Professor's Last Lecture - Azara Feroz Sayed

Came accross this presentation done by Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Professor Randy Pausch, who has been fighting cancer. A truly remarkable and inspirational segment about childhood dreams and how to achieve them and lessons learnt on the way which will help others enable achieve their dreams

See the video at http://www.divinecaroline.com/article/22368/44055 or download the transcript http://download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/Randy/pauschlastlecturetranscript.pdf

Some thoughts from his presentation that I noted down

- We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.
- Enabling the dreams of others is even more fun - being a professor helped it
- Providing the Inspiration and Permission to dream in childhood is important
- Believe in your childhood dreams
- Get the fundamentals right as otherwise the fancy stuff isn't going to work - practice footbal without a ball as other 21 don't have the ball
- Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want
- When you do a bad job and nobody points it out - they don't care for you - your critics are the ones telling you they love you and still care
- Participating in sports such as football, swimming etc provides for indirect training in Teamwork, sportsmanship, perseverance, etcetera, etcetera
- It is a tremendous gift to get other people excited and happy
- You can tell if the world is good by body language. If they are standing close to each other, the world is good
- When you do something young enough and train for it - it becomes part of you
- When people care they spent hours helping you improve
- Brick walls (obstacles) 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 the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.
- We need to wait long enough and people will surprise and impress us. When we are pissed off at somebody and we are angry at them, we just haven’t given them enough time. Just give them a little more time and they’ll almost always impress us.
- Oppurtunities to express Creativity most important for upbringing
- Instill importance of people over things
- Being humble
- Helping others
- Never give up - some door will open
- How do you get people to help you? You can’t get there alone. You get people to help you by telling the truth. Being earnest.
- Get a feedback loop and listen to it. When people give you feedback, cherish it and
use it.
- Advice for woman looking for man in their life - Just ignore everything men say and only pay attention to what they do. It’s that simple. It’s that easy.
- Decide if you are Tigger(enthusiastic) or Eeyore - Have fun - Never lose the child like wonder
- Theory - people who come from large families are better people because they’ve just had to learn to get along.
- Work and play well with others - live with integrity - tell the truth - Aplogize (I am sorry, It was my fault, How do I correct) - How do I correct? is the part which we all miss and to pay attention to that aspect while apologizing
- There is no one who is all evil - People will eventually show their good side
- Show Gratitude
- If you’re such a good salesman that any company that gets you is going to use you as a salesman. And you might as well be selling something worthwhile like education - being a professor
- Don't spend time whining and complaining
- Build something for others to learn from your life
- Be good at something. It makes you valuable
- Be prepared. Luck is when preparation meets oppurtuinity
- Say your story to belong in family, relationship, world