The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I recently reread this because I've been reading memoirs written by people facing death (The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying, When Breath Becomes Air, The Year of Magical Thinking, It's Okay to Laugh). I didn't remember it as well as I remembered the video of his lecture. This is more of an inspirational positive-thinking-working-harder-than-everyone business book and a book for his children.

There is some, but not a lot, of discussion about what one should do with one's life. He thinks you should be passionate about your work and work hard, but this didn't really resonate with me especially considering his job was teaching and creating virtual reality technologies. That's cool, but is he really glad he spent all that extra time at work even though his life was shorter than average? Maybe some people love their work that much, but I would hope it would be mostly people in helping professions. Perhaps he thought his job was helping people? Or maybe he thought it was the most fun pastime ever?

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