Essay about The Last Lecture book

Introduction

The last lecture is a book about a real story from Randy Pausch, (10/23/1960-07/25/2008), who was dying because a terminal illness, pancreatic cancer, with ten tumors in his liver.

He was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, he accepted his diagnosis and thought about the best way to let his kids, three children (5, 2 and 1 years old), the better from him, and he wrote the book trying to his children will remember him and will know about how much he loved them, in the future, because they are too young at that time.

He died very young, at the age of 47 years old, the last two years treating his illness and also writing the book and doing the last lecture speech.

Development

He lived a loved life with his all family, when he was a child, he said he felt like he won the lottery with his parents, although his family was a middle class family, but his parents thought him it is most important the knowledge, respect, and people; that the reason they spent more time reading and taking in family instead of buying stuff they did not need it.

In our time that sounds like and inexistent family because we are living in a modern age, technological age, where nobody talks with others even if they are in front of each other, we are connected with people around the world, but we cannot speak between us, we are already busy all the time.

At his professional life he got several goals, he worked by Google, Walt Disney, and flew in an airplane from NASA, and he always found how much he care about the dreams come true.

It does not mean he did not care about his own health, but he knew was nothing to do; he tried to stay enough time with his family because he had not time enough.

It is a reason to think , we know very well we do not live for all time, but we spend a lot of time thinking in our future, or thinking in the past, and we do not live our present, that it is the only really true.

Conclusion

The lecture was not about death, instead of that it was about how much we have to enjoy life, about how much we have to appreciate life, and live with honesty, integrity, and thankfulness our life.

He tries to teach us that the most valuable thing we have are our dreams, our goals, because we cannot live without dreams, when we were kids, almost everybody wanted to be someone important or someone really good, a police officer, a firefighter, super hero, then we became in a professional life and its financial problem we have to fight with.

There is a popular quote, nobody knows what he has until he has not, it is important to know something we need for work but the most important is our family, the way we share with family, our feelings, our knowledge, our behavior.

The best gifts we can give to kids are education, love each other, and for the family is time and a good way, to enjoy each other and nothing else.

Jose Luis Sequeira Pineda
Level VII
24th Sep 2017.