The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

This isn't a very long book, and I have procrastinated for quite some time. A friend told me, "You must read this." But the whole thing just seemed so depressing that, even though I did buy the book, I let it sit for a long time. It turned up again in the current shuffle of stuff in the house and I decided that maybe I could at least open it and look at the first few pages.

Here's the general background. The "Last Lecture" series at Carnegie-Mellon (and I gather at other universities) is a mind game for professors. If they had only one last lecture, what would they tell their students. Randy Pausch was on the schedule for the series which at Carnegie-Mellon had been retitled "Journeys." For Pausch, at age 47, it was indeed his last lecture because he was dying of pancreatic cancer. He gave some statistics, most people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer are dead within a year. Fewer than four percent make it five years. My father lived six years after his diagnosis, making him one of even a smaller group. Randy Pausch was not. He left a wife and three small children, the oldest only five years old.

This is quite possibly the most upbeat, positive piece of writing that I have ever encountered. He says it himself: it isn't about dying - it is about living - and specifically about teaching. After a sabbatical at Disney, he was offered his dream job - as a Disney Imagineer - and turned it down to return to his classroom. I read it through and then went to the web and watched the video of the actual lecture. I was in tears at the end - but it is truly inspirational.