really achieving your childhood dreams

Last month, Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch gave his last lecture at the university, titled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. Randy is a professor of computer science, and is the co-founder of Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), as well as the creator of the Alice educational program.  If you don’t know, the ETC is one of the premiere programs in the country that brings engineers and artists together and simply creates some amazing stuff – As a matter of fact the program has such a high reputation that companies have signed agreements that guarantee that they will hire students who have completed the program. On a sad note though, Randy is dying from pancreatic cancer, and this last lecture was his farewell advice on how to achieve your childhood dreams. This might not seem directly related to semiconductors and startups, but one should never forget that inspiration is one of the key factors that enables individuals to reach beyond what seems possible and come up with new ideas and approaches to difficult problems. Randy fills this lecture with priceless lessons learned and so much inspiration that regardless whether you work for a large corporation or a small startup you are bound to find some useful advice in his words. Some of my favorite quotes include: experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted; enabling the dreams of others is more rewarding than enabling your own; brick walls are there for a reason: they let people prove that they want something bad enough. So fix yourself a cup of coffee, for the lecture is about an hour and a half long, sit back and absorb all the great lessons that Randy has to offer in the video below.