And before you say it, yes, inspirer is apparently a real word (I wasn’t sure). If you’re the 0.0001% of people who haven’t been following the story of US lecturer Randy Pausch, then give yourself a gift by watching his famous Last Lecture on YouTube. It’s all about making the most of life, achieving your childhood dreams and dying happy.
Because unfortunately that’s the news today, that Randy Pausch has died after his pretty public battle with pancreatic cancer. But he and his family have got to be proud after his inspirational speech – he first gave it in September last year at Carnegie Mellon University, where they have a tradition of inviting speakers to imagine what they would say if they knew it would be their last lecture ever – buzzed around the world on TV and the internet and created a book as well.
But to bring this whole story back to me and my fiction writing – the story and the way that Pausch describes chasing his childhood dreams and succeeding is definitely inspiring. His lecture doesn’t patronise and it doesn’t make achieving dreams sound unrealistic. And of course, hearing those things from a man who knew he was dying gives us all a kick up the backside to do better in our own lives.
One of Randy Pausch’s childhood dreams was to design at Disneyland – it sounds like one of those totally unrealistic ideas that a child would have, akin to becoming an astronaut. But he achieved it, along with a bunch of other things. In comparison to that, my childhood dream of being a published writer seems relatively easy to achieve. Which means I’d better stop blogging and get on with it.
