Greetings all, Mahesh Joshi recently shared the following with me - many of you may have already heard of it, but I had not (showing you how much of a bubble I live in sometimes...) In Sept 2007 a CMU professor named Randy Pausch (who does research in Virtual Reality) gave a lecture that has become quite widely viewed online, and has recently come out in book form (and sits atop the best seller list now). See the lecture and more about his life and career here...
http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/ The circumstances of the lecture are a bit tragic, he is quite ill with pancreatic cancer, which is notoriously deadly. But the lecture is quite uplifting, and really gives some very nice advice for dealing with the good and bad that comes in life. It's not at all grim, and very much worth watching. I enjoyed it very much not only for the deeper messages, but also for the bits and pieces of the academic world and academic process that emerge. There is of course an obvious thought experiment that follows from this, and that is "What if you had 1 hour to tell the world about your career and what you have learned and done, what would you say?" And obviously very early in one's career it is hard to really put things in that kind of perspective, but as time goes by things begin to sort themselves out a bit, into those things that are important and those that are not. I recall reading or hearing somewhere that there are certain things you will not hear people saying on their deathbed, such as "I wish I had watched more television" or "I should have spent more time at the office" .... The Last Lecture starts with Randy Pausch listing his childhood dreams and talking about how he did or didn't realize those, and what he learned along the way. I think it's worth keeping track of at least a few dreams that one has both on a work and personal level, just so that you don't get too caught up in the small things that make up a good part of every day, but that you have a little time each day even to pursue some of those big things that you always wanted to do, or more importantly, those things that you will deeply regret if you find yourself towards the end of your life not having done. In any case, thanks to Mahesh to pointing this out to me, I very much encourage any of you to watch the lecture, read the book, think a little bit about life in a bigger sense, and perhaps most of all to make sure you are having fun with whatever you are doing (at least for most of the time). Enjoy, Ted -- Ted Pedersen http://www.d.umn.edu/~tpederse
