Approach life without taking yourself too seriously, but be prepared to work hard
The last lecture by Randy Pausch is a sad book at times as it is about a professor with pancreatic cancer who distils his advice on work and life to pass on to others, in particular his children.
Key points:
- Be earnest: keep things simple and minimalist, both in terms of your work and other habits
- Have a long-term mindset with everything that you do
- Surrender petty arguments; it is always better to be happy together than to ‘win’ these little fights
- Encourage group working of students and force it upon them with a set of rules (e.g. have to sit next to someone else and then have to give each person x-minutes to talk)
- To help reach the top you have to work really hard, and don’t complain about it, you can do something else instead if you want to
- [This is written from the perspective of a high-performing university computer scientist.]
- Write thank you notes, included to people when they wouldn’t necessarily expect it
- Send out ‘mint thins’ (i.e. After Eights, I assume) to people when you want them to do something (e.g. review a paper) and say that they can only eat them once they’ve done the task
- A bad apology is worse than no apology at all. A good apology is:
- What I did was wrong,
- I feel bad because I hurt you, and
- How do I make it better?
- Make an active decision to be an optimist (a ‘Tigger’, rather than an Eeyore).
This book sits in my mind along with others like Road Less Travelled and 12 Rules for life as having a few nuggets of well articulated thoughts on how to lead a meaningful life. I believe that if I can triangulate the common themes (or the most convincing ones) from >4 of these books then they are likely to be important maxims.
More books like this:
- 12 rules for life by Jordan Peterson
- The road less travelled by M. Scott Peck
- Magic of thinking big by David J. Schwartz
Here are one, two, and three other summaries/reflections on this book.
