Last week we said goodbye and many thanks to an incredible man and teacher, Randy Pausch. The Carnegie Mellon Professor who, as he was dying of pancreatic cancer, taught the world how to live.
Randy wanted to leave some strong lessons and a bit of his personality for his children to access as they grow up, and in the process, he made the leap from good professor and father to a great teacher.
Randy Pausch became his lessons. He burst through the proverbial brick wall (more on that below) and continued to live and work his calling as a leader and teacher in the face of the biggest and most final limiting factor possible - death.
To me, a great person knows what needs to be done and does those things with equanimity and consistency. A Great Teacher knows that he can help someone through his own experience or simply through compassion, and shares whatever he can of himself or herself because they need and they want to help everyone, without exception. A Great Teacher has many students who admire and follow those lessons, out of respect and trust, because they know that the lessons were given out of compassion and love, out of genuine life experience, not from a need to control.
The following is from NPR:
Wall Street Journal reporter Jeffrey Zaslow was also in the audience [at Randy's last lecture]. He wrote a piece about the lecture and posted a video of it in on the newspaper's Web site.
"That spread so fast, with people saying they were so touched," says Zaslow. "I knew he was going to move the world."
Eventually, Zaslow collaborated with Pausch on the book The Last Lecture. None of the lessons in the book is startlingly new, but Pausch had a way of taking a cliché — like running into a brick wall" — and imbuing it with new life:
"The brick walls are there for a reason. Right? The brick walls are not there to keep us out, the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough," he said in his lecture.
In the end, Zaslow says Pausch's ability to embrace life even as he faced death was a lesson in itself:
"He lived with such bravado and such love of everybody in his life … but he also showed … that when our time comes, we should have a little bit of Randy inside of us."
So when you or I meet up with a "brick wall," we can remember just how gracefully Randy Pausch dealt with his. Seemingly without hesitation, he leaped over, or passed through or perhaps became one with the biggest brick wall a human being can encounter on their way through life, and he showed us how to approach ours, with dignity, grace and humor.
Please see Randy Pausch's website:
http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/to view the last lecture and find out more about him.
