The Last Lecture

(Read the original and complete text here, at ABC News site.)

What would you say if you knew you were going to die and had a chance to sum up everything that was most important to you?
That's the hypothetical question posed to the annual speaker of a lecture series commonly known as "The Last Lecture." But for Randy Pausch, the charismatic young professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, the question wasn't hypothetical.

The 47-year-old father of three small children had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer -- and given six months to live.
Friends and colleagues flew in from all around the country to attend his last lecture. And -- almost as an afterthought -- the lecture was videotaped and put on the Internet for the few people who couldn't get there that day.
That was all it took.

Somehow amid the vast clamor of the Web and the bling-bling of million-dollar budgets, savvy marketing campaigns and millions of strange and bizarre videos, the voice of one earnest professor standing at a podium and talking about his childhood dreams cut through the noise.

The lecture was so uplifting, so funny, so inspirational that it went viral. So far, 10 million people have downloaded it. And thousands have written in to say that his lecture changed their lives.

If you had only six months to live, what would you do? How would you live your life? And how can all of us take heart from Pausch's inspiring message to live each day to its fullest?
(...)

In the lecture, he speaks of overcoming the obstacles that may seem insurmountable.
Although he graduated magna cum laude from Brown University, he nearly didn't get in to Brown in the first place -- he was wait listed. It was a brick wall that some might have walked away from. But Pausch has a novel way of looking at obstacles:
"The brick walls are there for a reason," he said during his lecture. "The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something."


Watch the lecture here:


Belive me, it will change your life.
Kisses and have a great week.