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Randy Pausch - A lição final - Legendado Português pt-br
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lancelot_vga on Nov 9, 2008
Famoso vídeo da última aula de Randy Pausch, professor americano que morreu de cancer, agora legendado em português-br.
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- Really achieving Your Childhood Dreams
- Translation and subtitles: Ernesto M. Costa & r0n1n. Spelling and interpunction check by native speaker needed!
- ERNESTO@IG.COM.BR
- Make me earn it.
- It's wonderful to be here.
- What Indira didn't tell you is that this lecture series
- used to be called The Last Lecture.
- If you had one last lecture to give before you died, what would it be?
- I thought, damn, I finally nailed the venue and they renamed it.
- So, in case there's anybody who wandered in and doesn't know the back story
- my dad always taught me that when there's an elephant in the room,
- introduce them. If you look at my CAT scans, there are approximately 10 tumors
- in my liver, and the doctors told me 3-6 months of good health left.
- That was a month ago, so you can do the math.
- I have some of the best doctors in the world.
- So that is what it is.
- We can’t change it,
- and we just have to decide how we’re going to respond to that.
- We cannot change the cards we are dealt,
- just how we play the hand.
- If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be,
- sorry to disappoint you.
- And I assure you I am not in denial.
- It's not like I'm not aware of what's going on.
- My family, my three kids, my wife, we just decamped.
- We bought a lovely house in Virginia, and we're doing that because
- that's a better place for the family to be, down the road.
- And the other thing is I am in phenomenally good health right now.
- I mean it's the greatest thing of cognitive dissonance you will ever see
- is the fact that I am in really good shape.
- In fact, I am in better shape than most of you.
- So anybody who wants to cry or pity me can down and do a few of those,
- and then you may pity me.
- All right, so what we’re not talking about today, we are not talking about cancer,
- because I spent a lot of time talking about that and I’m really not interested.
- If you have any herbal supplements or remedies, please stay away from me.
- And we're not going to talk about things that are even more important
- than achieving your childhood dreams. We're not going to talk about my wife,
- we're not talking about my kids.
- Because I'm good, but I'm not good enough to talk about that without tearing up.
- So, we're just going to take that off the table. That's much more important.
- And we're not going to talk about spirituality and religion,
- although I'll tell you that I have experienced a deathbed conversion.
- I just bought a Macintosh.
- Now I knew I'd get 9% of the audience with that
- All right, so what is today's talk about then?
- It's about my childhood dreams and how I have achieved them.
- I've been very fortunate that way.
- How I believe I've been able to enable the dreams of others,
- and to some degree, lessons learned. I'm a professor,
- there should be some lessons learned
- and how you can use the stuff you hear today
- to achieve your dreams or enable the dreams of others.
- And as you get older, you may find that
- "enabling the dreams of others" thing is even more fun.
- So what were my childhood dreams?
- Well, you know, I had a really good childhood.
- Well, you know, I had a really good childhood.
- I was going back through the family archives,
- and what was really amazing was, I couldn’t find any pictures of me as a kid where I wasn’t smiling.
- as a kid where I wasn’t smiling.
- And that was just a very gratifying thing.
- There was our dog, right? Aww, thank you.
- And there I actually have a picture of me dreaming.
- I did a lot of that. You know, there's a lot of wake up's!
- It was a easy time to dream. I was born in 1960.
- When you are 8 or 9 years old and you look at the TV set,
- men are landing on the moon, anything's possible.
- And that's something we should not lose sight of,
- is that the inspiration and the permission to dream is huge.
- So what were my childhood dreams?
- You may not agree with this list, but I was there.
- Being in zero gravity, playing in the National Football League,
- authoring an article in the World Book Encyclopedia,
- I guess you can tell the nerds early.
- Being Captain Kirk, anybody here have that childhood dream?
- Not at CMU, nooooo. I wanted to become one of the guys
- who won the big stuffed animals in the amusement park,
- and I wanted to be an Imagineer with Disney.
- These are not sorted in any particular order, although I think
- they do get harder, except for maybe the first one.
- is that the inspiration and the permission to dream is huge.
- Now it’s important to have specific dreams.
- Now it’s important to have specific dreams.
- I wore glasses and they told me oh, astronauts can't have glasses.
- And I was like, mmm, I didn't really want the whole astronaut gig,
- I just wanted the floating.
- So, and as a child,
- prototype 0.0.
- But that didn’t work so well,
- and it turns out that NASA
- has something called the Vomit Comet
- that they used to train the astronauts.
- And this thing does parabolic arcs, and at the top of each arc
- you get about 25 seconds where you're ballistic and you get about,
- a rough equivalent of weightlessness for about 25 seconds.
- And there is a program where college students
- can submit proposals
- and if they win the competition,
- they get to fly.
- And I thought that was really cool,
- and we put a team together and they won and they got to fly.
- And I was all excited because I was going to go with them.
- And then I hit the first brick wall,
- because they made it very clear that under no circumstances
- were faculty members allowed to fly with the teams.
- I know, I was heartbroken.
- I was like, I worked so hard!
- And so I read the literature very carefully and it turns out that NASA,
- it’s part of their outreach and publicity program,
- and it turns out that the students
- were allowed to bring a local media journalist from their home town.
- And, Randy Pausch, web journalist.
- It’s really easy to get a press pass!
- So I called up the guys at NASA and I said,
- I need to know where to fax some documents
- And they said, what documents are you going to fax us?
- And I said my resignation as the faculty advisor
- and my application as the journalist.
- And he said, that's a little transparent, don't you think?
- And I said, yeah, but our project is virtual reality,
- and we're going to bring down a whole bunch of VR headsets
- and all the students from all the teams are going to experience it
- and all those other real journalists are going to get to film it.
- Jim Foley's going oh! you bastard, yes.
- And the guy said, here's the fax number.
- So, indeed, we kept our end of the bargain, and that's one of the
- themes that you'll hear later on in the talk, is have something to bring
- to the table, right, because that will make you more welcome.
- And if you're curious about what zero gravity looks like,
- hopefully the sound will be working here.
- Here I am.
- You do pay the piper at the bottom.
- So, childhood dream number one, check.
- OK, let’s talk about football.
- OK, let’s talk about football.
- League. And most of you don't know that I actually ...... no.
- No, I did not make it to the National Football League,
- but I probably got more from that dream
- and not accomplishing it
- than I got from any of the ones that I did accomplish.
- I had a coach, I signed up when I was nine years old.
- I was the smallest kid in the league, by far.
- And I had a coach, Jim Graham, who was six-foot-four, he had
- played linebacker at Penn State. He was just this hulk of a guy and
- he was old school. And I mean really old school.
- Like he thought the forward pass was a trick play.
- And he showed up for practice the first day,
- and you know, there’s big hulking guy, we were all scared to death of him.
- And he hadn’t brought any footballs.
- How are we going to have practice without any footballs?
- And one of the other kids said,
- excuse me coach, but there’s no football.
- And Coach Graham said, right,
- how many men are on a football field at a time?
- Eleven on a team, twenty-two.
- Coach Graham said, all right, and how many people are touching the football at any given time?
- One of them.
- And he said, right, so we’re going to work
- on what those other twenty-one guys are doing.
- And that's a really good story
- because it's all about fundamentals. Fundamentals, fundamentals,
- fundamentals. You've got to get the fundamentals down because otherwise the
- fancy stuff isn't going to work. And the other Jim Graham story I have is there
- was one practice where he just rode me all practice. You#re doing
- this wrong, you're doing this wrong, go back and do it again, you owe me, you're
- doing push-ups after practice. And when it was all over, one of the other
- assistant coaches came over and said,
- yeah, Coach Graham rode you pretty hard, didn’t he?
- I said, yeah.
- He said, that’s a good thing.
- He said, when you’re screwing up
- and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore,
- that means they gave up.
- And that's a lesson that stuck with me my whole life.
- Is that when you see yourself doing something badly
- and nobody's bothering to tell you anymore, that's a very bad place to be.
- Your critics are your ones telling you they still love you and care.
- After Coach Graham, I had another coach, Coach Setliff, and he taught me
- a lot about the power of enthusiasm. He did this one thing where only for one play
- at a time he would put people in at like the most horrifically wrong position for them.
- Like all the short guys would become receivers, right?
- It was just laughable. But we only went in for one play, right?
- And boy, the other team just never knew what hit ‘em them.
- Because when you’re only doing it for one play and you’re just not where you’re supposed to be,
- and freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,
- boy are you going to clean somebody’s clock for that one play.
- And that kind of enthusiasm was great.
- And to this day, I am most comfortable on a football field.
- I mean, it’s just one of those things where, you know,
- if I’m working a hard problem, people will see me
- wandering the hall with one of these things,
- and that’s just because, you know,
- when you do something young enough and you train for it,
- it just becomes a part of you.
- And I’m very glad that football was a part of my life.
- And if I didn’t get the dream of playing in the NFL, that’s OK.
- I’ve probably got stuff more valuable.
- Because looking at what’s going on in the NFL, I’m not sure those guys
- are doing so great right now.
- OK, and so one of the expressions I learned at Electronic Arts, which I love,
- which pertains to this,is
- "experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted."
- And I think that’s absolutely lovely.
- And the other thing about football is
- we send our kids out to play football or soccer or swimming or whatever it is,
- and it’s the first example of what I’m going to call
- a head fake, or indirect learning.
- We actually don’t want our kids to learn football.
- I mean, yeah, it’s really nice that I have a wonderful three-point stance and
- that I know how to do a chop block and all this kind of stuff.
- But we send our kids out to learn much more important things.
- Teamwork, sportsmanship, perseverance, etcetera, etcetera.
- And these kinds of head fake learning are absolutely important.
- And you should keep your eye out for them because they’re everywhere.
- All right. A simple one, being an author in the World Book Encyclopedia.
- When I was a kid,
- we had the World Book Encyclopedia on the shelf.
- For the freshman, this is paper. …
- We used to have these things called books.
- And after I had become somewhat of an authority on virtual reality,
- but not like a really important one,
- so I was at the level of people the World Book would badger.
- They called me up and I wrote an article,
- and this is Caitlin Kelleher
- and there's an article if you go to your local library
- where they still have copies of the World Book.
- Look under V for Virtual Reality, and there it is.
- And all I have to say is that
- having been selected to be an author in the World Book Encyclopedia,
- I now believe that Wikipedia is a perfectly fine source
- because I know what the quality control is
- for real encyclopedias
- They let me in.
- All right, next one.
- (Being like) Meeting Capitain Kirk
- At a certain point you just realize there are some things you are not gonna
- do, so maybe you just want to stand close to the people.
- And I mean, my god, what a role model for young people.
- I mean, this is everything you want to be,
- and what I learned that carried me forward in leadership later is that,
- you know, he wasn’t the smartest guy on the ship.
- I mean, Spock was pretty smart and McCoy was the doctor and Scotty was the engineer.
- And you sort of go, and what skill set did he have to get on this damn thing and run it?
- And, you know, clearly there is this skill set called leadership,
- and, you know, whether or not you like the series,
- there’s no doubt that there was a lot to be learned about how to lead people
- by watching this guy in action.
- And he just had the coolest damn toys!
- I mean, my god,
- I just thought it was fascinating as a kid
- that he had this thing and he could talk to the ship with it.
- I just thought that was just spectacular,
- and of course now I own one and it's smaller.
- So that’s kind of cool.
- So I got to achieve this dream.
- James T. Kirk, and his alter ego
- William Shatner, wrote a book,
- which I think was actually a pretty cool book.
- It was with Chip Walter
- who is a Pittsburgh- based author
- who is quite good, and they wrote a book on basically the science of Star Trek,
- you know, what has come true.
- And they went around to the top places around the country and looked at various things
- and they came here to study our virtual reality setup.
- And so we build a virtual reality for him, it looks something like that.
- We put it in, put it to red alert. He was a very good sport.
- It’s not like he saw that one coming.
- And it's really cool to meet your boyhood idol,
- but it’s even cooler when he comes to you
- to see what cool stuff you’re doing in your lab.
- And that was just a great moment.
- All right, winning stuffed animals.
- This may seem mundane to you, but when you're a little kid
- and you see the big buff guys walking around the amusement park
- and they've got all these big stuffed animals, right?
- And this is my lovely wife,
- and I have a lot of pictures of stuffed animals I've won.
- That's my dad posing with one that I won.
- I've won a lot of these animals.
- There's my dad, he did win that one, to his credit.
- And this was just a big part of my life and my family's life.
- But you know, I can hear the cynics.
- In this age of digitally manipulated images,
- maybe those bears really aren't in the pictures with me,
- or maybe I paid somebody five bucks to take a picture
- in the theme park next to the bear.
- And I said, how, in this age of cynicism can I convince people?
- And I said, I know, I can show them the bears! Bring them out.
- Just put them back against the wall.
- It's hard to hear you.
- Thanks honey.
- So here are some bears.
- We didn't have quite enough room in the moving truck,
- and anybody who would like a little piece of me at the end of this,
- feel free to come up and take a bear, first come, first served.
- All right, my next one. Being an Imagineer.
- This was the hard one.
- Believe me, getting to zero gravity is easier than becoming an Imagineer.
- When I was a kid, I was eight years old and our family
- took a trip cross-country to see Disneyland.
- And if you've ever seen the movie National Lampoon's Vacation,
- it was a lot like that! It was a quest.
- And these are real vintage photographs,
- and there I am in front of the castle.
- And there I am,
- and for those of you who are into foreshadowing, this is the Alice ride.
- And I just thought this was just the coolest
- environment I had ever been in, and instead of saying, gee,
- I want to experience this, I said, I want to make stuff like this.
- And so I bided my time and then I graduated with my Ph.D.
- from Carnegie Mellon, thinking that meant me infinitely qualified to do anything.
- And I dashed off my letters of applications to Walt Disney Imagineering,
- and they sent me some of the damm nicest go-to-hell letters I have ever gotten.
- I mean it was just,
- we have carefully reviewed your application and
- presently we do not have any positions available
- which require your particular qualifications.
- Now think about the fact that you're getting this from a place
- that's famous for guys who sweep the street.
- So that was a bit of a setback.
- But remember, 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. Because the brick walls are there
- to stop the people who don't want it badly enough.
- They're there to stop the "other people".
- All right, fast forward to 1991.
- We did a system back at the University of Virginia called Virtual Reality
- on Five Dollars a Day.
- Just one of those unbelievable spectacular things. I was so scared
- back in those days as a junior academic. Jim Foley's here,
- and I just love to tell this story. He knew my undergraduate advisor,
- Andy Van Dam, and I'm at my first conference and I'm just scared to death.
- And this icon in the user interface community walks up to me and just out
- of nowhere just gives me this huge bear hug and he says,
- that was from Andy.
- And that was when I thought, ok, maybe I can make it.
- Maybe I do belong.
- And a similar story is that this was just this unbelievable hit
- because at the time, everybody needed a half a million to do virtual reality.
- And everybody felt frustrated. And we literally hacked together a system
- for about five thousand dollars in parts
- and made a working VR system. And people were just like, oh my god,
- you know, the Hewlett Packard garage thing. This is so awesome.
- And so I'm giving this talk and the room has just gone wild,
- and during the Q and A, a guy named Tom Furness, who was one of the big names
- in virtual reality at the time, he goes up to the microphone and he introduces himself.
- I didn't know what he looked like but I sure as hell knew the name.
- And he asked a question. And I was like,
- I'm sorry did you say you were Tom Furness?
- And he said yes. I said, then I would love to answer your question,
- but first, will you have lunch with me tomorrow?
- And there’s a lot in that little moment,
- there’s a lot of humility but also
- asking a person where he can’t possibly say no.
- And so Imagineering a couple of years later was working
- on a virtual reality project. This was top secret.
- They were denying the existence of a virtual reality attraction after
- the time that the publicity department was running the TV commercials.
- So Imagineering really had nailed this one tight.
- And it was the Aladdin attraction where you would fly a magic carpet,
- and the head mounted display, sometimes known as gator vision.
- And so I had an in. As soon as the project had just,
- you know they start running the TV commercials,
- and I had been asked to brief the Secretary of Defense
- on the state of virtual reality. OK, Fred Brooks
- and I had been asked to brief the Secretary of Defense,
- and that gave me an excuse.
- So I called them up. I called Imagineering and I said, look,
- I'm briefing the Secretary of Defense.
- I'd like some materials on what you have
- because it's one of the best VR systems in the world.
- And they kind of pushed back. And I said, look, is all this patriotism
- stuff in the parks a farce?
- Ok. But they said this is so new the PR department
- doesn't have any footage for you, so I'm going to have to connect you
- straight through to the team who did the work. Jackpot!
- So I find myself on the phone with a guy named Jon Snoddy
- who is one of the most impressive guys I have ever met,
- and he was the guy running this team,
- and it's not surprising they had done impressive things.
- And so he sent me some stuff, we talked briefly and he sent me some stuff,
- and I said, hey, I'm going to be out in the area for a conference shortly,
- would you like to get together and have lunch? Translation: I'm going to lie to
- you and say that I have an excuse to be in the area
- so I don’t look too anxious
- but I would go to Neptune to have lunch with you!
- And so Jon said sure,
- and I spent something like 80 hours
- talking with all the VR experts in the world,
- saying if you had access to this one unbelievable project,
- what would you ask?
- And then I compiled all of that and I had to memorize it,
- which anybody that knows me knows that I have no memory at all,
- because I couldn’t go in looking like a dweeb with, you know, Hi, Question 72.
- So, I went in, and this was like a two hour lunch,
- and Jon must have thought he was talking to some phenomenal person,
- because all I was doing was channeling Fred Brooks and Ivan Sutherland
- and Andy Van Dam and people like that. And Henry Fuchs.
- So it's pretty easy to be smart when you're parroting smart people.
- And at the end of the lunch with Jon,
- I sort of, as we say in the business, made "the ask."
- And I said, you know, I have a sabbatical coming up.
- And he said, what's that?
- The beginnings of the culture clash.
- And so I talked with him about the possibility
- of coming there and working with him.
- And he said, well that's really good except, you know,
- you're in the business of telling people stuff
- and we're in the business of keeping secrets.
- And then what made Jon Snoddy Jon Snoddy was he said,
- but we'll work it out,
- which I really loved. The other thing that I learned from Jon Snoddy
- I could do easily an hour long talk just on what have I learned from Jon Snoddy.
- One of the things he told me was that
- wait long enough and people will surprise and impress you.
- He said, when you're pissed off at somebody and you're angry at them,
- you just haven't given them enough time.
- Just give them a little more time and they'll almost always impress you.
- And that really stuck with me. I think he's absolutely right on that one.
- So to make a long story short, we negotiated
- a legal contract. It was going to be the first - some people referred to it
- as the first and last paper ever published by Imagineering.
- That the deal was I go, I provide my own funding,
- I go for six months, I work with a project, we publish a paper.
- And then we meet our villain.
- I can't be all sweetness and light, because I have no credibility.
- Somebody's head's going to go on a stick.
- Turns out that the person who gets his head on a stick is a dean back at the
- University of Virginia. His name is not important.
- Let's call him Dean Wormer.
- And Dean Wormer has a meeting with me where I say I want to do this sabbatical
- thing and I've actually got the Imagineering guys to let an academic in,
- which is insane. I mean if Jon hadn’t gone nuts,
- this would never have been a possibility. This is a very secretive organization.
- And Dean Wormer looks at the paperwork and he says,
- well it says they're going to own your intellectual property. And I said, yeah,
- we got the agreement to publish the paper. There is no other IP.
- I don't do patentable stuff. And says, yeah, but you might.
- And so deal's off. Just go and get them to change that little clause there
- and then come back to me.
- I'm like, excuse me?
- And then I said to him, I want you to understand how important this is.
- If we can't work this out, I'm going to take an unpaid leave of absence
- and I’m just going to go there and I’m going to do this thing
- And he said, hey
- I might not even let you do that
- I mean you’ve got the IP in your head already
- and maybe they’re going to suck it out of you, so that’s not going to fly either.
- It's very important to know when you're in a pissing match.
- And it’s very important to get out of it as quickly as possible.
- So I said to him,
- well, let’s back off on this. Do we think this is a good idea at all?
- He said, I have no idea if this is a good idea.
- I was like, OK, well we've got common ground there.
- Then I said, well is this really your call?
- Isn't this the call of the Dean of Sponsored Research
- if it's an IP issue? And he said, yeah, that's true.
- I said, but so if he’s happy you’re happy? Yeah, then I’d be fine.
- Whoosh! Like Wile E. Coyote, I’m gone in a big ball of dust.
- And I find myself in Gene Block’s office, who is the most fantastic man in the world.
- And I start talking to Gene Block and I say let's start at the high level,
- since I don't want to have to back out again.
- So let's start at the high level. Do you think this is a good idea?
- He said, well if you're asking me
- if it's a good idea, I don't have very much information.
- All I know is that one of my star faculty members is in my office and he's
- really excited, so tell me more.
- Here's a lesson for everybody in administration.
- They both said the same thing.
- But think about how they said it, right?
- I don't know! Well,
- I don't have much information, but one of my start faculty members is here and
- he's all excited so I want to learn more.
- They’re both ways of saying I don’t know, but boy there’s a good way and a bad way.
- So anyway, we got it all worked out. I went to Imagineering.
- Sweetness and light. And all’s well that ends well.
- Some brick walls are made of flesh.
- So I worked on the Aladdin Project. It was absolutely spectacular,
- I mean just unbelievable.
- Here's my nephew Christopher. This was the apparatus.
- You would sit on this sort of motorcycle-type thing.
- And you would steer your magic carpet
- and you would put on the head-mounted display. The headmounted display is very
- interesting because it had two parts, and it was a very clever design.
- To get throughput up, the only part that touched the guest's head was this little cap
- and everything else clicked onto it - all the expensive hardware.
- So you could replicate the caps because they were basically free to manufacture.
- And this is what I really did is I was a cap cleaner during the sabbatical.
- I loved Imagineering. It was just a spectacular place.
- Just spectacular. Everything that I had dreamed. I loved the model shop.
- People crawling around on things the size of this room
- that are just big physical models.
- It was just an incredible place to walk around and be inspired.
- I'm always reminded of when I went there and people said,
- do you think your expectations are too high?
- And I said, you ever see the movie Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory?
- Where Gene Wilder says to the little boy Charlie, he's about to give him the
- chocolate factory. He says "Well Charlie, did anybody ever tell you the story
- of the little boy who suddenly got everything he ever wanted?"
- Charlie's eyes get like saucers and he says,
- “No, what happened to him?”
- Gene Wilder says, “He lived happily ever after.”
- OK, so working on the Aladdin VR, I described it as a once in every five
- years opportunity, and I stand by that assessment.
- And it forever changed me.
- It wasn't just that it was good work and I got to be a part of it.
- But it got me into the place of working with real people and
- real HCI user interface issues.
- Most HCI people live in this fantasy world of white collar laborers with
- Ph.D.s and masters degrees. And you know,
- until you got ice cream spilled on you, you're not doing field work.
- And more than anything else, from Jon Snoddy I learned how to put artists
- and engineers together, and that's been the real legacy.
- We published a paper. Just a nice academic cultural scandal.
- When we wrote the paper, the guys at
- Imagineering said, well let's do a nice big picture.
- Like you would in a magazine.
- And the SIGGRAPH committee, which accepted the paper,
- it was like this big scandal. Are they allowed to do that?
- There was no rule!
- So we published the paper and amazingly since then there's
- a tradition of SIGGRAPH papers having color figures on the first page.
- So I've changed the world in a small way.
- And then at the end of my six months, they came to me and they said,
- you want to do it for real? You can stay.
- And I said no.
- One of the only times in my life I have surprised my father.
- He was like, you're what?
- He said, since you were (small), you know, this is all you wanted,
- and now that you got it, and you're ... huh?
- There was a bottle of Maalox in my desk drawer. Be careful what you wish for.
- It was a particularly stressful place. Imagineering in general
- is actually not so Maalox-laden,
- but the lab I was in - oh, Jon left in the middle.
- And it was a lot like the Soviet Union.
- It was a little dicey for awhile.
- But it worked out OK. And if they had said,
- stay here or never walk in the building again, I would have done it.
- I would have walked away from tenure, I would have just done it.
- But they made it easy on me. They said you can have your cake and eat it too.
- And I basically became a day-a-week consultant for Imagineering,
- and I did that for about ten years.
- And that's one of the reasons you should all become professors.
- Because you can have your cake and eat it too.
- I went and consulted on things like Disney Quest.
- So there was the Virtual Jungle Cruise.
- And the best interactive experience I think ever done,
- and Jesse Schell gets the credit for this, Pirates of the Caribbean.
- Wonderful at DisneyQuest.
- And so those are my childhood dreams.
- And that's pretty good. I felt good about that.
- So then the question becomes,
- how can I enable the childhood dreams of others.
- And again, boy am I glad I became a professor.
- What better place to enable childhood dreams?
- Eh, maybe working at EA, I don’t know.
- That’d probably be a good close second.
- And this started in a very concrete realization that I could do this,
- because a young man named Tommy Burnett, when I was at the University of Virginia,
- came to me, was interested in joining my research group.
- And we talked about it, and he said, oh, and I have a childhood dream.
- It gets pretty easy to recognize them when they tell you.
- And I said, yes, Tommy, what is your childhood dream?
- He said, I want to work on the next Star Wars film.
- Now you got to remember the timing on this. Where's Tommy, Tommy's here today?
- What year would this have been? Your sophomore year.
- It was around 1993.
- Are you breaking anything back there young man? OK, all right,
- so in 1993. And I said to Tommy,
- you know they’re probably not going to make those next movies.
- And he said, no, THEY ARE.
- And Tommy worked with me for a number of years as an undergraduate
- and then as a staff member, and then I moved to Carnegie Mellon,
- every single member of my team came from Virginia
- to Carnegie Mellon except for Tommy
- because he got a better offer.
- And he did indeed work on all three of those films.
- And then I said, well that's nice, but you know,
- one at a time is kind of inefficient.
- And people who know me know that I'm an efficiency freak. So I said,
- can I do this in mass? Can I get people turned
- in such a way that they can be turned onto their childhood dreams?
- And I created a course,
- I came to Carnegie Mellon and I created a course called Building Virtual Worlds.
- It’s a very simple course. How many people here have ever been to any of the shows?
- OK, so some of you have an idea. For those of you who don’t,
- the course is very simple. There are 50 students
- drawn from all the different departments of the university.
- There are randomly chosen teams,
- four people per team, and they change every project.
- A project only lasts two weeks, so you do something, you make something,
- you show something, then I shuffle the teams,
- you get three new playmates and you do it again.
- And it's every two weeks, and so you get five projects during the semester.
- The first year we taught this course,
- it is impossible to describe how much of a tiger by the tail we had.
- I was just running the course because I wanted to see if we could do it.
- We had just learned how to do texture mapping on 3D graphics,
- and we could make stuff that looked half decent. But you know, we were running
- on really weak computers, by current standards.
- But I said I'll give it a try.
- And at my new university I made a couple of phone calls,
- and I said I want to cross-list this course to get all these other people.
- And within 24 hours it was cross-listed in five departments.
- I love this university. I mean it's the most amazing place.
- And the kids said, well what content do we make? I said, hell, I don't know.
- You make whatever you want.
- Two rules: no shooting violence and no pornography.
- Not because I'm opposed to those in particular, but you know,
- that's been done with VR, right?
- And you'd be amazed how many 19-year-old boys are completely out of ideas
- when you take those off the table.
- Anyway, so I taught the course.
- The first assignment, I gave it to them, they came back in two weeks
- and they just blew me away.
- I mean the work was so beyond, literally, my imagination,
- because I had copied the process from Imagineering's VR lab, but I had no idea
- what they could or couldn't do with it as undergraduates,
- and their tools were weaker,
- and they came back on the first assignment, and they did something
- that was so spectacular that I literally didn't, ten years as a professor
- and I had no idea what to do next. So I called up my mentor,
- and I called up Andy Van Dam.
- And I said, Andy,
- I just gave a two-week assignment, and they came back and did
- stuff that if I had given them a whole semester I would have given them all As.
- Sensei, what do I do?
- And Andy thought for a minute and he said,
- you go back into class tomorrow and you look them in the eye and you say,
- "Guys, that was pretty good, but I know you can do better."
- And that was exactly the right advice.
- Because what he said was, you obviously don't know where the bar should be,
- and you're only going to do them a disservice by putting it anywhere.
- And boy was that good advice
- because they just kept going.
- And during that semester it became this underground thing.
- I’d walk into a class with 50 students in it
- and there were 95 people in the room.
- Because it was the day we were showing work.
- And people's roommates and friends and parents
- I’d never had parents come to class before!
- It was flattering and somewhat scary.
- And so it snowballed
- and we had this bizarre thing of, well we’ve got to share this.
- If there’s anything I’ve been raised to do, it’s to share,
- and I said, we’ve got to show this at the end of the semester.
- We’ve got to have a big show.
- And we booked this room, McConomy. I have a lot of good memories in this room.
- And we booked it not because we thought we could fill it,
- but because it had the only AV setup that would work,
- because this was a zoo. Computers and everything.
- And then we filled it.
- And we more than filled it. We had people standing in the aisle.
- I will never forget the dean at the time, Jim Morris
- was sitting on the stage right about there.
- We had to kind of scoot him out of the way.
- And the energy in the room was like nothing I had ever experienced before.
- And President Cohen, Jerry Cohen
- was there, and he sensed the same thing.
- He later described it as like an Ohio State football pep rally.
- Except for academics.
- And he came over and he asked exactly the right question.
- He said, before you start, he said, where are these people from?
- He said, the audience, what departments are they from?
- And we polled them and it was all the departments.
- And I felt very good because I had just come to campus, he had just come to campus,
- and my new boss had seen in a very corporal way
- that this is the university that puts everybody together.
- And that made me feel just tremendous.
- So we did this campus-wide exhibition.
- People performed down here. They’re in costume,
- and we project just like this and you can see what’s going on.
- You can see what they're seeing in the head mount.
- There's a lot of big props, so there's a guy white water rafting.
- This is Ben in E.T.
- And yes, I did tell them if they didn't do the shot of the kids biking across
- the moon I would fail him. That is a true story.
- And I thought I’d show you
- just one world, and if we can get the lights down if that’s at all possible.
- No, ok, that means no. All right.
- All right we'll just do our best then.
- Oh, Hello there
- I'm Lonely
- Make me a world!
- Make me some trees
- Now, they're gonna turn this on its head, Watch closely
- The world doesn't want to go on to the next thing in the show
- So, she's ready to move on, and it's not.
- Waht are you doing?
- You can't end this now!
- But there's so many other worlds that have to go
- But our world is the best worl
- We're gonna shut you down
- Control + Alt + Delete.
- Not Control + Alt + Delete!
- We loved you!
- It was an unusual course.
- With some of the most brilliant, creative students from all across the campus.
- It just was a joy to be involved.
- And they took the whole stage performance aspect of this way too seriously
- And it became this campus phenomenon every year. People would line up for it.
- It was very flattering.
- And it gave kids a sense of excitement
- of putting on a show for people who were excited about it.
- And I think that that’s one of the best things you can give somebody
- the chance to show them what it feels like to
- make other people get excited and happy.
- I mean that’s a tremendous gift.
- We always try to involve the audience. Whether it was people with glow sticks
- or batting a beach ball around .... or driving.
- This is really cool.
- This technology actually got used at the Spiderman 3 premiere in L.A.,
- so the audience was controlling something on the screen, so that's kind of nice.
- And I don't have a class picture from every year,
- but I dredged all the ones that I do have, and all I can say is that
- what a privilege and an honor it was to teach that course
- for something like ten years.
- And all good things come to an end.
- And I stopped teaching that course about a year ago.
- People always ask me what was my favorite moment.
- I don't know if you could have a favorite moment.
- But boy there is one I'll never forget.
- This was a world with, I believe a roller skating ninja.
- And one of the rules was that we perform these things live
- and they all had to really work. And the moment it stopped working,
- we went to your backup videotape. And this was very embarrassing.
- So we have this ninja on stage and he's doing this roller skating thing
- and the world, it did not crash gently. Whoosh.
- And I come out, and I believe it was Steve, Audia, wasn't it? Where is he?
- OK, where is Steve? Ah, my man. Steve Audia.
- And talk about quick on your feet.
- I say, Steve, I'm sorry but your world has crashed
- and we're going to go to videotape.
- And he pulls out his ninja sword and says, I am dishonored! Whaaa!
- And just drops!
- And so I think it's very telling that my very favorite moment in ten years of
- this high technology course was a brilliant ad lib.
- And then when the videotape is done and the lights come up,
- he's lying there lifeless and his teammates drag him off!
- It really was a fantastic moment.
- And the course was all about bonding.
- People used to say, you know, what's going to make for a good world?
- I said, I can't tell you beforehand, but right before they present it
- I can tell you if the world's good just by the body language.
- If they're standing close to each other, the world is good.
- And BVW was a pioneering course,
- and I won’t bore you with all the details, but it wasn’t easy to do,
- and I was given this when I stepped down from the ETC and I think it's emblematic.
- If you're going to do anything that pioneering
- you will get those arrows in the back, and you just have to put up with it.
- I mean everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
- But at the end of the day, a whole lot of people had a whole lot of fun.
- When you've had something for ten years that you hold so precious,
- it's the toughest thing in the world to hand it over.
- And the only advice I can give you is, find somebody better than you
- to hand it to. And that's what I did.
- There was this kid at the VR studios way back when,
- and you didn't have to spend very long in Jesse Schell's orbit to go,
- the force is strong in this one.
- And one of my greatest - my two greatest accomplishments for Carnegie Mellon
- was that I got Jessica Hodgins and Jesse Schell to come here and join our faculty.
- And I was thrilled when I could hand this over to Jesse, and to no one's surprise,
- he has really taken it up to the next notch.
- And the course is in more than good hands - it's in better hands.
- But it was just one course.
- And then we really took it up a notch.
- And we created what I would call the dream fulfillment factory.
- Don Marinelli and I got together
- and with the university's blessing and encouragement,
- we made this thing out of whole cloth
- that was absolutely insane. Should never have been tried.
- All the sane universities didn't go near this kind of stuff.
- Creating a tremendous opportunistic void.
- So the Entertainment Technology Center was all about artists and technologists
- working in small teams to make things.
- It was a 2 year professional master's degree.
- And Don and I were two kindred spirits. We're very different
- anybody who knows us knows that we are very different people.
- And we liked to do things in a new way, and the truth of the matter is that
- we are both a little uncomfortable in academia.
- I used to say that I am uncomfortable as an academic
- because I come from a long line of people who actually worked for a living.
- I detect nervous laughter!
- And I want to stress, Carnegie Mellon is the only place in the world
- that the ETC could have happened.
- By far the only place.
- OK, this picture was Don's idea, OK?
- And we like to refer to this picture as Don Marinelli on guitar
- and Randy Pausch on keyboards.
- But we really did play up the left brain, right brain and it worked out
- really well that way.
- Don is an intense guy.
- And Don and I shared an office,
- and at first it was a small office.
- We shared an office for six years.
- You know, those of you who know Don know he's an intense guy.
- And you know, given my current condition, somebody was asking me ....
- this is a terrible joke, but I'm going to use it anyway.
- Because I know Don will forgive me. Somebody said,
- given your current condition, have you thought about whether you're going to go
- to heaven or hell? And I said,
- And I said, I don’t know, but if I’m going to hell,
- I’m due six years for time served!
- Sharing an office with Don was really like sharing an office with a tornado.
- There was just so much energy and you never knew which trailer was next, right?
- But you know something exciting was going to happen.
- And there was so much energy, and I do believe in giving credit
- where credit is due. So in my typically visual way,
- if Don and I were to split the success for the ETC,
- he clearly gets the lion's share of it. He did the lion's share of the work, ok,
- he had the lion's share of the ideas. It was a great teamwork.
- I think it was a great yin and a yang, but it was more like YIN and yang.
- And he deserves that credit
- and I give it to him because the ETC is a wonderful place.
- And he’s now running it and he’s taking it global. We’ll talk about that in a second.
- Describing the ETC is really hard, and I finally found a metaphor.
- Telling people about the ETC is like describing Cirque du Soleil
- if they've never seen it. Sooner or later you're going to make the mistake.
- You're going to say, well it's like a circus.
- And then you're dragged into this conversation about oh, how many tigers,
- how many lions, how many trapeze acts?
- And that misses the whole point.
- So when we say we're a master's degree,
- we're really not like any master's degree you've ever seen.
- Here's the curriculum
- The curriculum ended up looking like this. All I want to do is visually
- communicate to you that you do five projects in Building Virtual Worlds,
- then you do three more. All of your time is spent in small teams making stuff.
- None of that book learning thing. Don and I had no patience
- for the book learning thing.
- It's a master's degree. They already spent four years doing book learning.
- By now they should have read all the books.
- The keys to success were that Carnegie Mellon gave us the reins.
- Completely gave us the reins. We had no deans to report to.
- We reported directly to the provost, which is great because the provost
- is way too busy to watch you carefully.
- We were given explicit license to break the mold.
- It was all project based. It was intense, it was fun, and we took field trips!
- Every spring semester in January,
- we took all 50 students in the first year class
- and we'd take them out to Pixar, Industrial Light and Magic,
- and of course when you've got guys like Tommy there acting as host,
- right, it's pretty easy to get entree to these places.
- So we did things very, very differently.
- The kind of projects students would do, we did a lot of what we'd call
- edutainment.
- We developed a bunch of things with the Fire Department of New York,
- a network simulator for training firefighters,
- using video game-ish type technology to teach people useful things.
- That's not bad.
- Companies did this strange thing. They put in writing,
- we promise to hire your students.
- I've got the EA and Activision ones here. I think there are now,
- how many, five? Drew knows I bet.
- So there are five written agreements.
- I don't know of any other school that has this kind of written agreement
- with any company. And so that's a real statement.
- And these are multiple year things, so they're agreeing to
- hire people for summer internships that we have not admitted yet.
- That's a pretty strong statement about the quality of the program.
- And Don, as I said, he's now, he's crazy.
- In a wonderful complimentary way.
- He's doing these things where I'm like, oh my god.
- He's not here tonight because he's in Singapore
- because there's going to be an ETC campus in Singapore.
- There's already on in Australia and there's going to be on in Korea.
- So this is becoming a global phenomenon.
- So I think this really speaks volumes about all the other universities.
- It's really true that Carnegie Mellon is the only university that can do this.
- We just have to do it all over the world now.
- One other big success about the ETC is teaching people about feedback...
- oh! God! I hear the nervous laughter from the students.
- I had forgotten the delayed shock therapy effect of these bar charts.
- When you are taking Building Virtual Worlds,
- every 2 weeks we get peer feedback. We put that all into a big spreadsheet
- and at the end of the semester, you had 3 teammates per project, five projects,
- that's 15 data points, that's statistically valid.
- And you get a bar chart telling you on a
- ranking of how easy you are to work with,
- where you stacked up against your peers.
- Boy that's hard feedback to ignore.
- Some still managed, but...
- But for the most part, people looked at that and went, wow,
- I've got to take it up a notch.
- I better start thinking about what I'm saying to people in these meetings.
- And that is the best gift an educator can give is to get somebody
- to become self reflective.
- So the ETC was wonderful, but even the ETC
- and even as Don scales it around the globe,
- it's still very labor intensive, you know.
- It's not Tommy one-at-a-time. It's not a research group ten at a time.
- It's 50 or 100 at a times for campuses.
- But I wanted something infinitely scalable.
- Scalable to the point where millions or
- tens of millions of people could chase their dreams with something.
- And you know, I guess that kind of a goal
- really does make me the Mad Hatter.
- So Alice
- is a project that we worked on for a long, long time.
- It’s a novel way to teach computer programming.
- Kids make movies and games. The head fake – again, we’re back to the head fakes.
- The best way to teach somebody something
- is to have them think they're learning something else.
- I've done it my whole career.
- And the head fake here is that they're learning to program
- but they just think they're making movies and video games.
- This thing has already been downloaded well over a million times.
- There are eight textbooks that have been written about it.
- 10% of U.S. colleges are using it now.
- And it's not the good stuff yet.
- The good stuff is coming in the next version.
- I, like Moses, get to see the promised land, but I won't get to set foot in it.
- And that’s OK,
- because I can see it.
- And the vision is clear.
- Millions of kids having fun
- while learning something hard.
- That's pretty cool. I can deal with that as a legacy.
- The next version's going to come out in 2008.
- It's going to be teaching the Java language if you want them to know
- they're learning Java.
- Otherwise they'll just think that they're writing movie scripts.
- And we’re getting the characters from
- the bestselling PC video game in history, The Sims.
- And this is already working in the lab,
- so there's no real technological risk.
- I don't have time to thank and mention everybody in the Alice team,
- I just want to say that Dennis Cosgrove is going to be building this,
- has been building this. He is the designer. This is his baby.
- And for those of you who are wondering, well, in some number of months who
- should I be emailing about the Alice project, where's Wanda Dann?
- Oh, there you are. Stand up, let them all see you.
- - Everybody say, Hi Wanda. - Hi, Wanda.
- Send her the email.
- And I'll talk a little bit more about Caitlin Kelleher,
- but she's graduated with her Ph.D., and she's at Washington University,
- and she's going to be taking this up a notch
- and going to middle schools with it.
- So, grand vision and to the extent that you can live on in something,
- I will live on in Alice.
- All right, so now the third part of the talk. Lessons learned.
- We've talked about my dreams.
- We've talked about helping other people enable their dreams.
- Somewhere along the way there's got to be some aspect of what lets you get to
- achieve your dreams.
- First one is the rule of parents, mentors and students.
- I was blessed to have been born to two incredible people.
- This is my mother on her 70th birthday.
- I am back here. I have just been lapped.
- This is my dad riding a roller coaster on his 80th birthday.
- And he points out that he's not only brave,
- he's talented because he did win that big bear the same day.
- My dad was so full of life,
- anything with him was an adventure.
- I don't know what's in that bag, but I know it's cool.
- My dad dressed up as Santa Claus,
- but he also did very, very significant things
- to help lots of people.
- This is a dormitory in Thailand that my mom and dad underwrote.
- And every year about 30 students get to go to school who wouldn't have otherwise
- This is something my wife and I have also been involved in heavily.
- And these are the kind of things that I think
- everybody ought to be doing. Helping others.
- But the best story I have about my dad - unfortunately my dad passed away a
- little over a year ago
- and when we were going through his things,
- he had fought in World War II in the Battle of the Bulge,
- and when we were going through his things,
- we found out he had been awarded the Bronze Star for Valor.
- My mom didn't know it.
- In 50 years of marriage it had just never come up.
- My mom.
- Mothers are people who love even when you pull their hair.
- And I have two great mom stories.
- When I was here studying to get my Ph.D.
- and I was taking something called the theory qualifier,
- which I can definitively say
- is the second worst thing in my life after chemotherapy.
- And I was complaining to my mother about how hard this test was
- and how awful it was,
- and she just leaned over and she patted me on the arm and she said,
- we know how you feel honey, and remember when your father was your age
- he was fighting the Germans.
- After I got my Ph.D., my mother took great relish in introducing me as,
- this is my son, he's a doctor but not the kind that helps people.
- These slides are a little bit dark, but when I was in high school
- I decided to paint my bedroom.
- I always wanted a submarine and an elevator.
- And the great thing about this...
- what can I say?
- And the great thing about this is they let me do it.
- And they didn't get upset about it. And it's still there.
- If you go to my parent's house it's still there.
- And anybody who is out there who is a parent,
- if your kids want to paint their bedroom, as a favor to me let them do it.
- It'll be OK. Don't worry about resale value on the house.
- Other people who help us besides our parents: our teachers, our mentors,
- our friends, our colleagues.
- God, what is there to say about Andy Van Dam?
- When I was a freshman at Brown, he was on leave.
- And all I heard about was this is Andy Van Dam.
- He was like a mythical creature.
- Like a centaur, but like a really pissed off centaur.
- And everybody was like really sad that he was gone,
- but kind of more relaxed?
- And I found out why. Because I started working for Andy.
- I was a teaching assistant for him as a sophomore.
- And I was quite an arrogant young man.
- And I came in to some office hours and of course it was nine o'clock at night
- and Andy was there at office hours, which is your first clue
- as to what kind of professor he was.
- And I come bounding in and you know, I'm just I'm going to save the world.
- There're all these kids waiting for help, da da, da da, da da, da da, da da.
- And afterwards, Andy literally Dutch-uncled - he's Dutch,
- right? He Dutch-uncled me.
- And he put his arm on my shoulders and we went for a little walk and he said,
- Randy, it's such a shame
- that people perceive you as so arrogant.
- Because it's going to limit what you're going to be able to accomplish in life.
- What a hell of a way to word "you're being a jerk." Right?
- He doesn't say you're a jerk.
- He says people are perceiving you this way and he says the downside
- is it's going to limit what you're going to be able to accomplish.
- When I got to know Andy better, the beatings became more direct, but.
- I could tell you Andy stories for a month,
- but the one I will tell you is that when it came time to start thinking
- about what to do after graduating from Brown,
- it had never occurred to me in a million years to go to graduate school.
- Just out of my imagination.
- It wasn't the kind of thing people from my family did.
- We got, say, what do you call them? .... jobs.
- And Andy said, no, don't go do that. Go get a Ph.D. Become a professor.
- And I said, why?
- And he said, because
- you're such a good salesman that any company that gets you
- is going to use you as a salesman. And you might as well be
- selling something worthwhile like education.
- Thanks.
- Andy was my first boss, so to speak.
- I was lucky enough to have a lot of bosses.
- That red circle is way off. Al is over here.
- I don't know what the hell happened there.
- He's probably watching this on the webcast going, my god he's targeting
- and he still can't aim!
- I don't want to say much about the great bosses I've had
- except that they were great.
- And I know a lot of people in the world that have had bad bosses,
- and I haven't had to endure that experience
- and I'm very grateful to all the people that I ever had to have worked for.
- They have just been incredible.
- But its not just our bosses, we learn from our students.
- I think the best head fake of all time comes from Caitlin Kelleher.
- Excuse me, Doctor Caitlin Kelleher,
- who just finished up here and is starting at Washington University,
- and she looked at Alice when it was an easier way to learn to program, and
- she said, yeah, but why is that fun?
- I was like, "cause uh, I'm a compulsive male ...I like to make the
- little toy soldiers move around by my command, and that's fun."
- And she was the one who said,
- no, we'll just approach it all as a storytelling activity.
- And she's done wonderful work showing that,
- particularly with middle school girls,
- if you present it as a storytelling activity, they're
- perfectly willing to learn how to write computer software.
- So all-time best head fake award goes to Caitlin Kelleher's dissertation.
- President Cohen, when I told him I was going to do this talk,
- he said, please tell them about having fun,
- because that's what I remember you for.
- And I said, I can do that, but it's kind of like a fish talking
- about the importance of water.
- I mean I don't know how to not have fun.
- I'm dying and I'm having fun.
- And I'm going to keep having fun every day I have left.
- Because there's no other way to play it.
- So my next piece of advice is, you just have to decide if you're
- a Tigger or an Eeyore.
- I think I'm clear where I stand on the great Tigger/Eeyore debate.
- Never lose the childlike wonder.
- It's just too important. It's what drives us.
- Help others.
- Denny Proffitt knows more about helping other people.
- He's forgotten more than I'll ever know. He's taught me by example
- how to run a group, how to care about people.
- M.K. Haley I have a theory that people who come from large families
- are better people because they've just had to learn to get along.
- M. K. Haley comes from a family with 20 kids.
- Yeah. Unbelievable.
- And she always says it's kind of fun to do the impossible.
- When I first got to Imagineering,
- she was one of the people who dressed me down,
- and she said, I understand you've joined the Aladdin Project. What can you do?
- And I said, well I'm a tenured professor of computer science.
- And she said, well that's very nice Professor Boy,
- but that's not what I asked. I said what can you do?
- And you know I mentioned sort of my working class roots.
- We keep what is valuable to us, what we cherish.
- And I've kept my letterman's jacket all these years.
- I used to like wearing it in grad school,
- and one of my friends, Jessica Hodgins would say,
- why do you wear this letterman's jacket?
- And I looked around at all the non-athletic guys around me
- who were much smarter than me. And I said, because I can.
- And so she thought that was a real hoot
- so one year she made for me this little Raggedy Randy doll.
- He's got a little letterman's jacket too.
- That's my all-time favorite.
- It's the perfect gift for the egomaniac in your life.
- So, I've met so many wonderful people along the way.
- Loyalty is a two way street. There was a young man named Dennis Cosgrove
- at the University of Virginia,
- and when he was a young man,
- let's just say things happened.
- And I found myself talking to a dean.
- No, not that dean.
- Anyway, this dean really had it in for Dennis, and I could never figure out why
- because Dennis was a fine fellow.
- But for some reason this Dean really had it in for him.
- And I ended up basically saying, no, I vouch for Dennis. And the guy says,
- you're not even tenured yet and you're telling me you're going to vouch
- for this sophomore, junior or whatever? I think he was a junior at the time.
- I said, yeah, I'm going to vouch for him because I believe in him.
- And the dean said, and I'm going to remember this
- when your tenure case comes up. And I said, deal.
- I went back to talk to Dennis and I said, I would really appreciate you ...
- that would be good.
- But loyalty is a two-way street. That was god knows how many years ago,
- but that's the same Dennis Cosgrove who's carrying Alice forward.
- He's been with me all these years.
- And if we only had one person to send in a space probe to meet an alien species,
- I'm picking Dennis.
- You can't give a talk at Carnegie Mellon without acknowledging
- one very special person.
- And that would be Sharon Burks.
- I joked with her, I said, well look, if you're retiring,
- it's just not worth living anymore.
- Sharon is so wonderful it's beyond description,
- and for all of us who have been helped by her, it's just indescribable.
- I love this picture because it puts here together with Syl, and Syl is great
- because Syl gave the best piece of advice pound-for-pound that I have ever
- heard. And I think all young ladies should hear this.
- Syl said, "it took me a long time but I've finally figured it out.
- When it comes to men that are romantically interested in you,
- it's really simple. Just ignore everything they say
- and only pay attention to what they do."
- It's that simple. It's that easy.
- And I thought back to my bachelor days and I said:
- Damn!
- Never give up. I didn't get into Brown University.
- I was on the wait list. I called them up
- and they eventually decided that it was
- getting really annoying to have me call everyday so they let me in.
- At Carnegie Mellon I didn't get into graduate school. Andy had mentored me.
- He said, go to graduate school, you're going to Carnegie Mellon.
- All my good students go to Carnegie Mellon.
- Yeah, you know what's coming.
- And so he said, you're going to go to Carnegie Mellon no problem.
- What he had kind of forgotten was that the
- difficulty of getting to the top Ph.D. program in the country
- had really gone up.
- And he also didn't know I was going to tank my GRE's
- because he believed in me.
- Which, based on my board scores was a really stupid idea.
- And so I didn't get into Carnegie Mellon.
- No one knows this. 'Til today I'm telling the story.
- I was declined admission to Carnegie Mellon.
- And I was a bit of an obnoxious little kid.
- I went into Andy's office and I dropped the rejection letter on his desk.
- And I said, I just want you to know what your letter of recommendation
- goes for at Carnegie Mellon.
- And before the letter had hit his desk,
- his hand was on the phone and he said,
- I will fix this.
- And I said, no no no, I don't want to do it that way.
- That's not the way I was raised.
- Maybe some other graduate schools will see fit to admit me.
- And he said, look, Carnegie Mellon's where you're going to be.
- I'll make you a deal.
- Go visit the other schools. Because I did get into all the other schools.
- He said, go visit the other schools and if you really don't feel comfortable
- at any of them, then will you let me call Nico?
- Nico being Nico Habermann and I said, OK deal.
- I went to the other schools. Without naming them by name
- Berkeley, Cornell.
- They managed to be so unwelcoming that I found myself saying to Andy,
- you know, I'm going to get a job. And he said, no, you're not.
- And he picked up the phone and he talked in Dutch.
- And he hung up the phone and he said, Nico says if you're serious,
- be in his office tomorrow morning at 8 a.m.
- And for those of you who know Nico, this is really scary.
- So I'm in Nico Habermann's office the next morning at eight a.m.
- and he's talking with me,
- and frankly I don't think he's that keen on this meeting.
- I don't think he's that keen at all.
- And he says, Randy,
- why are we here?
- And I said, because Andy phoned you? Heh-heh.
- And I said, well, since you admitted me, I have won a fellowship.
- The Office of Naval Research is a very prestigious fellowship.
- I've won this fellowship and that wasn't in my file when I applied.
- And Nico said, a fellowship, money, we have plenty of money.
- That was back then.
- He said, we have plenty of money.
- Why do you think having a fellowship makes any difference to us?
- And he looked at me. There are moments that change your life.
- And ten years later if you know in retrospect
- it was one of those moments, you're blessed.
- But to know it at the moment ...
- with Nico staring through your soul.
- And I said, I didn't mean to imply anything about the money.
- It’s just that it was an honor. There were only 15 given nationwide.
- And I did think it was an honor that would be something that would be meritorious.
- And I apologize if that was presumptuous.
- And he smiled. And that was good.
- So. How do you get people to help you? You can't get there alone.
- People have to help you and I do believe in karma. I believe in paybacks.
- You get people to help you by telling the truth. Being earnest.
- I'll take an earnest person over a hip person every day,
- because hip is short term. Earnest is long term.
- Apologize when you screw up
- and focus on other people, not on yourself.
- And I thought, how do I possibly make a concrete example of that?
- Do we have a concrete example of focusing on somebody else over there?
- Could we bring it out?
- See, yesterday was my wife's birthday.
- If there was ever a time I might be entitled to have the focus on me,
- it might be the last lecture.
- But no, I feel very badly that my wife didn't really get a proper birthday,
- and I thought it would be very nice if 500 people...
- You gotta blow it out.
- And now you all have an extra reason to come to the reception.
- Remember brick walls let us show our dedication.
- They are there to separate us from the people who don't really want to
- achieve their childhood dreams.
- Don't bail. The best of the gold's at the bottom of barrels of crap.
- What Steve didn't tell you was the big sabbatical at EA,
- I had been there for 48 hours
- and they loved the ETC, we were the best, we were the favorites,
- and then somebody pulled me aside and said, oh, by the way,
- we're about to give 8 million dollars to USC to build a program just like yours.
- We're hoping you can help them get it off the ground.
- And then Steve came along and said, they said what? Oh god.
- And to quote a famous man, I will fix this.
- And he did. Steve has been an incredible partner.
- And we have a great relationship, personal and professional.
- And he has certainly been point man
- on getting a gaming asset to help teach millions of kids
- and that's just incredible.
- But, you know, it certainly would have been reasonable for me to leave
- 48 hours after that sabbatical,
- but it wouldn't have been the right thing to do,
- and when you do the right thing, good stuff has a way of happening.
- Get a feedback loop and listen to it.
- Your feedback loop can be this dorky spreadsheet thing I did,
- or it can just be one great man who tells you what you need to hear.
- The hard part is the listening to it. Anybody can get chewed out.
- It's the rare person who says, oh my god, you were right.
- As opposed to, no wait, the real reason is ...
- We've all heard that.
- When people give you feedback, cherish it and use it.
- Show gratitude.
- When I got tenure I took all of my research team
- down to Disneyworld for a week.
- And one of the other professors at Virginia said, how can you do that?
- I said these people just busted their ass and got me the best job in
- the world for life. How could I not do that?
- Don't complain. Just work harder.
- That's a picture of Jackie Robinson. It was in his contract not to complain,
- even when the fans spit on him.
- Be good at something, it makes you valuable.
- Work hard. I got tenure a year early as Steve mentioned.
- Junior faculty members used to say to me, wow,
- you got tenure early. What's your secret?
- I said, it's pretty simple. Call my any Friday night in my
- office at ten o'clock and I'll tell you.
- Find the best in everybody.
- One of the things that Jon Snoddy as I said told me, is
- that you might have to wait a long time, sometimes years,
- but people will show you their good side.
- Just keep waiting no matter how long it takes.
- No one is all evil. Everybody has a good side, just keep waitin, it'll come out.
- And be prepared. Luck is truly where preparation meets opportunity.
- So today’s talk was about my childhood dreams,
- enabling the dreams of others,
- and some lessons learned.
- But did you figure out the head fake?
- It's not about how to achieve your dreams.
- It's about how to lead your life.
- If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself.
- The dreams will come to you.
- Have you figured out the second head fake?
- The talk's not for you, it's for my kids.
- Thank you all, good night.
- Great thanks to Randy Pausch for sharing this, and to Ernesto M. Costa, for Uploading and subtitling
- ERNESTO@IG.COM.BR. and Thank YOU for watching !!! R0n1n


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