Randy Pausch's Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

What Hacker News said

Strong rec sdrinf · 2010-09 · on “Ask HN: After almost 30 years the romance is over - What now?”

Welcome to the law of Diminishing returns. Your choices fundamentally boils down to the following: -Take the blue pill. Stay in wonderland. Pick a technology, any technology. Drive yourself into it deeper. The rabbit hole goes much, much further, than you can imagine. -Take the red pill, and wake up: the rabbit hole goes the other way, too. On first basis, you have the ever-exploding number of scientific disciplines ( [LINK] ). Even further, society isn't merely a collection of engineers, and scientist: other people have all kind of different jobs. Furthermore, they are equally convinced, that their field of choice was the right one; and from their own perspective each one of them was right.

Strong rec rebase · 2018-06 · on “YouTube’s top creators are burning out”

If you haven't watched this, it will change your life. Even if you have, it's one of the few youtube videos that is worth a re-watch. The book is just as good if not better. [this video] Spoiler: It is a former CS professor at Carnegie Mellon named Randy Pausch. He had terminal pancreatic cancer. This is a dying professor's last lecture. It is a father sharing life lessons for his kids when they are older to watch. Some relevant quotes: - “As you get older, you may find that 'enabling the dreams of others' thing is even more fun.” - “We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.” - “The key question to keep asking is, Are you spending your time on the right things? Because t

Recommends Tarks · 2009-05 · on “Ask HN: Just lost my year long placement because they have no work. Begging for advice ”

Thankyou, I'd lost sight of this a little. teaching someone how to deal with a type of situation rather than a specific one is always useful in the long run. If anyone else appreciates this type of thing then Randy Pauche's "Last Lecture" is very inspirational [this video]

Recommends andre3k1 · 2010-10 · on “Ask HN: Good books?”

If you're looking for something different then check out The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. It's is an eye-opening book in a very nontraditional sense. You may remember Pausch as the computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon who was told that he had but a few months left to live (cancer). This book doesn't stray from its topic: "What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance?" If you're looking for motivation and an "out of the box" approach to analyzing daily life then this is it. Here's the book: [LINK] Here's the famous speech: [this video]

Recommends Xk · 2011-06 · on “Hacking the system: how to land meetings with anyone you want”

This reminds me of Randy Pausch's method of getting someone to sit down for lunch. [1] "And he asked a question. And I was like, I’m sorry did you say you were Tom Furness? And he said yes. I said, then I would love to answer your question, but first, will you have lunch with me tomorrow? And there’s a lot in that little moment. There’s a lot of humility, but also asking a person where he can’t possibly say no." Although, admittedly, that's after you got them to say a few words to you and you're in front of a large group of people. [1] [this video] 19:40 Edit: For those who don't know, here's the setting of this talk: This talk is one in a series given at CMU called the "Last Lecture" series with

Recommends elliottcarlson · 2011-10 · on “Pancreatic Cancer”

The Last Lecture is an inspiring book - Randy Pausch was another great man that the technology community had lost and I recommend everyone to both watch the Last lecture and read the book. The video is viewable here: [this video] (as embedded on the OP's submission)

Recommends ehurrell · 2014-05 · on “Hamming, "You and Your Research" (1995) [video]”

I was introduced to this recently and it has become one of my favourite talks. Maybe also of interest on the topic of doing important work, Randy Pausch's Last Lecture: [this video]

Recommends delibes · 2017-11 · on “Business questions engineers should ask when interviewing at ML/AI companies”

Thanks for reminding me. The Last Lecture is good. Since it's about 9 years ago, some younger HN readers may have missed it: [this video] Cancer sucks.