A Man For All Seasons

Dr Randy Pausch, the 47 year-old terminally-ill Carnegie Mellon professor who gave the famous ‘Last Lecture’ that became a worldwide internet hit, died last Friday. True to form, he continued to uplift and educate people as much in dying as he did in life, so his last lecture goes way beyond the usual platitudes and offers up some truly inspirational truths. Focusing on how he’d lived his childhood dreams – and setting aside the given importance of family and friends – his speech wanders lightheartedly through the lessons learned throughout his extraordinary career and the wisdom he was gifted with by others.

To set the scene, he reminds us “I was born in 1960. When you are 8 or 9 years old and you look at the TV set, men are landing on the moon, everything’s possible. And that’s something we should not lose sight of, is that the inspiration and the permission to dream is huge.”

Pausch’s childhood dream of playing in the National football dream was the one where “I probably got more from that dream and not accomplishing it than I got from any of the ones that I did accomplish”. Some of the real gems came from his early football coach, who showed up to teach without any footballs. When the kids asked how they could play without them, Pausch remembers his coach saying “Right, how many men are on a football field at a time? Eleven on a team, twenty-two. Coach Graham said, All right, and how many people are touching the football at any given time? One of them. And he said, Right, so we’re going to work on what those other twenty-one guys are doing. And that’s a really good story because it’s all about fundamentals … You’ve got to get the fundamentals down because otherwise the fancy stuff isn’t going to work.” Recalling how the coach rode him hard all practice one day, criticising everything he’d done, an assistant coach told him “That’s a good thing. He said, When you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore, that means they gave up. And that’s a lesson that stuck with me my whole life. Is that when you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore that’s a bad place to be. Your critics are your ones telling you they still love you and care.”

Another coach taught Pausch the power of enthusiasm – and of the element of surprise. “He did this one thing where only for one play at a time he would put people in at like the most horrifically wrong position for them … It was just laughable. But we only went in for one play, right? And boy, the other team just never knew what hit them. Because when you’re only doing it for one play and you’re just not where you’re supposed to be, and freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, boy are you going to clean somebody’s clock for that one play.”

One of Pausch’s favourite expressions is “experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted”. He describes football as “The first example of what I’m going to call a head fake, or indirect learning. We actually don’t want our kids to learn football. I mean, yeah, it’s really nice that I have a wonderful three-point stance and that I know how to do a chop block and all this kind of stuff. But we send our kids out to learn much more important things. Teamwork, sportsmanship, perseverance, etcetera, etcetera. And these kinds of head fake learning are absolutely important. And you should keep your eye out for them because they’re everywhere.”

Talking about tenacity in the face of rejection – recalling the numerous refusal letters from Walt Disney Imagineering, his dream job – he counsels “But remember, the brick walls are there for a reason. 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. They’re there to stop the other people.”

Perhaps one of the most curious little pieces of wisdom came from John Snoddy, a colleague of his at Imagineering – yes, Pausch did finally manage to make that happen after all the rejection – who advised “Wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you. He said, When you’re pissed off at somebody and you’re angry at them, you just haven’t given them enough time. Just give them a little more time and they’ll almost always impress you.”

Back at Carnegie Mellon, Pausch created a course called Building Virtual Worlds, which was open to all departments in the university. “And the kids said What content do we make? I said, Hell, I don’t know. You make whatever you want. Two rules: no shooting violence and no pornography. Not because I’m opposed to those in particular, but you know, that’s been done with VR, right. And you’d be amazed how many 19 year-old boys are completely out of ideas when you take those off the table.

“Anyway, so I taught the course. The first assignment, I gave it to them, they came back in two weeks and they just blew me away. I mean the work was so beyond, literally, my imagination … I had no idea what to do next. So I called up my mentor, Andy van Dam, and I said, I just gave a two-week assignment, and they came back and did stuff that if I had given them a whole semester, I would have given them all As. Sensei, what do I do? And Andy thought for a minute and he said, You go back into class tomorrow and you look them in the eye and you say ‘Guys, that was pretty good, but I know you can do better’. And that was exactly the right advice. Because what he said was, you obviously don’t know where the bar should be and you’re only going to do them a disservice by putting it anywhere.”

Along with the creativity came some classic education in social skills. One innovation was to include peer feedback so students would have a sense of how well they worked with others. “When you’re talking Building Virtual Worlds, every two weeks we get feedback. We put that all into a big spreadsheet and at the end of the semester, you had three teammates per project, five projects, 15 data points so that’s statistically valid. And you get a bar chart telling you on a ranking how easy you are to work with, where you stacked up against your peers. Boy, that’s hard feedback to ignore. Some still managed. But for the most part, people looked at that and went, Wow, I’ve got to take it up a notch. I better start thinking about what I’m saying to people in these meetings. And that is the best gift an educator can give, is to get somebody to become self-reflective.”

The university president urged Pausch to talk about the importance of having fun in his speech, because that was what he remembered him for, but Pausch said “I can do that, but it’s a kind of like a fish talking about the importance of water. I mean I don’t know how not to have fun. I’m dying and I’m having fun. And I’m going to keep having fun every day I have left. Because there’s no other way to play it. So my next piece of advice is you just have to decide if you’re a Tigger or an Eeyore … Never lose the childlike wonder. It’s just too important. It’s what drives us.”

Finally, Pausch leaves us with one for the ladies, describing how his friend Syl “gave the best piece of advice, pound-for-pound that I have ever heard. And I think all young ladies should hear this. Syl said, It took me a long time but I’ve finally figured it out. When it comes to men that are romantically interested in you, it’s really simple. Just ignore everything they say and only pay attention to what they do. It’s that simple. It’s that easy. And I thought back to my bachelor days and I said damn.”

This week, you could pick any of those little pieces of wisdom and start living it in your life. Recapture your childlike wonder. Chase a lifelong dream. Remember the walls aren’t there to keep you out if you want it enough. Pay attention to how you deal with people. Set the bar high. Wait long enough for someone to surprise you. Life is a total head fake – pay attention to what you’re really learning. And if you’re dating, you’ve just heard the most fabulous piece of advice you will ever get!

For the Coach Fabulous archives, go to www.coachfabulous.blogspot.com and for the I Am Fabulous archives, go to www.fabcentral.blogspot.com. You can email me at coachfabulous@iamfabulous.co.uk. All material ©2008 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author. (Originally posted 21 Jul 08)