Word count: 1000 words

Essay

Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Lectured by: Randy Pausch

The last lecture from Randy Pausch is not that cliché lecture or motivating speech. Judging
from the title Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, people might be skeptical as to expect
this as a merely success story. It is truthfully beyond than that. As an opening, he introduced
not only himself but also the cancer—he described it as introducing the elephant in the room.
You can tell it is not ordinary lecture by looking at how eloquent and light he was at bringing
up the cancer—without self-pity and with great sense of humor. The positivity in the beginning
was consistently maintained even escalated at the end of the lecture. All of sudden one-hour
lecture was not that bad. It’s fascinating how a person's valuable life experience for decades
can be summarized and delivered so well and in a short time.

Randy told about his dreams and the importance of having dreams to inspire and aspire oneself
in life. Started from childhood dreams, they have led him to accomplish many things in his life.
Therefore, he emphasized to encourage oneself to keep childhood dreams and chasing it. As
he told his life journey, he highlighted the essential of having fundamentals and taking criticism.
Often we despise criticism, our first response toward criticism is making an excuse, shielding
ourselves from the attack that can hurt our feelings. As matter of fact, criticism is something
valuable indeed. “When you’re screwing up and nobody saying anything to you anymore that
means they gave up”, Randy quoted from his mentor. Thus, listening may be the hardest yet
the most valuable thing.

The true learning might be not that obvious. Sometimes the important lessons can only be
learned in indirect ways even through the big chunk of brick walls. There are always meanings
behind the brick walls. They give us a chance to prove how badly we want something. Another
gripping point is when he mentioned is to wait a little longer for people to show their good
sides because no one is pure evil. He taught a lot about human connection, although his
concentration was heavily tech related. He gave an example about decent communication. How
“I don’t know” could be conveyed in more affecting way. How appreciation could be utilized
not only as a reward but as a fuel to boost someone passing the limit as you shouldn’t ever set
the bar for anything or anyone. Don’t judge a person easily, focus on what someone do instead
of what someone say. Pick an earnest person and always focus on the best side of someone.
The few last slides might the most enlightening yet astonishing lessons: head fake—achieving
an intended objective by performing deceiving method. The concept of chasing childhood
dreams might be too utopian for some people yet the real fundamental of it is actually to make
childhood dreams as compass to lead our life while dreams and karma are just good things that
can find their own ways if we do the right things.

Reflecting to myself and my business, somehow I could relate especially on the lesson of
perceiving people and trying to connect with them. Since I started my business, I’ve been
learning a lot how to collaborate with many people with different backgrounds and how to not
easily judge them. This is a valuable lesson that I had to learn in the hard way because I always
had little experience working with such diversity before—especially when I was undergraduate.
Just like Randy said, “You can’t get there alone”. Having no prejudice about anything and
anyone as well as taking criticism well could result improvement not only to individual but
also to the whole team.

This lecture has influenced my interpretation about the meaning about the brick walls. Before,
I presumed all obstacles that impede me are warning signs so I should stop or find other
alternatives. Now I realized that it is important to understand what a goal means to me. If I’m
not quite sure, then might be I should re-orientate my directions. But if it really matters, if I
really wanted to happen, then I should not stop. Looking back at my personal journey, I believe
that something really matters won’t come easy.

Related to the paper, Randy shows implementations of ethics in his professional work. With
his inter-department course in Carnegie Mellon University, he proved that with such creativity
and good relationship practical, he could make a success course that was well-know and
compelling that reward him trust from all stake holders such as college students, faculty, even
company that invested on him and his project. The way he performed such ethics has been
started early when he involved himself in secret project as an Imagineering. Within the context
of moral duties, he earned trust and he respected the contract and all the people with different
professions. As stated in the paper, “Moral duties go hand-in-hand with moral rights” (Paine,
2006). Moral duties correspond with other parties too as also told by Randy Pausch, “Loyalty
is two-way streets”. Once Randy helped his college student not getting expelled by putting
faith on him, later his college student helped Randy achieving his dream to complete his Alice
project. Beyond basic rights and duties, Randy had done what paper stated as best practices
and he applied it in long period—10 years to be exact—as he was lecturing the Irtual Reality
Building course. The commitment of ethics is rooted in Randy’s personal values as he always
believed that doing the right thing no matter what because good stuffs will find their own ways
eventually.

Related to my business, ethics is an essential thing that underlies the concept of social
enterprise where social programs are entirely overlapped with business activities within the
organization as one type of social enterprise typology explained by Kim Alter (2007). As a
social-based business entity, in addition to economical gain, social and environmental gain also
expected as its business impact (Elkington, 1997).

Bibliography

Alter, Kim. (2007). Social Enterprise Typology. Delaware: Virtue Ventures, LLC.

Elkington, J. (1997). Partnerships from Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom line of 21 st
Century Business. Environmental Quality Management, Autumn 199, 37–51.

Paine, L. S. (2006). Ethics: A Basic Framework. Harvard Business Review, 1-8.

Pausch, R. (2007). Really Achieving Childhood Dreams. Retrieved from: