matthearn.com

As usual, I’m about a year behind hearing about things, so I’m sure all you have seen this: Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, a 75 minute (so block out the time, people) lecture by Professor Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon. At the time of the lecture, Dr. Pausch had been fighting pancreatic cancer for just over a year, and had been told about a month beforehand that tumors had turned up in his liver and other organs, giving him approximately 3-6 months. He beat that prediction by nearly a half-year, dying early this morning at 47.

I don’t want you folks to get the idea that because I’m riding in a cancer-related charity race in just 30 days that this is going to turn into a “cancer blog;” rest assured today’s subject matter is pretty much coincidence. This isn’t even really a cancer post, except that it was inspired by a cancer victim. This is a hell of a lot more self-centered: the Biannual “WTF is Matt Hearn doing with his life?” Self-Examination.

Watching that video, you sense immediately that Dr. Pausch was simply a fantastic human being. He could have done anything; it is to geeks’ benefit worldwide that he chose computer science. It occurs to me suddenly that if he’d entered medicine he might well have cured the cancer that took his life. His accomplishments, as well as his earth-shaking charisma, are due exclusively to one thing: he was absolutely fearless. There aren’t a lot of people who are going to take an opportunity to lecture and start out by doing a bunch of pushups; there aren’t a lot of people who would go into the lengthy details of their life in such a revealing way; there certainly aren’t a lot of people who would interrupt a college lecture to make everyone sing happy birthday to their spouse.

Fearlessness like that makes it possible to be supremely creative. I myself am terrified of failure, not because I worry that people are going to think less of me (although that’s certainly a factor), but because I’m worried that I’m going to waste hours/days/months/years of my life pursuing something only for it not to work out, for that time to be wasted. The end result is that I start a number of small projects, which I abandon as soon as I realize it’s going to be, OMG WTF, hard.

I can knock out a short blog post, because that’s maybe 30-60 minutes of effort and I know it’ll be well received by both of my readers (Hi, Dad!) if I bring a little of the funny. But write a novel, something I’ve been wanting to do for years? I type maybe 5-10 pages, get frustrated because it’s crappy, and quit. I’ve done this at least four times in the last 6 months.

Dr. Pausch, on the other hand, teamed with a Drama professor to develop an entire Master’s degree program that no one at any other college had even thought of. Sort of a combination of graphic design, virtual reality, animation, and a lot of computing concepts I don’t even remotely comprehend. It’s been around for several years now, and it still nothing like it is appearing at other schools, so Carnegie Mellon is simply creating their own labs for it around the world; Australia, Singapore, and others.

He also led the team that developed Alice, which is an object-oriented programming language entirely designed to teach kids how to program. Except, and this is the kicker, it doesn’t seem like programming; the kids feel like they are creating detailed computer animations. It’s a revolutionary way to teach programming, centered on Dr. Pausch’s belief that the best way to teach someone something is to make him think he’s not learning at all.

I’m sure along the way he tried some things that didn’t work. But he didn’t care, because he learned from every failure, and was simply unafraid of not succeeding. This gave him the ability to work staggeringly hard.

Also, he knew what he wanted. At the beginning of the lecture, he lists his childhood dreams, and establishes exactly what he did to try and accomplish each one of them. The only one he missed out on, at the time of the lecture? Playing in the NFL. Within a few weeks, the Pittsburgh Steelers caught wind of this and invited him to team practice. The man set out a list of tasks at a young age, and completed each one.

I still, at thirty years of age, don’t know what I want to do with my life. This is remarkably common among my friends, I find, and is unbelievably frustrating. The relentlessly negative portion of my conscious mind likes to remind me on occasion that I’m never going to amount to anything, because if I was I’d know what I want to do. Unsurprisingly, this is a bit of a damper on the creative process.

The only thing more terrifying than having a ton of talent and not knowing what to do with it? Having a ton of talent and being too scared to use it.

Great, I’m batting a thousand.

Randy, you were a great teacher, great husband, undoubtedly great father, and most of all great man by any measure. You are already missed. May we all (especially, you know, I) learn from your staggering example.