Two in one day? I know you’re asking yourself how you could possibly be so amazingly lucky. Well, thanks to some vacation days from The Local Station, I have been able to sleep like a normal person for several nights in a row. Somnia=productivity. Check that. Slumber=productivity. Apparently “somnia” means “a sick man’s dreams,” not the opposite of insomnia. I definitely don’t have that.
When I was in grad school we watched a fair number of movies in our grand apartment on Tulane Drive. Since I was in control of the Netflix account, I could definitely field the blame or credit for the choice of discs that ended up in the DVD player. That’s the period where I became aware of a tendency to end up with a string of not-so-uplifting entertainment choices. I’m not sure of the exact lineup of movies we went through, but I do remember one of them being the poignant yet utterly depressing “Elephant.” (If you haven’t seen it, there’s a Columbine quality to the storyline).
After this string of movies one of my roommates, Jason, said something like, “Wow, another extremely happy tale.” While they were all good movies, I definitely saw his point. I don’t intend to string together “downer” tales, but sometimes it just ends up happening.
Such is the case with the reading project. I just went from Machiavellian words of do whatever is necessary to achieve what you want, to a discussion of game theory where in many cases the altruistic and benevolent end up being “suckers” in the outcome. Whenever I catch on to these trends, I do my best to add some more comedies to the Netflix list or grab a happier volume from my bookshelf.
Which brings me to “The Last Lecture” by Randy Pausch. Granted, it isn’t exactly a “happy” set of circumstances, but that’s exactly the point.
If you’ve been living with dial-up in a DSL world, Pausch recently died of pancreatic cancer. He was a computer science professor at Carnegie-Mellon University. Pausch was asked to give a “last lecture,” a chance for professors to really focus on a talk as if it were the last they would ever give. But Pausch was told he had just months to live shortly before he was going to give his lecture. It became a widespread hit on the Internet, and he eventually expanded upon the idea with this book. More at TheLastLecture.com.
Pausch is a man who certainly wasn’t wallowing in the dire nature of his diagnosis. He really wanted to go out the way he had lived his life, as a fun-loving person who demanded a lot from himself and those around him. But at all times, he writes, he wanted to have a sense of what was really important.
One of the best illustrations comes from late in his cancer battle. He writes that he went to the grocery store and used the self-checkout. By mistake, he swiped his credit card twice, racking up a double charge for the $16 worth of goods. He says he could have spent time tracking down the manager and waiting for the extra transaction to be reversed. But then it hit him, “Is this really how I’d like to spend this 15 minutes? Is 15 minutes worth $16 to me right now?” The answer was no, and he just left the store. Think about that the next time you ask for a Coke and get a Dr. Pepper, or you get italian dressing instead of the balsamic vinagrette you ordered. Is that really how you’d like to spend that time?
I expected 200 pages of poignant messages about living your life to the fullest and achieving your dreams. What I didn’t foresee was the absolute carefree attitude in Pausch’s writing that is really humorous at times. He gives tips for making sure you waste as little time on the phone as possible. These include standing up while you talk and having something you want to get to next sitting in front of you as a reminder you need to hurry up. The best is when you need to call someone, do it just a few minutes before lunch. “They’ll talk fast,” he writes. “You may think you are interesting, but you are not more interesting than lunch.”
He’s also a man after my own heart. I hate being asked a question, or thinking about something to which I don’t know the answer. Thankfully we live in an age where most of the time that information is just a few keystrokes away. Paush says that his family was integral in instilling those same traits in him. “‘If you have a question,’ my folks would say, ‘then find the answer.’ The instinct at our house was never to sit around like slobs and wonder. We knew a better way: Open the encyclopedia. Open the dictionary. Open your mind.”
One of my favorite of Pausch’s message is to let kids be kids. He rails against the notion that we should be protecting kids from everything and holding them all up as “gifted.” Kids should be able to make mistakes, strike out in Little League, get a B- on a test and scribble on their bedroom walls. In fact, that’s just what Pausch’s parents allowed.
He asked his parents if he could paint things that mattered to him on his walls. They said OK. His mother may not have been totally for the project–Pausch writes that she hovered out in the hallway during the process, while dad sat in the living room–but they came to show off his work proudly.
When I was about 12 I was allowed to paint my own room, including a giant replica of the Major League Baseball logo on one wall. That was one of the coolest parts of my childhood.
But Pausch put my creative work to shame. He had the quadratic formula and a rocket ship. There was his version of Pandora’s box. A submarine lurked around his bed with a periscope sticking up above the headboard. And the best item: A replica of elevator doors complete with up and down arrows, and the lights over top with floors numbered one through six. “The number ‘three’ was illuminated,” he writes. “We lived in a ranch house–it was just one level–so I was doing a bit of fantasizing to imagine six floors. But looking back, why didn’t I paint eighty or ninety floors?”
What parents would allow that type of freedom today? I picture the mother from the show “Jon & Kate Plus 8”–she’d have a simultaneous massive heart attack and stroke.
When Pausch was teaching, he brought that same “try and it’s OK if you fail” attitude to his students. After all, that’s when we learn a lot. At the end of the semester, he says he would give “The First Penguin Award” to the group that failed the most while taking the biggest chance. He says he named it as he did after the first penguin to dive in the water in the wild, who is taking the chance that a predator could be waiting for lunch. Of course, after he dives in, the rest of the penguins can make a more informed decision. But that’s exactly the point–if nobody is the first penguin, we all stand on the shore forever.
“Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted…Failure is not just acceptable, it’s often essential.” — Randy Pausch.