Introduction
Professor Randy Pausch was an incredibly positive and motivated person. His work on Virtual Reality and the Alice project has helped shape many of the advances in those fields today. His last lecture was dedicated to how he was able to achieve his dreams and what lessons he learned throughout his life. He had a great way with words and created a variety of sayings that would later be known as “Pauschism’s.” This paper will reflect on three of his sayings that were present in the “Last Lecture.”
Reflection
Although his last lecture was filled with many nuggets of great advice, I found three of them to be especially truthful. They resonated with me because I have had similar experiences but have never thought enough about them to put them to words. The first saying I selected was “the brick walls are made for others” (Pausch, 2007). This might be one of the most accurate recommendations somebody can give to a person trying to achieve anything from getting a job, to working in politics. Life is full of situations that seem like dead ends, but some of them can be overcome. I know this to be true due to the myriad of real-life examples. Even the concept of a “follow-up letter” indicates that walls are often set up to weed out people who do not want the position enough. In the short term, I will follow this saying to overcome any issues I might have in my studies, but in the long term, I will make sure to try all the available options to meet my goals.
The second saying I selected is “get a feedback loop and listen to it” (Pausch, 2007). Some of my biggest problems while growing up were caused by my refusal to listen to others. Even when I knew that the fault was mine, I refused to admit it to people accusing me of misdeeds. Sometime in high school, this changed however as I found that it is much more productive to be self-reflective and focus on improving yourself. I think my initial refusal came from the fear of losing my identity, but I came to understand that as long as I shape it of my free will, I will only serve to improve it. Any successful manager will point out that feedback is essential for a successful operation, and the same could be said about people. In the short term, I plan to continue to improve myself, and in the long term, I hope to find a wise person who could become my primary feedback loop.
The last saying I chose was “the best way to teach someone is to make them think they are learning something else.” This saying could be considered the main one of the lecture as he comes back to the concept of “head fake” multiple times throughout the lecture (Pausch, 2007). I identify with it as I found team-based activities to be critical to my development of social skills. I have learned to better read people and work with them after joining an online gaming community. After a few years, I could immediately tell what kind of person I am talking to and how to avoid conflict. In the short term, I use this type of learning to learn new languages in my past time, but in the long run, I hope to develop programs that could help others learn.
Conclusion
Randy Pausch seemed to be a great person. His sayings are wise and are devoid of pretension. Unfortunately, he could not see the advancements in technology we have today as I believe he could inspire a new generation of VR developers.
References
Pausch, R. (2007). Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. Web.