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Cover of The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

The Last Lecture

  • 233 pages · about 4 hours
  • First published 2008
  • 18 editions

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1 About this book

When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, was asked to give a last lecture," he didn’t have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave — “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” — wasn’t about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because “time is all you have... and you may find one day that you have less than you think”). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.

In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humor, inspiration and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.

You can watch The Last Lecture on YouTube.

Good for readers who want: a true life story, philosophy, and psychology.

  • Biography
  • Biography & autobiography
  • Philosophy
  • Cancer, patients
  • Psychology
  • Cancer
  • Computer scientists
  • Death

2 About Randy Pausch

1960–2008

Randolph Frederick Pausch (October 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) was an American educator, a professor of computer science, human–computer interaction, and design at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Pausch learned he had pancreatic cancer in September 2006. In August 2007, he was given a terminal diagnosis: "three to six months of good health left".

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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