destination annually – so far, so good.
- Complete a Master’s degree at a well respected school – I have not yet started into a master’s program because I feel like the appropriate timing for this will be in a couple years after I have another job under my belt. Getting into a school of choice is a whole different issue. =) I would love to go to a well respected school for the sole reason that I am simply a girl from the rural town of Helper, Utah. Everything I have is a direct result from my work and determination and nothing to do with my family or their financial affairs… and I just want to see if I could work my way into a good school. =)
- Be involved with humanitarian efforts – This is actually a real important goal to me, but I haven’t done anything to even work towards it, besides volunteering at home. At home I volunteered with Ten Thousand Villages (a fair trade organization) and donated platelets as often as I could (which were used in the local cancer hospitals). However, I would ideally like to be more directly involved with UN affiliated programs or am actually real interested in Micro Finance Institutions such as Unitus and Kiva. In fact, a move to the micro-financial realm would actually make sense career-wise for me.
It’s interesting to actually write out these goals as doing such resulted in two take-aways for me.
- A couple goals that are of up-most importance to me, I have either not even started to work towards or have just recently started. Why I am procrastinating?
- My hobby of climbing, where I spend incredible amounts of time, is no where near my list of goals. Huh. It seems to be more of a hobby that I thoroughly enjoy, but not what I find to be important in life. Perhaps I should soon tone down my time devotion in this area?
I would highly recommend reading or watching the Last Lecture. And if you do, please let me know your thoughts. Did you like it? What were your favorite topics? Why? Or, even if you don’t read the book, I would love to hear your life goals and the status of each.
Tags: goals, The Last Lecture