The Dreambuilder

I recently watched Randy Pausch's last lecture called Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. You can find it on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo. With over 9 million views on YouTube, Randy's lecture has been widely circulated. Randy died from liver cancer last year. He touches on this at the begining of his lecture but just briefly. His main emphasis is about childhood dreams. Randy had quite a few of them. One of the most important ones for him, to be a Disney Imagineer, led him into his life work of being a professor at MIT and teaching virtual reality.

You can see Randy's true desire is to see his students pursue their own dreams. One of the most crucial aspect of this is allowing people to have the creativity in order to pursue their dreams. Randy was very good at equipping his students to be succesfu at fulfilling their dreams. Randy speaks about how important you dreams are and he talks about how he went about achieving his own dreams.

Another important aspect of achieving your dreams is looking for and having mentors. Mentors are able to develope and help shape you to make your dreams a reality. Mentors encourage you and push you. Some of Randy's most crucial mentors were his parents. His dad in particular was more than just a father. He was his coach and freind. His dad pushed him to be the best he could be.

The take-away from this video is very important to understand. In the face of adversity, you must push on and stay positive. We also should do whatever we can to help those around us achieve what is important to them. Randy set a high standard for the rest of us to follow. He was a great motivator amd a great professor. Would that we could all have a Randy Pausch in our lives to motivate us and push us to break through those walls that keep us from our dreams.