Pausch's "Last Lecture" (Randy Pausch, 2007)

In August 2007, Carnegie Mellon computer science professor and pancreatic cancer sufferer Randy Pausch got some bad news: it's metastasized, and you've got three months. The next month, he delivered a "last lecture" to a packed auditorium, regaling his audience with the tales of how he achieved, or of what he learned from not achieving, his childhood dreams. After being uploaded to the internet, the lecture made Pausch an inspiration celebrity.

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I often get into a sometimes beneficial but mostly (I assume) wasteful mode I call "inspiration seeking". What I'll do is browse an information source, usually each and every one of the good old internets, for hours on end, revisiting and finding new examples of lives well-lived. Books, articles, blogs, quotes; using all of thsem I try to answer the question, "Who should I be imitating?" Because Pausch's lecture seemed to fill that niche for its viewers — there are a bunch of "I was spiraling toward oblivion until I watched Randy Pausch" stories out there — I saved it for a rainy, inspiration-free day. When Pausch died on July 25th, I called it as good as a time as any to view the video.

I admit, dear readers, to not being quite as violently galvanized by Pausch's words as some have claimed to be, but I was still damn impressed by the man himself. He won me over quickly, by getting the cancerous elephant in the room out of the way immediately and then forcefully telling anyone with a pocketful of "herbal remedies" to keep their distance. (This made up for the fact that he was using Powerpoint.) As I'm sure you've heard by now, he maintains a positive attitude throughout the lecture, makes a bunch of funny jokes, does push-ups, gives away giant stuffed animals, has the audience sing "Happy Birthday" to his wife, etc. All good stuff, but my main takeaways — man, that word is lame — were as follows:

• The "head fake". The idea that learning one skill indirectly teaches you another, broader one. He gave the example of his hard-assed football coach, who got him to live life with dedication, not just to play football with dedication, because, well, he wasn't headed straight for the NFL anyway. I've given a lot of though to how useful knowledge can be gained by generalizing micro-skills picked up from mastering specific tasks, so this was relevant to my interests.
  
• Brick walls let us prove how badly we want stuff. This was a really smart point: obstacles sitting between you and your goals are chances to test your own drive. As I think he put it, those brick walls are "there to keep the other people out," and sometimes "those brick walls are made of flesh." You've often got to blast on forward, game the system, scrap the rules, and dupe bureaucrats to get what you want, and if you're unwilling to do those things, then by definition you probably don't want it. That's actually a good rule of thumb: a desire isn't a desire unless you're willing to snow a stuffed shirt to satiate it.
  
• We can't change the cards we're dealt, just how we play the hand. He was referring to the whole cancer thing, but it applies to any area of life. We can't avoid being dealt a hand of some kind, and maybe it's a good one, but maybe it sucks. What you make out of that hand comes down to the strategy you build to deal with it. I don't know how to make that sound less clichéd, unfortunately.
  
• Live with quality, because you're not assured quantity. "We don't beat the Reaper by living longer. We beat the Reaper by living well." I doubt I can put it any better, but it's important to remember that none of us are guaranteed another day. The trick, I guess, is not to dwell on that fact; you can't very well live every day as if it was literally your last — we'd need to build vomitoriums — but you can life every day as if it has a small probability of being your last. It's a probability worth hedging against by doing what you want to do sooner than later.

Though oncology was declared not to be its subject matter, the lecture made me realize how little I understand cancer, which really scares me since I seem to know more about it than a lot of the people I talk to. Here's my understanding of this family of diseases:

1. A buggily-programmed cell is so buggy that it doesn't self-destruct like it's supposed to.
   
2. That cell keeps replicating until it's these nasty growths.
   
3. You die of pneumonia.

I do know that pancreatic cancer is especially freaky because it's asymptomatic until it's already well on its way to killing you. It got one of my favorite guitarists, it took Erick Wujcik out of the game not two months ago, and a few other people whose work I enjoy and whose names aren't coming easily to mind are also now stencils on pancreatic's biplane. It almost got Steve Jobs, and Patrick Swayze's locked in a battle with it as you read this.

To further complicate things, Pausch makes a big deal about the cognitive dissonance stemming from how good he feels and how many onstage push-ups he could do versus his advanced disease and aggressive chemotherapy. So he's not just that most compelling human spectacle, the dead man walking, but one more or less just like us: feeling good, being productive, and giving internet phenom lectures... but also just about to check out. He's us, accelerated, sending a message from his place so close to the grave: "Yes, my situation sucks, but I beat the crap out of life's challenges and achieved lots of real things. I played football hard, I met William Shatner, I floated around in zero gravity, I got rejected from the schools from which I eventually graduated, I pioneered some cool virtual reality stuff, and I never took no for an answer. What's your excuse?" (Not a direct quote, but I sort of wish it was.) We think of him as a victim of cruel fate, but who wrings as much from 80 years of life as Randy Pausch did from 47 of them?

Tangentially, watching Pausch speak after his shuffling from this mortal coil, I felt the future. Specifically, I felt how nonsensical Pausch's place in our minds is going to seem in the future. You know how, when you read history books, you see constant references to people dying of causes considered inconsequential these days? We wonder how, a century ago, people could have stood to live knowing that they could be destroyed by an infected pinprick on the toe. But that's how 2008 will eventually look. A few generations on — fewer than we think — our descendants will wonder how we could bear living in a world where some disease, some inexorable, not-that-predictable biological process, could kill us. The future will have no Randy Pausches, because the future will have no living people organically condemned to death as even medical science looks on powerlessly. It'll have the living and it'll have the dead, who will primarily die in sudden accidents. That we all watched rapt as a dying man gave us words of advice won't even compute to future humans. Randy Pausch's great-great grandkids will understand that he was good at speaking, good at computers, and an expert liver of life, but they won't understand the concept of a dying man. A dead man, yes; a dying man, no.

(If you're one of the final holdouts, you can watch the Last Lecture here.)

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