I thought hard about how I defined myself: as a teacher, a computer scientist, a husband, a father, a son, a friend, a brother, a mentor to my students. Those were all roles I valued. But did any of those roles really set me apart?
…
“What do I, alone, truly have to offer?”
… It came to me in a flash: Whatever my accomplishments, all of the things I loved were rooted in the dreams and goals I had as a child… and in the ways I had managed to fulfill almost all of them. My uniqueness, I realized, came in the specifics of all the dreams — from incredibly meaningful to decidedly quirky — that defined my forty-six years of life. Sitting there, I knew that despite the cancer, I truly believed I was a lucky man because I had lived out these dreams. And I had lived out my dreams, in great measure, because of the things I was taught by all sorts of extraordinary people along the way.
On the lessons that football taught him
When you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a bad place to be. You may not want to hear it, but your critics are often the ones telling you they still love you and care about you, and want to make you better.
^taking this advice with the caveat that the critics that Pausch is referring to are actually well-meaning people with constructive pieces of feedback, not just haters that criticize for the sake of criticizing/hating
There’s a lot of talk these days about giving children self-esteem. It’s not something you can give; it’s something they have to build. Coach Graham […] knew there was really one way to teach kids how to develop it: You give them something they can’t do, they work hard until they find they can do it, and you just keep repeating the process […] he made me realize that if I work hard enough, there will be things I can do tomorrow that I can’t do today.
Time is all you have. And you may find one day that you have less than you think.
It’s a thrill to fulfill your own childhood dreams, but as you get older, you may find that enabling the dreams of others is even more fun.
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
On balancing optimism and realism — the importance of preparedness
There are a lot of things I don’t worry about because I have a plan in place if they do [happen].
From story about Disney
There is more than one way to measure profits and losses. On every level, institutions can and should have a heart.
“No job is beneath you” — something my mom has said/believes in/tells me, too. In Korean, 직업에는 귀천이 없다.
Story about how he got rejected from Carnegie Mellon’s PhD but got a second chance thanks to a call that his recommender made
It’s interesting, the secrets you decide to reveal at the end of your life. I should have been telling that story for years, because the moral is: If you want something bad enough, never give up (and take a boost when offered). Brick walls are there for a reason. And once you get over them — even if someone has practically had to throw you over — it can be helpful to others to tell them how you did it.
I love and find it inspiring to hear mentors/older people in general tell their stories of ‘failures’ — for example, a cool person with a cool job sharing how they once got turned down from their dream internship or from like thirty places before landing their job, or a professor sharing their academic struggles as a student. As I get older and hopefully have some experiences/wisdom that people want to learn about, I also want to share about my struggles and help inspire people/let them know that it’s never a smooth, linear journey.
악뮤 이찬혁이 유퀴즈에 나와서 반농담식으로 자신의 인생 목표중 하나가 누군가가 자기의 위인전을 적어주는 거라 했는데 이 책을 읽고 나도 어떻게 보면 비슷하다고 할 수 있는 생각이 문득 들었다. 나도 삶을 살면서 나중에 책을 쓸 만한 지혜로운 사람이 되고 싶다는 생각.
Three data points are nowhere near sufficient to establish any trends, but I do think that the fact that I enjoyed reading this book, ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’ and ‘When Breath Becomes Air’ shows that I gravitate towards memoirs written by ‘wise’ people approaching the end of their lives due to a terminal diagnosis. Pausch wrote that he felt ‘lucky’ in the very ironic and limited sense that he could foresee his death and prepare as much as he could, saying goodbyes and checking off his list of things to do before his time was up. The other day, I thought about how I never got to say goodbye or say any ‘last words’ to 창윤이. I don’t think things would have been that much more different or better even if I was able to do that, because I would have told him things that (I hope and I’m pretty sure) he already knew, like how much I love him and how much I would have liked to spend as long as possible with him by my side.
But this also ties in with another thought I had recently — if we were to rank ‘ways to die’ in descending order of idealness, the first kind of death would be 편한하게 가는 것, having lived a long and happy life and dying without much pain, like in your sleep or something. Then, roughly, would be 어이없지 않게 가는 것, like dying from an illness after having lived at least past the average life expectancy — you’ve lived sufficiently, have some time to say your goodbyes, but the way you die might be a little painful. It’s hard to die without any pain from a major illness. But at least nothing about your death feels like there’s something that goes ‘against nature.’ I think that people who die in these first two ways are actually very lucky. And so are their loved ones. The next two types would be 어이없게 가는 것 & 비극적으로 가는 것. I think it’s very possible that a death could be more than one of these categories at the same time, but I think now that I described the first two, the next two don’t really need an elaboration. Come to think of it, I think that some of the factors that determine what category someone’s death would fit in would be: timing, foreseeability, immediate cause, and amount of pain leading to death.
Out of curiosity, I Googled Randy Pausch and his family. His widow, Jai, also wrote a book called Dream New Dreams: Reimagining My Life After Loss. It seems like she has since remarried and that her kids are around my age now. The reviews of her book on Goodreads are pretty polarizing, ranging from scathing 1-star reviews calling her ‘whiny’ to shiny 5-star reviews extolling her resilience. Having read and loved The Last Lecture, I’m now curious to see what Jai has to say in her memoir.
In the middle of reading this book, I made a list of dreams/goals/bucket list items that I’d like to achieve/check off. Also reading this made me feel, for the first time, that I’d like to do something that lasts beyond my own finite life here on earth. Whether that’s writing a book, teaching students, or setting up a scholarship or a fund, I’d like to do something that will last beyond myself that will also be done in 창윤이's name.
Also, I recommended this book to my parents and in talking about the author, mom brought up that 수경이 아줌마 had passed from pancreatic cancer, too. :( I really hope the rest of my mom’s friends stay healthy for a long time, not just for their own sake but also for my mom’s sake.
I wish I was able to have conversations with my grandparents about their lives/their approaches to life/their own life lessons they want to impart onto me. Tbh a part of me wonders whether there’s a lot to learn from my grandparents — some of them aren’t exactly the paragons of virtue — but I also believe that there’s something to learn from everyone, despite their flaws and imperfections, which everyone has.
