What Happened to your Childhood Hopes and Dreams, and Where are They Now?

Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch is dying from pancreatic cancer, and he gave his last lecture at Carnegie Mellow university on September 18, 2007.

The topic of his lecture was not about his work, not about computational algorithms or immersive virtual reality systems -- its topic was instead:

Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.

The lecture, just for his students, colleagues and visitors, swelled to over 400 attendees in the large McConomy Auditorium. It was recorded and released on youtube where it became a world wide phenomena.

The Apostle Paul counsels us in the 13th Corinthians, verse 11: When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that I am become a man, I have put away childish things.

Yet there are some childish things that should not be put away, or at least not thought of as childish things, and that is -- our Hopes and our Dreams. They are what we begin with, and they will be with us in the end -- if we keep, hold, and cherish them always.

Give yourself a quiet uninterrupted hour and 15 minutes to listen to his lecture. He's a very successful happy guy, and he gives some great advice, but what stands out, in the end, is what we think are the most important things are not really those things -- it's something else: it's not what we get (though that is very important stuff!) -- it's what we give, and we give though the realization of our hopes and dreams:

Postscript

MacArthur speaks eloquently of Duty, Honor, Country. It is not an accident that these words, their deep meaning, becomes intertwined with a metaphor of where he was at the end of his life, and how service to his country, the fulfillment of all of [his] boyish hopes and dreams, remained with him to the end:

The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished, tone and tint. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears, and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen vainly, but with thirsty ears, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll. In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

But in the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point.

Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn. (General Douglas MacArthur, Sylvanus Thayer Award Acceptance Address, May 12th, 1962, West Point)

Our Hopes and our Dreams are our Country, and living them is our Duty and our Honor.