One Man Who Gives Thanks Daily

Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch, diagnosed with terminal cancer, has some words to live by that ring particularly true on Thanksgiving

by John A. Byrne

• View Slide Show

On this Thanksgiving holiday, when we sit with family and friends to express gratitude for the things we have in life, I will think of Randy Pausch. If you haven't heard his name yet, you should have. On the afternoon of Sept. 18 the Carnegie-Mellon University professor walked into a packed auditorium on the Pittsburgh campus and delivered his "last lecture."

It was a doozy.

Pausch spoke with the theatrics of a showman, the wit of a master comic, and the eloquence of a statesman. He recalled his own childhood dreams, his life's goal to enable the dreams of others, and the lessons he learned and wanted to share over the 46 years of his life. Pausch is a handsome man, with a full head of black hair, bushy eyebrows, and a remarkable sense of humor. Of all the lectures this computer science prof had delivered during years in classrooms, this one was especially poignant and urgent. He began simply enough by quoting his father who always told him that when there is an elephant in the room you introduce it.

So Pausch pulled up on an overhead screen a trio of CAT scans that showed the 10 tumors in his liver and spoke about his doctors' prognosis that he had three to six months of good health left. "That is what it is," he said simply. "We can't change it. We cannot change the cards we are dealt—just how we play the hand."

Close to Home

The one-hour lecture quickly became an Internet sensation. An estimated five million people have since watched at least part of it on the Web. (Click here to see the lecture.) After front-page articles in Pittsburgh's two local newspapers, the national media jumped on the story. The frenzy that followed—including an appearance on Oprah—culminated in a reported $6.7 million book deal for Pausch and a collaborator who wrote a story on him in The Wall Street Journal.

I was instantly drawn to the story, if only because three of my closest friends have been diagnosed with cancer over the past two years. Two have died within the past 12 months. The last of the three—with a death sentence of stage IV liver and stomach cancer — checked out of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center on Sunday after extensive surgery. To put it mildly, I could relate to Pausch and what he had to say that day.

When one of Pausch's closest friends got the news four weeks earlier, he was stunned.

"Dude, you can't die," Steve Seabolt, a vice-president at Electronic Arts (ERTS), told him over the telephone.

"What do you mean?" asked Pausch.

"When you die, the average IQ of my friends is going to drop 50 points!"

"You need to find brighter friends," joked Pausch, trying to take the horror out of the sad news. The conversation recalled one of my own with a friend now lost.

Most of us go through our lives using no more than a small fraction of our potential. Pausch teaches us how to more effectively tap into the vast reservoir of unused talent and energy that resides deep within each of us. That is no small feat. In a world filled with distractions and frustrations, it often takes a tragedy to move us to action. By sharing his personal ordeal with us, Pausch created the urgency so many of us require to awake the human potential that is so frequently wasted.

So what did Pausch actually say that day? He spoke about the brick walls that often appear in the path of every accomplishment. "Remember," he said, pacing the floor, "the brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough."