Randy Pausch's "The Last Lecture" (Part 2)

My take on the autobiography of Randy Pausch.

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• randy
• pausch
• last
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• cancer
• carnegie-mellon

[sanitary103]

good video. the older I get, the more I realize what's important in life. there's no need to keep trying to impress others. any goals that I want to attain, it's for my own self improvement, not others validation.

*also a quick side note. asian families are notorious for being tough on their kids. my niece is I believe almost 8 and she's very smart yet she once received "only" an 88% on her test and her school "offered" her tutoring. it's an ultra competitive school so she got over 90%and is ok

[TheLogicJunkie]

Crazy. It's all just too much. Life shouldn't have to be this uptight all the time.

Whatever happened to "good enough"? The parasympathetic nervous system? "Rest and recuperate"?

[Ironkettle]

Dude, painting the quadratic equation... OK, the equation itself is seriously the brainwashing of "boys" having to be math/science heads. No child would directly paint an equation... maybe an abstract representation (curves?). It, imo, is purely a social pressure to relish in known and identified knowledge, not his representation of it. Maybe he did it on his own and choose to, but the only one to truly know is him. But come on! He wanted to show that he was "good enough". PhD isn't good enough?

[TheLogicJunkie]

The whole thing to me is just sick. And apparently I'm in the clear minority to think that. America has become a land of achievementitis or something.

[TheLogicJunkie]

@AMIABRUZZO Have you ever tried contacting one of the animation or film production companies? Also, if you're interested in accounting, you should never think of it as too late to get a degree in it.

[TheLogicJunkie]

Yeah, after what I've been through with college, there is absolutely no way I'm going to go into ginormous debt any more on the lie that there's going to near-automatically be a market for me when I get out, like low-hanging fruit. Barbara Ehrenreich called it "Bait and Switch", and I couldn't agree more.

[TheLogicJunkie]

Yes -- that's exactly my point! So, why are you disagreeing with my mention of the quadratic formula on the wall, then?

[TheLogicJunkie]

Pausch clearly describes, all throughout the book, how if he didn't constantly make an ostentacious show of how "intelligent" and "relevant" he was, his stern, joyless mother would deride him as trivial fluff. And, as I clearly explained in my video, she even went so far as to introduce him to strangers as being her son with a Ph.D. -- "but not the kind that helps people".

I'm sorry, but it just can't get any clearer than that. It was child abuse, of the psychological kind.

[TheLogicJunkie]

Well, I disagree with you on that... because there are degrees and shades of "forcing" people to do things, and children are the most susceptible of all to coercion through shaming and ultimatum techniques.

Pausch's childhood -- as he himself described it in his own book -- consisted almost entirely of his parents imposing upon him their "hateful duty" mentality of life, all in a neurotic and joyless pursuit of moral narcissism and one-upmanship.

(cont'd)

[firehawk895]

Why do you consider the "painting of the quadratic formula" vulgar?

Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean its vulgar. He did that because he wanted to, or just had a fancy for math perhaps, not in anyway was he forced to do that.