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The Last Lecture a reminder to find accomplishment and peace in the moment
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Suppose that a doctor tells you that you have three to six months to live. How would you react? Are you satisfied with what you have done and with what you have accomplished so far in life? Have you aggressively pursued your childhood dreams?
I have developed a habit of always keeping two books or articles on my bedside table. I have only one rule. At any given point, at least one of them has to be completely unrelated to medicine. Each night, depending on my mood, I pick and read one of them. Based on my weekly patterns, my wife can tell which Juan is laying next to her: the nerdy, focused-on-his-career, evidenced-based obsessed Juan, or the academically-frustrated, paper-rejected, I-don’t-give-a-damn husband. She can track, according to her, my multiple personalities based on my reading material.
‘The Last Lecture’
This past week I stumbled upon a book titled “The Last Lecture,” written by Carnegie Mellon computer science Professor Randy Pausch. At the age of 46, when Randy was at the peak of his academic career, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. At the time – 2006 – his kids were 4 years, 2 years, and 3 months old. Unfortunately, despite chemotherapy, his cancer became metastatic. All of the sudden, his good quality life expectancy sank to less than six months.
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Carnegie Mellon University has a lecture series called “The Last Lecture” in which retiring professors get to reflect on their academic careers and share their life experiences with the audience. In Professor Pausch’s case, it literally became his last lecture.
What is really interesting about this one-hour talk (which you can see on Randy Pausch’s website at download.srv.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/) as well as the book, is the fact that he decides to share with us how good his life is, despite his terrible diagnosis. He talks about his childhood dreams, the joy of helping others achieve their dreams through academia, and the lessons that he learned throughout his life and throughout his career. There is no hint of denial, bitterness or anger in his presentation; as he said, “You have to do your best with the cards that you were dealt.” His book became an instant national best seller and millions have watched his last lecture, a terminal cancer story that is about everything but cancer or dying.
There are books that you read and quickly forget; this is not one of them. As I read it, I could not stop thinking about my career and life (which at least the career part must be very similar to yours). I have always purposely avoided thinking about the time that we have spent in training and the sacrifices that we have made to achieve our career goal, for some their childhood dream. Our last 12 to 14 education/training years are analogous to a never-ending train ride which once in a while stops at different destinations; it just happens to be that none of them are ours. People come and go, friends move on, but we just keep on going. It is almost like a Hotel California-type of feeling – you can check in but you can’t check out.
After reading Randy’s story I asked myself: How would I feel if after investing almost half of my life in pursuing my dream I am told that I was going to die in less than six months, either making it impossible to achieve my dream or cutting it short, like in Randy’s case? As I tried to answer this question as honestly as possible, my appreciation and admiration for Randy Pausch kept on growing.
The truth of the matter, my friends, is that most of the time our eyes are not on the ball. We focus too much on the last train stop, our ultimate goal, and our thoughts are constantly linked to the future. What am I going to do when I finish my fellowship? How do I see myself 10 years from now? These are important questions, but we fail to recognize “the now.” We should also ask ourselves the following questions: What can I do today to feel accomplished and at peace with myself? How can I impact “the now” in order to be an element of change for my family and for my community?
I concluded that if I was in Randy’s shoes, my reaction would not have been as positive and as mature as his. I suspect that this has to do with the fact that my happiness is conditioned too much on my future possibilities and aspirations. From Pausch’s lecture and book I hope to have learned that although the realization of a dream is important, it is the process, the train ride, that makes us better human beings.
I encourage you to read this book, listen to the lecture, and ask yourself the same questions I asked myself.
For more information:
- Juan Rivera, MD, is a Fellow at the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Center for Prevention of Heart Disease and a Member of the Cardiology Today Fellows Advisory Board. He also writes a cardiovascular prevention blog for Hispanics called Corazon Hispano. The blog can be viewed at: corazonhispano.blogspot.com.