The Last Lecture

I had just read a string of dense, “serious” philosophical books, and I thought to take a breather and read a different kind of book – the kind that a terminal pancreatic cancer patient would write months before his death. Pausch’s The Last Lecture is based on a recorded lecture he made at CMU when he learned that his cancer would be fatal; I had seen part of the lecture video a long time back, and only thought to read the book now after many years. The book is inspirational and provides concrete anecdotes which are memorable and heartwarming, though the chapters can become very disjoint and although each is engaging, it took some effort to form a coherent narrative. I’ve gleamed some of Pausch’s unbridled optimism and some practical, applicable advice in life through my reading.

The most important lesson I took from Pausch was on tenacity. Pausch likes to call them “brick walls”, which include any kind of rejections or things that don’t go well. “The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something”, Pausch says. I had just begun a project to court rejection as a means to build a thick skin and resilience, and through this I’ve seen that the tenacity to try again after initial rejection is just as crucial as being able to handle and shrug off rejections. I have been lucky not to have had significant, life-changing setbacks in my life, perhaps due to the fact that my life hasn’t been that long – but before I hit my big, pivotal, inevitable setbacks, I want to equip myself beforehand with the resilience and tenacity to overcome such brick walls instead of learning impromptu how to scale the walls as they present themselves with possibly worse outcomes. Maybe this wish is an impossible ideal but I reason there’s no harm in preparation, especially when the preparation comes in handy for smaller brick walls. Reading the book made me think that resilience and tenacity are like peanut butter and jelly; it’s good to have either, but it’s so much more to have both.