Randy Pausch (1960 – 2008)
Professor of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States and a best-selling author, who achieved worldwide fame for his speech The Last Lecture at Carnegie Mellon University, after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and having only a few months to live.
Be good at something. It makes you valuable.
Focus on other people, not on yourself.
When you're eight or nine years old and you look at the TV set and men are landing on the moon — anything is possible. And that is something we need to not lose sight of — that the inspiration and permission to dream is immense.
It is not the things we do in life that we regret on our death bed. It is the things we do not. Find your passion and follow it. And if there is anything that I have learned in life, you will not find that passion in things. And you will not find that passion in money. Because the more things and the more money you have, the more you will just look around and use that as the metric — and there will always be someone with more. Your passion must come from the things that fuel you from the inside. That passion will be grounded in people. It will be grounded in the relationships you have with people and what they think of you when your time comes.
Having been selected to be an author in the World Book, I now believe that Wikipedia is a perfectly fine source for your information, because I know what the quality control is for real encyclopedias — they let me in.
Did you figure out the second head fake? This talk's not for you. It's for my kids.
You just have to decide whether you are Tigger or an Eeyore. You have to be clear where you stand on the Tigger/Eeyore debate.
Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.
Never give up: There are certain times that you think, “OK, you have beaten me down to my knees. And now the challenge is, I am on my knees and you keep on beating me down. And the question is, are you going to keep beating me all the way to the ground or will I find a way to struggle my way back on to my feet.”
You get people to help you by telling the truth; by being earnest. I'll take an earnest person over a hip person every day, because hip is short-term, earnest is long term.
We don't beat the reaper by living longer, but by living well, and living fully — for the reaper will come for all of us. The question is: what do we do between the time we're born and the time he shows up.
Remember brick walls let us show our dedication. They are there to separate us from the people who don't really want to achieve their childhood dreams.
You can't get there alone and I believe in karma.
We all stand on the dart board and very few of us catch the darts. Do not think it is unfair. It is fair but you are unlucky.
Did you figure out the head fake? It's not about how to achieve your dreams. It's about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself. The dreams will come to you.
Treat the Disease, Not the Symptom.
Do not tell people how to live their lives. Just tell them stories. And they will figure out how those stories apply to them.
It took me a long time but I 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.
Too many people go through life complaining about their problems. I've always believed that if you took one tenth the enrgy you put into complaining and applied it to solving the problem, you'd be surprised by how well things can work out."