Randy Pausch is truly someone I think everyone can learn from tremendously. His teaching strategies were all about not just providing students with the skills they needed to do whatever the assignment at hand was, but also providing them with invaluable life skills. His philosophy, in my opinion, can be summarized by the following quote from his Last Lecture: "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." It does not matter what you might be able to achieve of your own accord. What matters is how you treat the people around you, who help you achieve those dreams.
In his own way, he taught his students never to give up. One of my favorite quotes from the lecture is, "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 people who don't want it badly enough." Determination and fortitude are two characteristics that are very important to me, because I had a great example of those traits early in my life - my grandmother. I learned from her that if you make up your mind that you truly want something, then you can overcome any obstacle that might get in your way.
He also taught that you should always put others before yourself, and "When you see yourself doing something badly and nobody's bothering to tell you anymore that's a very bad place to be. Your critics are your ones telling you they still love you and care." Even though we might not appreciate "advice" and criticism at the time we are given it, we never want to come to a place where we realize no one is giving us feedback anymore because that means we have chased away the people who love us. Constructive criticism is a very valuable thing and we must learn to take it and use it to transform ourselves into a better version of ourselves.
Finally, perhaps the most important thing I got out of this lecture is summed up in the following two quotes: "Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted," and "I probably got more from that dream and not accomplishing it than I got from any of the ones I did accomplish." It is important to keep a positive attitude even when we see ourselves as not achieving the things we set out to do. There are no failures - just lessons learned in an unexpected way. When something doesn't go as planned, we have to step back and look at the events from a distance to see what we can learn from what did happen and take that away with us to make the next attempt better.
Hey Bonnie!
ReplyDeleteExcellent post, but I wouldn't have expected anything else. I like how you approached this. Dr. Pausch certainly had a way of putting things into words so that we can understand and utilize those nuggets of wisdom. As teachers, we are going to gain a lot of "experience," and some of it won't be by choice. But we are going to have to learn how to handle ourselves and the brick walls that stand in our way, or we'll fail in what we've set out to do: teach.