Critical Chance

Tag: randy pausch

  • Playing your hand

    “We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”

    –Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

    When your time is limited 

    Randy Pausch learned that he had pancreatic cancer in September 2006, and was given 3 to 6 months to live.

    As a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, he wanted to do something authentic before passing, something that encapsulated his life; who he was and what he learned. 

    He got to writing and within the next year, he gave a lecture titled “The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” The talk was later turned into a book, The Last Lecture, which became a New York Timesbest-seller.

    Both are phenomenal, and worth checking out.

    Playing Your Hand

    There’s no doubt you’ve experienced some sort of setback in your life. How you choose to interpret the situation is up to you.

    Sure, we need to be realistic; your mentality doesn’t change the fact that you were dealt a 7 / 2 off-suit. 

    Yet at the same time, you only get one hand to play, so you might as well play it as best you can. 

    “You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences… and then you die. How you choose to interpret that is up to you. And you do have that choice.”

    -Naval Ravikant 

    Stop focusing on your cards. 

    Get out, get going, and play the best damn hand you can. 

  • Solving the impossible

    The U.S. Government spent billions of dollars attempting to land on the moon. Many people complained that the money should have been spent on poverty.

    Randy Pausch once responded,

    “When you use money to fight poverty, it can be of great value, but too often, you’re working at the margins. When you’re putting people on the moon, you’re inspiring all of us to achieve the maximum of human potential, which is how our greatest problems will eventually be solved.”

    Our greatest breakthroughs happen when we aren’t focusing on the issue at hand, but instead broadcasting our most ambitious goals.

    By working on things that fascinate us, we create industries that don’t yet exist and solve problems we never imagined possible.