Randy Pausch - La última lección

make me earn it it's a it's wonderful to be here what Indira didn't tell you is that this lecture series used to be called the last lecture if you had one last lecture to give before you died what would it be damn I finally inhaled the venue and they renamed it so you know in case there's anybody who wandered in and doesn't know the backstory my dad always taught me what isn't when there's an elephant in the room introduced them if you look at my cat scans there are approximately 10 tumors in my liver and the doctors told me three to six months of good health left that was a month ago so you can do the math I have some of the best doctors in the world so that is what it is we can't change it and we just have to decide how we're going to respond to that we cannot change the cards we are dealt just how we play the hand if I don't seem as depressed or morose as I should be sorry to disappoint you and I assure you I am NOT in denial it's not like I'm not aware of what's going on my family my three kids my wife we just decamped we bought a lovely house in Chesapeake Virginia near Norfolk and we're doing that because that's a better place for the family to be down the road and the other thing is I am in phenomenally good health right now I mean is the greatest thing of cognitive dissonance you will ever see is the fact that I am in really good shape in fact I'm in better shape than most of you so anybody who wants to cry or pitter me can come down and do a few of those and then you may pity me all right so what we're not talking about today we're not talking about cancer because I spent a lot of time talking about that and I'm really not interested if you have any herbal supplements or remedies please stay away from me and we're not going to talk about things that are even more important than achieving your childhood dreams we're not going to talk about my wife we're not throwing my kids because I'm good but I'm not good enough to talk about that without tearing up so we're just going to take that off the table that's much more important and we're not going to talk about spirituality and religion although I will tell you that I have experienced a deathbed conversion I just bought a Macintosh now I knew I'd get 9% of the audience with that but all right so what is today's talk about that it's about my childhood dreams and have achieved them I've been very fortunate that way how I believe I've been able to enable the dreams I've been able to enable the dreams of others and to some degree lessons learned I'm a professor there should be some lessons learned and how you can use the stuff you hear today to achieve your dreams or enable the dreams of others and as you get older you may find that enabling the dreams of others thing is even more fun so what were my childhood dreams well you know I had a really good childhood I mean no kidding around I was going back through the family archives and what was really amazing was I couldn't find any pictures of me as a kid where I wasn't smiling right and that was just a very gratifying thing there was our dog right oh thank you and and there I actually have a picture of me dreaming and I did a lot of that you know there's a lot wake up and it was an easy time to dream I was born in 1960 right when you're eight or nine years old and you look at the TV set and men are landing on the moon anything is possible and that's something we should not lose sight of is that the inspiration and the permission to dream is huge so what were my childhood dreams you may not agree with this list but I was there being in zero gravity playing in the National Football League authoring an article in the World Book Encyclopedia I guess you can tell the Nerds early being Captain Kirk anybody here have that childhood dream not at CMU now I wanted to become one of the guys who won the big stuffed animals in the amusement park and I wanted to be an Imagineer with Disney right these are not sorted in any particular order although I think they do get harder except for maybe the first one okay so being in zero gravity now it's important to have specific dreams I did not dream of being an astronaut because when I was a little kid I wore glasses they told me Oh astronauts can't have glasses and I was like I didn't really want the whole astronaut gig I just wanted the floating so and as a child prototype 0.0 but that didn't work so well and it turns out that NASA has something called the vomit comet that they used to train the astronauts and this thing does parabolic arcs and at the top of each arc you get about 25 seconds where your ballistic and you get about rough equivalent of weightlessness for about 25 seconds and there is a program where college students can submit proposals and if they win the competition they get to fly and I thought that was really cool and we had a team and put a team together and they want and they got to fly and I was all excited because I was going to go with them and then I fit the first brick wall because they made it very clear that under no circumstances were faculty members allowed to fly with the teams I know I was heartbroken right I was like but I worked so hard and so I read the literature very carefully it turns out that NASA it's part of their outreach and publicity program and it turns out that these students were allowed to bring a local media journalist from their hometown and randy pausch web journalist it's really easy to get a press pass so so I called up the guys at NASA and I said I need to know where to fax some documents and they said what documents are going to fax us I said my resignation is the faculty advisor and my application is the journalist and he said that's a little transparent don't you think and I said yeah but our project is virtual reality and we're going to bring down a whole bunch of VR headsets and all the students from all the teams are going to experience it and all those other real journalists are going to get to film it Jimbo Lee's going hi you bastard yes and the guy said here's the fax number so and indeed we kept our end of the bargain and that's one of the themes that you'll hear later on the talk is have something to bring to the table right because that will make you more welcomed and if you're curious about what zero-gravity looks like hopefully the sound will be working here all right go get amazi this is fantastic it's just amazing it's nothing like I expected we're having it right here I am you do pay the piper at the bottom so childhood dream number one check alright let's talk about football my dream was to play in the National Football League and most of you don't know that I actually put no no I did not make it to the National Football League but I probably got more from that dream and not accomplishing it than I got from any of the ones that I did accomplish I had a coach I signed up when I was 9 years old I was the smallest kid in the league by far and I had a coach Jim Graham who was six foot four he played linebacker at Penn State he was just this Hulk of a guy and he was old school I mean really old school like he thought the forward pass was a trick play and he showed up for practice the first day and you know this big hulking guy we were all scared to death of him and he hadn't brought any footballs how are we going to have practice without any footballs and one of the other kids said excuse me coach but there's no football and coach Graham said right how many men are on a football field in time so he said 11 on a team 22 and coach Graham said all right and how many people are touching the football at any given time one of them and he said right so we're going to work on what those other 21 guys are doing and that's a really good story because it's all about fundamentals fundamentals fundamentals fundamentals you've got to get the fundamentals down because otherwise the fancy stuff isn't going to work and the others Jim Graham story I have is there was one practice where he just rode me all practice just you're doing this wrong you're doing this wrong go back and do it again you owe me you're doing push-ups after practice and when it was all over one of the other assistant coaches came over and said yeah coach Graham rode you pretty hard didn't he I said yeah he said that's a good thing he said when you screw it 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 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 after coach grandma another coach coach setliffe and he taught me a lot about the power of enthusiasm he did this one thing where only for one play at a time he would put people in at like the most horrific Allah wrong position for them like all the short guys would become receivers right it was just it was just laughable but we only went in for one play right and boy the other team just never knew what hit him because we know when you're only doing it for one play and you're just not where you're supposed to be and freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose boy are you going to clean somebody's clock for that one play and that kind of enthusiasm was great and to this day I am most comfortable on a football field I mean it's it's just one of those things where you know if I'm working a hard problem people will see me wandering the halls with one of these things and that's just because you know when you do something young enough and you train for it it just becomes a part of you and I'm very glad that football was a part of my life and if I didn't get the dream of playing in the NFL that's okay I probably got stuff more valuable because looking at what's going on in the NFL I'm not sure those guys are doing so great right now okay and so one of the expressions I learned Electronic Arts which I love which retains this is experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted and I think that's absolutely lovely and the other thing about football is we send our kids out to play football or soccer or swimming or whatever it is and its first example of what I'm going to call a head fake or indirect learning I actually don't want our kids to learn football I mean yeah it's really nice that I have a wonderful three-point stance and that I know how to do a chop block and all this kind of stuff but we send our kids out to learn much more important things teamwork sportsmanship perseverance etc etc when these kinds of head-fake learnings are absolutely important and you should keep your eye out for them because they're everywhere all right a simple one being an author in the world book encyclopedia when I was a kid we had the World Book Encyclopedia on the shelf for the freshmen this is paper we used to have these things called books and after I had become somewhat of an authority on virtual reality but not like a really important one so I was at the level of people the world book would badger they called me up and I wrote an article and this Caitlin Kelleher and there's an article if you go to your local library where they still have copies of the world book look under v4 virtual reality and there it is and all I have to say is that having been selected to be an author in the World Book Encyclopedia I now believe that Wikipedia is a perfectly fine source for your information because I know what the quality control is for real encyclopedias they let me in alright next one at a certain point you just realized there are some things you're not going to do so maybe you just want to stand close to the people and I mean my god what are what a role model for young people I mean just this is everything you want to be and what I what I learned that carried me forward in leadership later is that you know he wasn't the smartest guy on the ship I mean Spock was pretty smart and McCoy was the doctor and Scotty was the engineer and you sort of go and what skill set did he have to get on this damn thing and run it and you know clearly there's this skill set called leadership and you know whether or not you like the series there's no doubt that there was a lot to be learned about how to lead people by watching this guy in action so and he just had the coolest damn toys okay I mean my god yeah you know I just thought it was fascinating as a kid that he had this thing and he could you know talk to the ship with it you know I just thought that was just spectacular and of course now I own one and it's taller so that's kind of cool so I got to achieve this dream james t kirk his alter ego William Shatner wrote a book which I think was actually a pretty cool book it was with a chip Walter who is a pittsburgh-based author is quite good and they wrote a book on basically the science of Star Trek you know what has come true and they went around two top places around the country and looked at various things and they came here to study our virtual reality set up and so we built a virtual reality forum it looks something like that we put it in put it to Red Alert he was a very good sport it's not like you saw that one coming and it's really cool to meet your boyhood idol but it's even cooler when he comes to you to see what cool stuff you're doing in your lab that was that was just a great moment all right winning stuffed animals this may seem mundane to you but when you're a little kid you see the big buff guys walking around in using park and they got all these big stuffed animals right and this is my lovely wife and I have a lot of pictures of stuffed animals I want that's my dad posing with one that I won I have won a lot of these in there's my dad he did win that one to his credit right and this was just a big part of my life in my family's life but you know I can hear the cynics you know in this age of digitally manipulated things maybe those bears really aren't in the picture with me or maybe I paid somebody five bucks to take a picture in the theme park next to the bear and I said how in this age of cynicism can I convince people and I said I know I can show them theirs he's coming back against offense thanks honey so here are some here are some bears we didn't have quite enough room in the moving truck down to Chesapeake and anybody who'd like a little piece of me at the end of this feel free to come up first-come first-serve alright my next one being an Imagineer this was the hard one believe me getting to zero gravity is easier than becoming an imaginary when I was a kid I was eight years old and our family took a trip cross-country to see Disneyland and if you ever seen the movie national lampoon's vacation it was a lot like that there's a quest and these are real vintage photographs and there I am in front of the castle and there I am and for those of you who are into foreshadowing this is the Alice ride and and I just thought this was just the coolest coolest environment I'd ever been in and instead of saying gee I want to experience this I said I want to make stuff like this and so I i bided my time and then I graduated with my PhD from Carnegie Mellon thinking that meant me infinitely qualified to do anything and I dashed off my letters of application to Walt Disney Imagineering and they sent me some of the damn nicest go-to-hell letters I've ever gotten I mean it was just we have carefully reviewed your application and presently we do not have any positions available which require your particular qualifications now think about the fact that you're getting this from a place that's famous for guys who sweep the street right so that was a bit of a setback but remember the brick walls are there for a reason all right 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 because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough they're there to stop the other people all right fast forward in 1991 we did a system back at the University of Virginia called virtual reality on $5 a day just one of those unbelievable spectacular things I was so scared back in those days as a junior academic Jim Foley's here and I just loved to tell the story he knew my undergraduate advisor Andy Van Dam and I'm at my first conference and I'm just scared to death and this this icon in the user interface community walks up to me and just out of nowhere just gives me this huge bear hug and he says that was from Andy and that was when I thought okay maybe I can make it all right you know maybe maybe I do belong and a similar story is that this was just this unbelievable hit because at the time everybody needed half a million dollars to do virtual reality and everybody felt frustrated and we literally hacked together a system for about five thousand dollars in parts and made it working VR system if you were just like oh my god it's like you know the hewlett-packard garage thing this is so awesome and so I'm giving this talk in the room has just gone wild and during the QA a guy named Tom Furness who was one of the big names in virtual reality at the time he goes into the microphone and he introduces himself I didn't know what he looked like but I sure as hell knew the name and he asked a question I was like I'm sorry did you say your Tom Furness I said yes I said then I would love to answer your question but first will you have lunch with me tomorrow and there's a lot in that little moment right there's a lot of humility but also asking a person where he can't possibly say no and so imagine hearing a couple of years later was working on a virtual reality project this was top-secret they were denying the existence of a virtual reality attraction after the time that the velocity department was running the TV commercials okay so Imagineering really had nailed this one tight and it was the Aladdin attraction where you would fly a magic carpet and the head-mounted display sometimes known as Gator vision and so I had an in as soon as the the project had just you know they start running a TV commercials and I had been asked to brief the Secretary of Defense on the state of virtual reality okay Fred Brooks and I had been asked to brief the Secretary of Defense and that gave me an excuse so I I called them up I called Imagineering and I said look I'm briefing the Secretary of Defense I'd like some materials on what you have because it's one of the best VR systems in the world and they kind of pushed back and I said look there's all this patriotism stuff in the parks a farce and they're like mmm okay they said but the PR department doesn't this is so new the PR department doesn't have any footage for you so I'm going to have to connect you straight through to the team who did the work jackpot so I find myself on the phone with a guy named Jon Snoddy who is one of the most impressive guys I have ever met and he was the guy running this team and it's not surprising they had done impressive things and so he sent me some stuff we talked briefly he sent me some stuff and I said hey I'm going to be out in the area for a conference shortly we'd like to get together to have lunch translation I'm going to lie to you and say that I have an excuse to be in the area so I don't look too anxious but I would go to Neptune to have a lunch with you and so Jon said sure and I spent something like 80 hours talking with all the VR experts in the world saying if you had access to this one unbelievable project what would you ask and then I compiled all of that and I had to memorize it which anybody knows me knows that I have no memory at all because I couldn't go in looking like a dweeb with your high questions have a detail right so I went in and it was like a two-hour lunch and John must have thought he was talking to you know some phenomenal person because all I was doing was doing was channeling Fred Brooks and Ivan Sutherland and Andy Van Damme and people like that and Henry Fuchs so it's pretty easy to be smart when you're parroting smart people and at the end of the lunch with John I sort of as we say in the business made the ask and I said you know I have a sabbatical coming up and he said what's that the beginnings of the culture clash and so I talked about the possibility of coming there and working with him and he he said well that's really good except you know you're in the business of telling people stuff and we're in the business of keeping secrets right and then what made Jon Snoddy Jon Snoddy was he said but we'll work it out right which I really love the other thing that I learned from Jon Snoddy I had to easily an hour-long talk just on what have I learned from Jon Snoddy one thing she told me was that wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you he said when you're pissed off at somebody and you're angry at them you just haven't given them enough time just give them a little more time and they'll almost always impress you and that really stuck with me I think he's absolutely right on that one so to make a long story short we negotiated a legal contract it was going to be the first some people refer to it as the first and last paper ever published by Imagineering but the deal was I go I provide my own funding I go for six months I work for the project we published paper and then we meet our villain I can't be all sweetness and light because I have no credibility somebody's heads going to go on a stick turns out that the person who gets his head on the stick is a Dean back at the University of Virginia his name is not important let's call him Dean wormer and Dean wormer has a meeting with me where I say I want to do the sabbatical thing and I've actually gotten the Imagineering guys to let an academic in which is insane I mean if John hadn't gone nuts this would never been a possible he's a very secretive organization and Dean wormer looks at the paperwork and he says well it says they're going to own your intellectual property and I said yeah we got the agreement to publish the paper there is no other IP I don't do patentable stuff he says yeah but you might so it deals often just going to get them to change that little clause there and then come back to me I'm like excuse me and then I said to him I want you to understand how important this is if we can't work this out I'm going to take an unpaid leave of absence and I'm just going to go there and I'm going to do this thing and he said hey you know I might not even let you do that I mean you've got the IP in your head already and maybe they're going to suck it out of you so that's not going to fly either it's very important to know when you're in a pissing match and it's very important to get out of it as quickly as possible so I said to him Bo let's back off on this do we think this is a good idea at all he said I have no idea if this is a good idea I you know I was like okay well we've got common ground there I said well this is really your call isn't this the call of the Dean of sponsored research if it's an IP issue and he said yeah that's true I said so if he's happy you're happy yeah then I'd be fine like Wiley coyote a little and I find myself in gene blocks office who's the most fantastic Lea in the world and I start talking to gene block and I say let's start at the high level since I don't wanna have to back out again this started the high level do you think this is a good idea he said well if you're asking me if it's a good idea I don't have very much information all I know is that one of my star faculty members is in my office and he's really excited so tell me more here's a lesson for everybody in administration they both said the same thing but think about how they said it right I don't know no I don't have much information but one of my star faculty members is here and he's all excited so I want to learn more they're both ways of saying I don't know but boy there's a good way in a bad way so anyway we got it all worked out I went to Imagineering sweetness and light and all's well that ends well some brick walls are made of flesh so I work on the Aladdin project it was absolutely spectacular I mean just unbelievable here's my nephew Christopher this was the apparatus you would sit on this sort of motorcycle type thing and you would steer your magic carpet and you would put on the head-mounted display they have not displays very interesting into two parts and it was a very very clever design to get through put through the only part that touched the guests head with this little cap and everything else clicked onto it all the expensive hardware so you could replicate the caps because they were basically free to manufacture and yeah this is what I really did as I was a cap cleaner during this matter I loved Imagineering it was just a spectacular place just spectacular everything that I had dreamed I loved the model shop people crawl around on things the size of this room that are just big physical models it was just an incredible place to walk around and be inspired I'm always reminded when I went there and people said you think the expectations are too high and I said you ever see the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory really walk in the Chocolate Factory where gene Wilder says to the little boy charlie is about to give him the chalk effect he says well Charlie did anybody ever tell you the story of the little boy who suddenly got everything he ever wanted Charlie's eyes get like saucers he says no what happened to him Gene Wilder says he lived happily ever after okay so working on the aladdin vr i described it as a once in every five years opportunity and I stand by that assessment it forever changed me it wasn't just that it was good work and I got to be a part of it but it got me into the place of working with real people and real HCI user interface issues most HCI people live in this fantasy world of white collar laborers with PhDs and master's degrees and you know until you got ice cream spilled on you you're not doing field work right and more anymore than anything else from Jon Snoddy I learned how to put artists and engineers together and that's been the real legacy we published a paper just a nice academic cultural scandal when we wrote the paper the guys at Imagineering said well let's do a nice big picture like we'd like you would in a magazine and the SIGGRAPH Committee which accepted the paper it was like this big scandal are they allowed to do that there was no rule so we published the paper and amazingly since then there's a tradition of SIGGRAPH papers having colored figures on the first page I so I've changed the world in a small way and then at the end of my six months they came to me they said you want to do it for real you can stay and I said no one of the only times in my life I have surprised my father he was like you what he said since you were you know all you wanted and now they got it in here that hood there was a bottle of maalox in my desk drawer be careful what you wish for it was a particularly stressful place Imagineering in general is actually not so Maalox laden but the lab I was in oh John left in the middle and it was a lot like the Soviet Union was a little dicey for a while but it worked that okay and if they had said stay here or never walk in the building again I would have done it I would have walked away from tenure I would have just done it but they made it easy on me they said you can have your cake and eat it too and I basically become a day at we day a week consultant for Imagineering and I did that for about 10 years and that's one of the reasons you should all become professors because you can have your cake and eat it too okay I went on consultant on things like DisneyQuest so there was the virtual Jungle Cruise and the best interactive experience I think ever done and Jesse Schell gets the credit for this Pirates of the Caribbean wonderful it Disney quest and so those are my childhood dreams and you know that's pretty good I felt good about that so then the question becomes how can I enable the childhood dreams of other and again boy I'm glad I became a professor what better place to enable childhood dreams I may be working at EA I don't know they're probably good close second but and this started in a very concrete realization that I could do this because a young man named Tommy Burnett when I was at the University of Virginia came to me was interested in joining my research group and we talked about it he said oh and I have a childhood dream how often it gets pretty easy to recognize them when they tell you and I said yes Tommy what is your childhood dream he said I want to work on the next Star Wars film now you got to remember the timing on this where is Tommy Tommy is here today what year would this have been your sophomore year oh are you are you breaking anything back there young man okay all right so in 1993 and I said to Tommy you know they're probably not going to make those next movies and he said no they are and Tommy worked with me for a number of years as an undergraduate and as a staff member and then when I moved to Carnegie Mellon every single member of my team came from Virginia to Carnegie Mellon except for Tommy because he got a better offer and he did indeed work on all three of those films and then I said well that's nice but you know one at a time is kind of inefficient people who know me know that I'm an efficiency freak so I said can I do this in Mass can I get people turned in such a way that they can be turned on to their childhood dreams and I created a course I came to Carnegie Mellon and I created a course called building virtual worlds it's a very simple course how many people have ever been to any of the shows okay so you have some of you have an idea for those of you don't the course is very simple there are 50 students drawn from all the different departments of the University there are randomly chosen treaty randomly chosen teams four people per team and they change every project a project only lasts two weeks so you do something you make something you show something then I shuffle the teams you get three new playmates and you do it again and it's every two weeks and so you do five projects during a semester the first year we taught this course it is impossible to describe how much of a tiger by the tail we had I was just running the course because I wanted to see if we could do it we had just learned how to do texture mapping on 3d graphics and we could make stuff that looked half decent but you know we're running on really weak computers by current standards but I said I'll give it a try and at my new university I made a couple of phone calls and I said I want to cross-list this course to get all the other people and within 24 hours it was cross-listed in five departments I love this university I mean it's just it's the most amazing place and I said and the kids said well what content do we make I said hell I don't know you make whatever you want to rolls no shooting violence and no pornography not because I'm opposed to those in particular but you know that's been done with me arc and you'd be amazed how many 19 year old boys are completely out of ideas when you take those off anyway so I I taught the course the first assignment I gave it to them they came back in two weeks and they just blew me away I mean the work was so beyond literally my imagination because I copied the process from imagine earrings VR lab but I had no idea what they could or couldn't do with it as undergraduates and how because their and their tools were weaker and they came back in the first assignment and they did something that was so spectacular that I literally did 10 years as a professor and I had no idea what to do next so I called up my mentor I called up Andy Van Dam and I said Andy I just gave a two-week assignment and they came back and did stuff that if I'd given them a whole semester I would have given him all A's sensei what do I do and Andy thought for a minute he said you go back into class tomorrow and you look him in the eye and you say guys that was pretty good but I know you can do better and that was exactly the right advice because what he said was you obviously don't know where the bar should be and you're only going to do them a disservice by putting it anywhere and boy was that good advice because they just kept going and during that semester it became this underground thing I'd walk into a class with fifty with fifty students in it and there were 95 people in the room because it was the day we were showing work and people's roommates and friends and parents I never had parents come to class before it was flattering and somewhat scary and so it snowball then we had this bizarre thing of we got to share this if there's anything I've been raised to do it's to share and I said we got to show this again and semester we got have a big show and we booked this room economy I have a lot of good memories in this room and we booked it not because we thought we could fill it but because it had the only AV setup that would work because this was a zoo all right computers and everything and then we filled it and we more than filled it we had people standing in the aisle I will never forget the Dean at the time Jim Morris was sitting on the stage right about there we had to kind of scoot him out of the way and the energy in the room was like nothing I'd ever experienced before and president Cohen Jerry Cohen was there and he scents the same thing he later described it as like an Ohio State football pep rally except for academics and and he came over and he asked exactly the right question he said before you start he said I got a no where are these people from he said the audience what departments are they from and we pulled him in it was all the departments and I felt very good because I had just come to campus he had just come to campus and my new boss had seen in a very corporal way that this is the university that puts everybody together and and that made me feel just tremendous so we did this campus-wide exhibition people perform down here they're in costume and we project just like this and you can see what's going on you can see what they're seeing in the head mount there's a lot of big props so there's a guy whitewater rafting this is a then in et and yes I did tell them if they didn't do the shot of the kids biking across the moon I would fail him that is a true story and I thought I'd show you just so I thought I'd show you just one world if we get the lights down if that's at all possible mmm no okay that means No all right all right we'll just do our best thing oh hello there they're going to turn this on its head watch closely the world doesn't want to go on to the next thing in the show so she's ready to move on and it's not what are you doing now but there are so many other worlds that have to go but our world is best world control we love you it was an unusual course with some of the most brilliant creative students from all across the campus it just was a joy to be involved and they took the whole stage performance aspect of this way too seriously and it became this campus phenomenon every year people would line up for it it was very flattering and it gave kids a chance so a sense of excitement of putting on a show for people who were then excited about it I think that that's one of the best things you can give somebody the chance to show them what it feels like to make other people get excited and happy I mean that's a tremendous gift we always try to involve the audience whether it was people with glow sticks or batting a beach ball around or driving this is really cool this technology actually got used at the spider-man 3 premiere in LA so the audience was controlling something on the screen so that's kind of nice and I don't have a class picture from every year but I dredged all the ones that I do have and all I can say is that what a privilege and an honor was to teach that course for something like ten years and all good things come to an end and I stopped teaching that course about a year ago people always asked me what was my favorite moment I don't know if you could have a favorite moment but boy there's one I'll never forget this was a world with I believe a rollerskating ninja and one of the rules was that we performed these things live and they all had to really work and the moment it stopped working we went to your backup videotape and this was very embarrassing so we have this ninja on state he's doing this rollerskating thing and the world it did not crash gently and I come out and I believe it was Steve Audia wasn't it was it where is he okay here's to you ah my man Steve Audia and talk about quick on your feet right I say Steve I'm sorry but your world has crashed and we're going to go to videotape he pulls out his ninja sword I am Dishonored ah I just dropped and so I think it's very telling that my favorite moment in ten years of this high-technology course was a brilliant ad-lib and then when the videotape is done and the lights come up he's lying there lifeless and his teammates drag him off it was really a fantastic moment and the course was all about bonding people used to say well you know what's going to make for a good world I said I can't tell you beforehand but right before they present it I can tell you if the world's good just by the body language if they're standing close to each other the world is good and bbw was a pioneering course and I won't bore you with all the details but it wasn't easy to do and I was given this when I stepped down from the TC and I think it's it's emblematic if you're going to do anything that's pioneering you will get those arrows in the back and you just have to put up with it I mean everything that could go wrong did go wrong but at the end of the day a whole lot of people had a whole lot of fun when you've had something for 10 years that you hold so precious it's the toughest thing in the world to hand it over and the only advice I can give you is find somebody better than you to hand it to and that's what I did there was this kid at the VR Studio way back when and you didn't have to spend very long and Jesse shells orbit to go a force is strong in this one and one of my graded my two greatest accomplishments I think for Carnegie Mellon were that I got Jessica Hodgins and Jesse Schell to come here and join our faculty and I was thrilled when I could hand this over to Jesse and to no one's surprise he has really taken it up to the next notch and you know the courses in more than good hands it's in better hands but it was just one course and then we really took it up a notch and we we created what I would call the dream fulfillment Factory Don Marinelli and I got together and with the university's blessing and encouragement we made this thing out of whole cloth that was absolutely insane should never have been tried all the same universities didn't go near this kind of stuff creating a tremendous opportunistic void so the entertainment echnology center was all about artisan technologists working in small teams to make things it was a two-year professional master's degree and Don and I were two kindred spirits were very different anybody who knows us knows that were very different people and we like to do things in a new way and the truth of the matter is that we're both a little uncomfortable in academia I used to say that I'm uncomfortable as an academic because I come from a long line of people who actually worked for a living so I detect nervous laughter all right and I want to stress Carnegie Mellon is the only place in the world that the e.t.c could have happened by far the only place so okay this picture was Don's idea okay and we like to refer to this picture as Don Marinelli on guitar and Randy Pausch on keyboards but we really did play up the left-brain right-brain and worked out really well that way Don is an intense guy and Don and I shared an office and at first it was a small office we shared an office for six years right no those of you know Don no he's an intense guy right and you know given my current condition somebody was asking me this is a terrible joke but I'm going to use it in because I know Don will forgive me somebody said given your current condition have you thought about whether you're going to go to heaven or hell and I said I don't know but if I'm going to hell I'm do six years for time served I kid sharing an office with Don was really like sharing an office with a tornado right there was just so much energy and you never knew which trailer was next right but you knew something exciting was going to happen and and there was so much energy and I do believe in giving credit where credit is due so in my typically visual way right if Don and I were to split the success for the e.t.c he clearly gets the lion's share of it he did the lion's share the work okay he had the lion's share of the ideas it was a great teamwork I think it was a great yin and yang but it was more like young yang and he deserves that credit and I give it to him because the UTC is a wonderful place and you know he's now running it and he's taking it global we'll talk about that in a second describing the e.t.c is really hard and I finally found a metaphor telling people about the UTC is it like describing Cirque de Soleil if they've never seen it sooner or later you're going to make the mistake you're going to say well it's like a circus and then you're dragged into this conversation about oh how many Tigers how many lions right how many trapeze X and that misses the whole point so when we say we're a master's degree we're really not like any master's degree you've ever seen here's the curriculum the curriculum ended up looking like this all I want to do is visually communicate to you that you do five projects and building virtual words then you do three more all of your time is spent in small teams making stuff none of that book learnin thing Don and I had no patience for the book learning thing it's a master's degree they already spent four years doing book learnin right by now they should have read all the books the key to the success were the Carnegie Mellon gave us the reins completely gave us the reins we had no Dean's to report to reported directly to the Provost which is great because the Provost is way too busy to watch you carefully we were given explicit license to break the mold it was all project-based it was intense it was fun and we took field trips every spring spring semester in January we take all 50 students in the first year class and we take them out the shots at Pixar we take them to Pixar Industrial Light magic and of course when you got guys like Tommy they're acting as host right it's pretty easy to get entree to these places so we did things very very differently the kind of project students would do we did a lot of what we'd call edutainment we developed a bunch of things with fire department of New York and network simulator for training firefighters using videogame ish type technology to teach people useful things that's not bad companies did the strange thing they put in writing we promise to hire your students I've got the EA and Activision ones here I think there are now how many five guys because I drew nose I bet so there are five written agreements I don't know of any other school that has this kind of written agreement with any company and so that's a real statement and these are multiple year things so they're agreeing to hire people for summer internships that we have not admitted yet that's a pretty strong statement about the quality of the program and Don as I said he's now he's he's crazy I mean that in a wonderful complimentary way he's doing these things where I'm like oh my god you know he's he's not here tonight because he's in Singapore because there's going to be an et Cie campus in Singapore there's already one on Australia there going to be one in Korea so this is becoming a global phenomenon so I think this really speaks volumes about all the other universities it's really true that Carnegie Mellon is the only university can do this we just have to do it all the world now one of the big success about the UTC is teaching people about focus oh I hear the nervous laughter from the students I had forgotten the delayed shock therapy effect of these bar charts when you're taking building virtual worlds every two weeks we get peer feedback and put that all into a big spreadsheet and at the end of the semester you had three teammates per project five projects that's 15 data points that's statistically valid and you get a bar chart telling you on a ranking of how easy you are to work with where you stack up against your peers boy that's hard feedback to ignore some still managed but but for the most part people looked at that and went wow I got a I got to pick it up a notch I better start thinking about what I'm saying to people in these meetings and that is the best best gift an educator can give is to get somebody to become self reflective so the e.t.c was wonderful but even the e.t.c and even as dawn scales it around the globe it's still very labor intensive you know it's not Tommy one at a time it's not a research group ten at a time it's fifty or a hundred a time per campus times for campuses but I wanted something infinitely scalable right scalable to the point where millions or tens of millions of people could chase their dreams with something and you know I guess that kind of a goal really does make me the Mad Hatter so Alice is a project that we've worked on for a long long time it's a novel way to teach computer programming kids make movies and games the head-fake again we're back to the head fakes best way to teach somebody something is to have them think they're learning something else I have done it my whole career and the head-fake here is that they're learning to program but they just think are making movies and video games this thing has already been downloaded well over a million times there are eight textbooks amiran about it ten percent of u.s. colleges are using it now and it's not the good stuff yet the good stuff is coming in the next version okay I like Moses get to see the Promised Land but I won't get to set foot in it and that's okay because I can see it and the vision is clear millions of kids having fun while learning something hard that's pretty cool I can deal with that as a legacy the next version is going to come out 2008 it's going to be teaching the Java language if you want them to know they're learning Java otherwise they'll just think that they're writing movie scripts and we're getting the characters from the the best-selling PC game in history the Sims and this is all already working in the lab so there's no real technological risk I don't have time to thank and mention everybody in the Alice team but I just want to say that Dennis cosgrove is going to be building this has been building this he is the designer it's his baby and for those of you are wondering well you know in some number of months who should I be emailing about the Alice project where's Wanda dan there you're on stand up let them all see you everybody say hi Wanda send her the email and I'll talk a little bit more about Caitlin Kelleher but she's graduated with her PhD and is at Washington University and she's going to be taking this up a notch and going to middle schools with it so grand vision and you know to the extent that you can live on in something I will live on and Alice all right so now the third part of the talk lessons learned and we've talked about my dreams we've talked about helping other people in neighborhood dreams somewhere along the way there's got to be some aspect of what lets you get to achieve your dreams first one is the role of parents mentors and students I was blessed to have been born to two incredible people this is my mother on her 70th birthday I am back here I have just been left this is my dad riding a roller coaster on his 80th birthday and he points out that you know he's not only brave he's talented because he did win that big bear the same day my dad was so full of life anything with him was an adventure I don't know what's in that bag but I know it's cool my dad dressed up as Santa Claus but he also did very very significant things to help lots of people this is a dormitory in Thailand my mom and dad underwrote and every year about 30 students get to go to school who wouldn't have otherwise I mean my wife and I have also been involved in heavily and these are the kind of things that I think everybody ought to be doing helping others but the best story huh but my dad is unfortunately dad passed away a little over a year ago and when we were going through his things he had fought in World War two in the Battle of the Bulge and when we were going through his things we found out he had been awarded the Bronze Star for valor my mom didn't know it in 50 years of marriage it had just never come up my mom mothers are people who love you even when you pull their hair and I have two great mom stories when I was here studying to get my PhD and I was taking something called the theory qualifier which I can definitively say is the second worst thing in my life after chemotherapy and I was complaining to my mother about how hard this test was and how awful it was and she just leaned over and she patted me on the arm and she said we know how you feel honey and remember when your father was your age he was fighting the Germans after I got my PhD my mother took great relish and introducing me as this is my son he's a doctor but not the kind who helps people these slides are a little bit dark but when I was in high school I decided to paint my bedroom I'd always wanted a submarine and an elevator and the great thing about this what can I say and the great thing about this is they let me do it and they didn't get upset about it and it's still there if you go to my parents house it's still there and anybody who is out there who is a parent if your kids want to paint their bedroom as a favor to me let them do it okay it'll be okay don't worry about resale value on the house other people who helped us what size our parents our teachers our mentors our friends our colleagues God what is there to say about Andy Van Damme when I was a freshman at Brown he was on leave and all I heard about was this Andy Van Damme he was like a mythical creature like a center but like a really pissed off center and everybody was like really sad that he was gone but kind of more relaxed and I found out why because I started working for Andy I was a teaching assistant for him as a sophomore and I was quite an arrogant young man and I came in to some office hours and of course it was nine o'clock at night Andy was there at office hours which is your first clue as to what kind of professor he was and I come bounding in and you know I'm just I'm going to save the world there all these kids waiting for help together other than that and afterwards and II literally Dutch uncle he is Dutch right he got juggled me and he put his arm around my shoulders we went for a little walk and I said Randy it's such a shame that people perceive you is so arrogant because it's going to limit what you're going to be able to accomplish in life what a hell of a good way to word you're being a jerk and he doesn't say you're jerk he says people are perceiving you this way and he says the downside is it's going to limit what you're going to be able to accomplish when I got to know Andy better the beatings became more direct I could tell you Andy stories for a month but the one I will tell you is that when it came time to start thinking about what to do after graduating from Brown it had never occurred to me in a million years to go to graduate school just out of my imagination wasn't the kind of thing people from my family did we gots a what do you call him a Jobs so and and Andy said now don't go do that go get a PhD become a professor I said why he said because you're such a good salesman that any company who gets you is going to use you as a salesman and you might as well be selling something worthwhile like education thanks Andy was my first boss so to speak I was lucky enough to have a lot of bosses that that red circle was way off owls over here I don't know what the hell happened he's probably watching this on the webcast oh my god he's targeting and he still can't aim all right I don't want to say much about the great bosses I've had except that they were great and I know a lot of people in the world have had bad bosses and I haven't had to endure that experience and I'm very grateful to all the people that I ever had to report to they've just been incredible it's not just our bosses we learn from our students I think the best head-fake of all time comes from Caitlin Keller excuse me dr. Caitlin Keller who just finished up here and starting at Washington University and she looked at Alice when it was an easier way to learn to program and she said yeah but why is that fun that's like because I'm a compulsive male like to make the littles Toy Soldiers move around by my command and that's fun Julie oh and she was the one who said no we'll just approach it all as a storytelling activity and she's done wonderful work showing that particularly with middle school girls if you presented as a storytelling activity they're perfectly willing to learn how to write computer software so all-time best head-fake award goes to Caitlin Kelleher's dissertation president Cohen when I told him I was going to do this talk he said please tell them about having fun because that's what I remember you for I said I can do that it's kind of like a fish talking about the importance of water I mean I don't know how to not have fun right I'm dying and I'm having fun and I'm going to keep having fun every day I have left because there's no other way to plant right so my next piece of advice is you just have to decide if you're a Tigger or you're in your I think I'm clear where I stand on the great Tigger debate never lose the childlike wonder it's just too important it's what drives us help others denny prophet knows more about helping other people he's forgotten more than I'll ever know he's taught me by example how to run a group how to care about people MK Haley I have a theory that people come from large families are better people because I just had to learn how to get along MK Haley comes from a family with 20 kids yeah unbelievable and she always says it's kind of fun to do the impossible when I first got to Imagineering she was one of the people who dressed me down and and she said I understand you've joined the Aladdin project what can you do I said well I'm a tenured professor of computer science and she said well that's a very nice professor boy but that's not what I asked I said what can you do and you know I mentioned sort of my working-class roots I we keep what is valuable to us what we cherish and I've kept my Letterman's jacket all these years I used to like wearing it in grad school and one of my friends Jessica Hodgins would say why do you wear this Letterman's jacket and I looked around at all the non-athletic guys around me who were much smarter than me and I said because I can and so she thought that was a real hoot so one year she made for me this little raggedy Randy doll he's got a little Letterman's jacket too that's my all-time favorite it's the perfect gift for the egomaniac in your life so I've met so many wonderful people along the way loyalty is a two-way street there was a young man named Dennis cosgrove at the University of Virginia and when he was a young man let's just say things happened and I found myself talking to a Dean and the Dean no not that Dean and anyway this Dean really had it in for Dennis and I can never figure out why because Dennis was a fine fellow but for some reason was Dean really had it in for him and I ended up basically saying no I vouch for Dennis the guy says you're not even tenured yet and you're telling me you're going to vouch for this sophomore or junior or whatever I think was a junior at the time I said young in a pouch for him because I believed in it the Dean said and I'm going to remember this when your tenure case comes up I said deal I went back to talk to Dennis and I said I would really appreciate you that would be good but loyalty is a two-way street I mean that was god knows how many years ago but that's the same Dennis cosgrove who's carrying out a sport you've been with me all these years right and you know if we only had one person to send in a space probe to meet an alien species I'm picking Dennis you can't give a talk at carnegie-mellon without acknowledging one very special person and that would be sharing books and I joked with her I said well look if you're retiring it's just not worth living anymore Sharon is so wonderful it's beyond description and for all of us have been helped by her it's just indescribable I love this picture because it puts together with SIL and SIL is great because SIL gave the best piece of advice pound-for-pound that I have ever heard and I think all young ladies should hear this Syl said it took me a long time but I finally figured it out when it comes to men that are romantically interested in you it's really simple just ignore everything they say and only pay attention to what they do it's that simple it's that easy and I felt back to my bachelor days and I said damn never give up I didn't get into Brown University he's on the wait list I called him up and they eventually decided that he was getting really annoying to have me call every day so they let me in at Carnegie Mellon I didn't get into graduate school and he had mentored me he said go to graduate school you're gonna Carnegie Mellon all my good students go to kion and yeah you know what's coming and so he said you're gonna go to Carnegie Mellon no problem what he had kind of forgotten was that the difficulty of getting into the top THD program in the country had really gone up and he also didn't know I was going to tank my GREs because he believed in me which based on my board scores was a really stupid idea and so I didn't get into Carnegie Mellon no one knows that still today I'm telling the story I was declined admission to Carnegie Mellon and I I was a bit of an obnoxious little kid I went into Andy's office and I dropped the rejection letter on his desk and I said I just want you to know what your letter recommendation goes for at Carnegie Mellon and before the letter had hit his desk his hand was on the phone he said I will fix this and I said no no I don't want to do it that way that's not the way I was raised you know maybe some other graduate schools will see fit to admit me I said look carnival is where you going to be said I'd say what I'll make you a deal go visit the other schools because I did get in all the other schools he said go visit the other schools and if you really don't feel comfortable at any of them then we'll let you will you let me call Nico Nico being neko harbour MIT and I said okay deal I went to the other schools without naming them by name Berkeley Cornell they manage to be so unwelcoming that I found myself saying to Andy you know I'm going to go get a job and he said no you're not and he picked up the phone and he talked in Dutch and he hung up the phone and he said Nico says if you're serious been his office tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. and for those of you know Nico this is really scary so I mean Nico hopper UN's office the next morning at 8 a.m. and he's talking with me and frankly I don't think he's that keen on this meeting I don't think he's that king at all and he says I'm Randy why are we here and I said cuz Andy phoned you and I said well since you admitted me I have won a fellowship the office of naval office of naval research is a very prestigious fellowship I've won this fellowship and that wasn't in my file when I applied and Nico said a fellowship money we have plenty of money that was back then and he said we have plenty of money why do you think having a fellowship makes any difference to us and he looked at me there are moments that change your life in 10 years later if you know in retrospect it was one of those moments you're blessed but to know it at the moment with Nico staring through your soul and I said I didn't mean to imply anything about the money it's just that it was an honor there were only 15 given nationwide and I did think it was an honour that would be something that would be meritorious and I apologize if that was presumptuous and he smiled and that was good so how do you get people to help you you can't get there alone people have to help you and I do believe in karma I believe in paybacks you get people to help you by telling the truth being earnest I'll take an earnest person over a hip person every day because hip is short-term earnest is long-term apologize when you screw up and focus on other people not on yourself and I thought how do I possibly make a concrete example of that do we have a concrete example of focusing on somebody else over there can we bring it out see yesterday was my wife's birthday if there was ever a time I might be entitled to have the focus on me it might be the last lecture but no I feel very badly that my wife didn't really get a proper birthday and I thought it'd be very nice if five hundred people happy birthday to you her name is Jay happy birthday to you happy birthday dear Jay happy birth I'm going to blow it all right and now you all have an extra reason to come to the reception remember brick walls let us show our dedication they are there to separate us from the people who don't really want to achieve their childhood dreams don't bail the best of the golds at the bottom of barrels of crap what Steve what Steve didn't tell you was the big sabbatical da I'd been there for 48 hours and they loved the e.t.c we were the best we were the favorites and then somebody else pulled me aside and said oh by the way we're about to give eight million dollars to USC to build a program just like yours we're hoping you could help me get it off the ground and then Steve came along and said they said what Oh God and and to quote a famous man I will fix this and he did Steve has been an incredible partner and we have a great relationship personal and professional and he has certainly been point man on on getting a gaming asset to help teach millions of kids and you know that's just incredible but you know it certainly would have been reasonable for me to leave 48 hours into that sabbatical but it wouldn't have been the right thing to do and when you do the right thing good stuff has a way of happening get a feedback loop and listen to it your feedback loop can be this dorky spreadsheet thing I did or it can just be one great man who tells you what you need to hear the hard part is the listening to it anybody can get chewed out right it's the rare person who says oh my god you are right as opposed to no wait the real reason is right we've all heard that when people give you feedback cherish it and use it show gratitude when I got tenure I took all of my research team down to Disneyworld for a week and one of the other professors at Virginia said how can you do that and so these people just busted their ass and got me the best job in the world for life how could I not do that right don't complain just work harder it's a picture of Jackie Robinson it was in his contract not to complain even when the fans spit on him right be good at something it makes you valuable work hard people I got tenure a year earlier Steve mentioned junior faculty members used to say to me wow you got tenure early what's your secret I said it's pretty simple call me any Friday night in my office at 10 o'clock and I'll tell you find the best in everybody one of the things that Jon Snoddy as I said told me is that you might have to wait a long time sometimes years but people will show you their good side just keep waiting no matter how long it takes no one is all evil everybody has a good side just keep waiting it will come out and be prepared luck is truly where preparation meets opportunity so today's talk was about my childhood dreams enabling the dreams of others and some lessons learned but did you figure out the head-fake it's not about how to achieve your dreams it's about how to lead your life if you lead your life the right way the Karma will take care of itself the dreams will come to you have you figured out the second head-fake talks not for you it's for my kids thank you all you

Channel: tudi0s

Views: 105,454

Rating: 4.8909092 out of 5

Keywords: Randy Pausch, La ultima leccion, conferencia, universidad

Id: BF_uIybJEqg

Length: 76min 27sec (4587 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 07 2011