The Last Lecture
Randy Pausch, 2008
Memoir & biography Self-developmentPhilosophy
A dying professor's final lecture becomes a handbook on childhood dreams, brick walls, and how to treat the people in front of you. Pausch's voice is plain and witty, with a steady hopeful warmth and a tender pull of memory.
Feels like hope, tenderness and grief. About morality, memory and adventure.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy direct life advice wrapped in personal stories and a teacher's plainspoken humor. The terminal-cancer context runs through it, so parts can be emotionally heavy even when the tone stays upbeat.
Why read it
It offers a compact reminder to notice your critics, chase childhood dreams, and treat the people in front of you with care.
A page from the book
The silence after you stop being corrected is not kindness.
He said, when you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore, that means they gave up. And that’s a lesson that stuck with me my whole life. Is that when you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a very bad place to be. Your critics are your ones telling you they still love you and care. Randy Pausch.Pausch gave the lecture at Carnegie Mellon in September 2007, a month after learning his pancreatic cancer was terminal. The talk went viral online before it became a book, written with Jeff Zaslow.
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Last Lecture for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy direct life advice wrapped in personal stories and a teacher's plainspoken humor. The terminal-cancer context runs through it, so parts can be emotionally heavy even when the tone stays upbeat.
- What is The Last Lecture like?
- Pausch's voice is plain and witty, with a steady hopeful warmth and a tender pull of memory. Feels like hope, tenderness and grief. About morality, memory and adventure.
- What should I read after The Last Lecture?
- If you liked The Last Lecture, try The Body Keeps the Score (Bessel van der Kolk), The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (Marie Kondō) and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey).
A taste of the feed
The look on a parent's face is a child's first mirror.
If your parents’ faces never lit up when they looked at you, it’s hard to know what it feels like to be loved and cherished. If you come from an incomprehensible world filled with secrecy and fear, it’s almost impossible to find the words to express what you have endured. If you grew up unwanted and ignored, it is a major challenge to develop a visceral sense of agency and self-worth.
The Body Keeps the Score · Bessel van der Kolk
Not usefulness, not guilt, not the price you paid. A feeling in the hand.
The best way to choose what to keep and what to throw away is to take each item in one’s hand and ask: “Does this spark joy?” If it does, keep it. If not, dispose of it. This is not only the simplest but also the most accurate yardstick by which to judge.
The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up · Marie Kondō
There is a kind of crying that only happens where nobody can hear it.
Everything else about the three-years-ago scene was different, though. That time, I was not in Rome but in the upstairs bathroom of the big house in the suburbs of New York which I’d recently purchased with my husband. It was a cold November, around three o’clock in the morning. My husband was sleeping in our bed. I was hiding in the bathroom for something like the forty-seventh consecutive night, and—just as during all those nights before—I was sobbing. Sobbing so hard, in fact, that a great lake of tears and snot was spreading before me on the bathroom tiles, a veritable Lake Inferior (if you will) of all my shame and fear and confusion and grief.
Eat, Pray, Love · Elizabeth Gilbert
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