Blog Assignment 7

This video really was worth every minute of watching it. Randy Pausch made some amazing points. Just listening to him talk about his life and dreams he achieved was extremely inspiring. The fact that he is dying and has the attitude and outlook on life that he has says enough. If you were to look at him and listen to him, the last thing you would think is that he has cancer and has a few months to live. This man is such an inspiration. Throughout the video, he made some awesome points and stated some eye-opening quotes. I love when he stated,  "Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted." This rings true. I can think of many times in my life when this statement was proven. If you always get what you want, you wouldn't necessarily see your achievements as anything more than accomplishments. The experience aspect would be overlooked. Another statement that hit home for me was, "If you are being corrected and criticized, it is a good thing. It means you are doing something right." If they aren't correcting you, it means they have given up on you. I never thought of it like this, I know constructive criticism is a great thing, but even harsh criticism can be looked at as a great thing. It just means that your critics still have faith in you and are still holding out on you.

When Dr. Pausch spoke about his childhood dreams and one was to be an Imagineer at Disney World, he spoke on the brick walls that came in front of him. "Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things." One brick wall for him was the rejection letters he got from Disney at first. For most, that would have been the end of trying. Dr. Pausch actually went on to work on the Aladdin Virtual Reality and got an offer to be a real Imagineer at Disney World. This just goes to show the extent to which we can succeed if we honestly try! Brick walls filter out the ones who don't really want to achieve their childhood dreams. Brick walls are useful tools. Helping with the Aladdin Virtual Reality led him to create a course at Carnegie Mellon called Building Virtual Worlds. 50 students are chosen and every 2 weeks you do a new project. You do a total of 5 projects. This was a huge accomplishment. When it came time for the students to present, they would bring their parents and friends and roommates to watch their presentation. They soon moved to the room he gave his talk in, and filled that up too!

Dr. Pausch summarized with a few points. The first one was, we learn from our students. This is a true statement. I have learned this in EDM 310. We have watched countless videos on students actually teaching their teachers things they discover through technology, and this is just one example. The next point he made was to always have fun. Through his life journey, he always had a good time even through the bad times he still looks back and laughs. Even while he is dying, he is still having fun! This is such a mind-blowing thing. He is dying, yet he still manages to live everyday to the fullest. Thirdly, he says to never lose the child-like wonder. He is basically a huge kid and wouldn't change anything. We need to keep that child-like wonder at all costs! It is our sanity for some days. Lastly, he stated to help others. This can mean so much, whether its helping someone at school or work or over in Thailand like he and his wife do. This means so much to so many people. He probably doesn't even know how much he has helped people or how many lives he has touched!

This video opened my eyes and my mind to so many things. His talk was titled "Achieving Your Childhood Dreams." Throughout his talk, he brought up numerous "head fakes". At the end of his lecture, he asked if we discovered the head fake of this talk. The head fake was: It's not about how to achieve your dreams, it's about how you live your life. That was the first big surprise to me. The second was when he said there was a second head fake. The second head fake was: The talk is not for us, it's for his kids. That was huge. I thought the whole lecture was about achieving my childhood dreams and that the talk was for the viewers. It wasn't about that at all and it definitely wasn't a talk meant for me. I still learned so much though. Dr. Pausch said you learn the best through head fakes. This is so true. It was proven as I watched this video. I am so glad we were assigned to watch this. I want to share it with so many people! This lecture rocked.