Tracey Leech

Happy wife, Devoted mother to fur baby, Tilly.
Interested in most things particularly History, Architecture, Technology, Current Affairs, Dance, Film & Music.

[Tracey Leech @Mrs_Leech]

I am in full support @JohnnyThomson2 #saywhatitis https://t.co/QyF5zxjI3d

[Sunday Brunch @SundayBrunchC4]

Since it's #SocialMediaDay, so we thought we'd share this bit of expertise from @JohnnyThomson2, our new social media guru 🤳

[Tracey Leech @Mrs_Leech]

@DawnNeesom Congratulations 🥂

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A Carnegie Mellon professor walked onto a stage in 2007 and gave an hour-long lecture to 400 people about achieving your childhood dreams. He did not tell the room that the entire talk was actually written for his three kids, who would grow up without him.

His name was Randy Pausch. The date was September 18, 2007. The video has since passed 20 million views, and the book that followed spent more than a hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Pausch was 46 years old, had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer a month earlier, and had been told he had three to six months of good health left.

He did not walk onto that stage to talk about dying. He walked onto it to teach a single lesson hidden inside another one.

Here is what I missed the first time I watched it.

Pausch opened by doing push-ups on stage. He told the audience he was in phenomenally good shape, in better shape than most of them, and anyone who wanted to cry or pity him was welcome to get down and match him. The room laughed. Then he said the line that sets up the entire hour to come. We cannot change the cards we are dealt. Just how we play the hand.

That was the frame. Everything after it was a demonstration.

The lecture was officially titled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, and Pausch did spend the first 40 minutes working through his actual childhood list. Zero gravity. Playing in the NFL. Writing an entry in the World Book Encyclopedia. Being Captain Kirk. Becoming a Disney Imagineer.

He walked the audience through which ones he got, which ones he didn't, and what the gap between wanting and getting had actually taught him.

The framework inside those 40 minutes is the part most people remember, and it is the one Pausch delivered with the most force.

He called it the brick wall. He said the brick walls in your life are there for a reason. They are not there to keep you out. They are there to give you a chance to show how badly you want something. They are there to stop the people who do not want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people.

Read that again slowly. He is not saying brick walls are a test you have to pass. He is saying brick walls are a filter nature uses to separate the people who actually want a thing from the people who only like the idea of wanting it. That is a completely different claim. Most people treat obstacles as unfair. Pausch argued obstacles are the mechanism by which desire gets proven, and without that mechanism the whole concept of wanting something would be meaningless. Every dream he achieved, he achieved by treating the wall as a signal that he was close, not a signal that he should stop.

The second framework he taught the audience is the one almost nobody teaches in any classroom. He called it the head fake. He pulled it from football. Coaches teach young kids to tackle by having them run drills that look like they are about tackling, but the real lesson being embedded is teamwork, grit, how to take a hit and get back up. The kid thinks they are learning football.

They are actually learning something much larger, and they will not realize it until years later. Pausch said the best teaching in the world is head fake teaching. You get people to learn the thing they need by dressing it up as the thing they already want.

This is the technique behind Alice, the programming software he built at Carnegie Mellon. Kids thought they were making animated movies and games. They were actually learning to code. Pausch said one of his proudest claims to fame was that he had taught programming to a generation of students who had no idea they were being taught programming at all.

And then, with about three minutes left in the lecture, he ran a head fake on the room.

He asked the audience if they had figured out the first head fake of the talk itself. The room went quiet. He said the lecture was never actually about how to achieve your childhood dreams. It was about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way, the karma takes care of itself and the dreams come to you anyway.

Then he asked if they had figured out the second head fake. Even quieter.

He said the talk was not for the four hundred people in the room.

It was for his three kids.

Dylan was six. Logan was three. Chloe was eighteen months. They would grow up without their father, and he knew it. Pausch had spent an hour on stage pretending to give career advice to strangers because he needed to record something his children could watch when they were old enough to understand who their dad had been.

The entire architecture of the lecture was a message in a bottle disguised as a keynote. The filtered brick-wall philosophy, the football stories, the dreams he chased and the ones he missed, the line about playing the hand you are dealt, all of it was something a father wanted three small children to internalize after he was no longer there to say it in person.

That is the moment the video stops being a lecture and starts being something else entirely.

Pausch died on July 25, 2008, ten months after giving it. His final sentence on stage was that he had given the talk tonight, and then he walked off. The applause lasted nearly a minute before the camera cut.

Most professors spend their entire careers trying to say one true thing their students will remember for a week.

He said one true thing his children will remember for the rest of their lives, and the rest of the world is still watching the footage.

[Tracey Leech @Mrs_Leech]

@claretbod Still living the dream Martin, Still living the dream. How are you?

[Tracey Leech @Mrs_Leech]

@ArtyBagger Thank you !

[Tracey Leech @Mrs_Leech]

@claretbod @ChesterFC Looking well Mr Spiers! Tony, Tilly and I are still living the dream at the seaside xxx

[Tracey Leech @Mrs_Leech]

@DawnNeesom @GBNEWS Happy Anniversary

[Tracey Leech @Mrs_Leech]

@claretbod I am really well thank you, no, I am not retired but I have a job I love so almost feels like I am retired. How are you?

[Tracey Leech @Mrs_Leech]

@frankbrunoboxer Get well soon

[Tracey Leech @Mrs_Leech]

@ArtyBagger My favourite book, GSE text marvellous. Read it in one sitting. Gripped beginning to end

[Tracey Leech @Mrs_Leech]

@sarajcox his. he grumbled but I was firm and told him to go and get on with whatever it was it should be doing. I hadn’t noticed the slack jawed ladies in the accounts until he left the office and the cracked up laughing. I hadn’t noticed just shoved the owner of the business off his own.

[Tracey Leech @Mrs_Leech]

@sarajcox My first day at a new job I had to photocopy some information and there was a doddery old scruff bag hogging the photocopier. Well being a take charge type of girl. I shoved him off the photocopier and told him to come back later my photocopying was so much more important than

[Tracey Leech @Mrs_Leech]

@Grand_Theatre I saw that production, and another when he and Prunella, discussed the play at length with a group of English Lit students my last year at school, never forgotten.

[Tracey Leech @Mrs_Leech]

@Bobby_Seagull Polite.

[Bad Dad Gymwear @RetroredS70]

Hey guys and girls, we would really appreciate it if you could help us gain some followers, either by sharing /retweeting or maybe tagging us in a post if you've purchased from us before, Massive thanks in advance ❤️

[Tracey Leech @Mrs_Leech]

@rickastley @CampBestival I am so excited to be seeing you @LythamFestival Together forever is the first dance I had with the man who became my husband. Still together, I will want a shout out please x

[Tracey Leech @Mrs_Leech]

@MelanieBlakeUK @Cockers72 Present mood

[Tracey Leech @Mrs_Leech]

@claretbod Why on earth not? I am really good thank you, are you retired yet ?

[Tracey Leech @Mrs_Leech]

@claretbod

[Puns AndOneliners @punsandoneliner]

Why are fast yachts like popular furniture stores? Both always seem to have a sail on.

https://t.co/77iPS2FJ5L #Sail #SailJokes #Joke

[Tracey Leech @Mrs_Leech]

@Phil_Sledge My little Yorkie, Tilly 💕