This is sincerely great, but I am not good with sincerity.
I'm as PoMo-ironic as anyone, but this is amazing.
We live in the age of self-help: we have the luxury, in the West anyway, of thinking about ourselves and our problems - our mostly internal problems - more than any other group of people in history.
For the most part, we don't till the land. We live long lives. We have food, and shelter, and the basics. Even those of us who live in comparative squalor - not the very poor or the homeless, but people who, economically speaking, are in the lower classes, do okay compared to say, your typical African today, or your typical North American 150 years ago. You're reading this, and that means that you've got the Internet, and some time, and some space. Those things are all pretty amazing and pretty luxurious compared to what our lives could be like.
I mention this briefly because, in the strictest, most Maslowian sense of it all, out hierarchy of needs is pretty well developed. We have the luxury - or the curse - of a massive amount of self-reflexion, and because of that I think we focus on problems that we shouldn't focus on.
Which brings me back to the whole self-help thing. the good part of it is that most of the industry just repeats essential truths, and these are things we need to hear over and over and remind ourselves of often. Life is okay. Be good to people. For the most part, the work you put in is directly correlative to the result achieved. these are good things to know and to hear. But we move away from these things as we get more and more wrapped up in this quest for self-knowledge: we spin more and more intricate webs of self-thought, and all of a sudden we are thinking about our problems too much, until we become our problems. the fundamental truths, the really simple things get lost, and the problem becomes the thing, instead of the solution.
So I find it really amazing when someone can present these truths, these same lessons, the things we should all know but convince ourselves aren't as important as our problems, in a way that cuts through all the crap. Here's a guy who's done it.
His name is Randy Pausch, and this is his "last lecture," a tradition in which an academic hypothesizes the last lecture they would ever give if they knew they were going to die.
Randy is going to die. He has inoperable cancer and a few months to live. About a million people have viewed his full, hour-long lecture online already: this is an 11-minute version, and I found it genuinely inspiring. Now, it's from an episode of Oprah: she is both the best and worst aspects of the self-help industry rolled into one ginormous brand, but this, for me, is what it is: a man with everything who is going to lose it all and chooses to live each day focusing on what he has, not what he is going to lose. I find that genuinely inspiring, and I'm not moved by much. If he can do it - this guy who is going to leave his three young children soon for no good reason other than his pancreas sucks - then I can too, right?
So I recommend that you watch this. If you've got an hour, you can see the full-length version here. In case you don't have the 11 minutes that this shorter version takes, here are the big lessons in a nutshell: choose people over things; work hard and the rest will come; decide to have fun every day; live your life the right way and things will sort themselves out for the most part.
I don't know why I need a dying man to tell me that, but I'm glad he did.
We live in the age of self-help: we have the luxury, in the West anyway, of thinking about ourselves and our problems - our mostly internal problems - more than any other group of people in history.
For the most part, we don't till the land. We live long lives. We have food, and shelter, and the basics. Even those of us who live in comparative squalor - not the very poor or the homeless, but people who, economically speaking, are in the lower classes, do okay compared to say, your typical African today, or your typical North American 150 years ago. You're reading this, and that means that you've got the Internet, and some time, and some space. Those things are all pretty amazing and pretty luxurious compared to what our lives could be like.
I mention this briefly because, in the strictest, most Maslowian sense of it all, out hierarchy of needs is pretty well developed. We have the luxury - or the curse - of a massive amount of self-reflexion, and because of that I think we focus on problems that we shouldn't focus on.
Which brings me back to the whole self-help thing. the good part of it is that most of the industry just repeats essential truths, and these are things we need to hear over and over and remind ourselves of often. Life is okay. Be good to people. For the most part, the work you put in is directly correlative to the result achieved. these are good things to know and to hear. But we move away from these things as we get more and more wrapped up in this quest for self-knowledge: we spin more and more intricate webs of self-thought, and all of a sudden we are thinking about our problems too much, until we become our problems. the fundamental truths, the really simple things get lost, and the problem becomes the thing, instead of the solution.
So I find it really amazing when someone can present these truths, these same lessons, the things we should all know but convince ourselves aren't as important as our problems, in a way that cuts through all the crap. Here's a guy who's done it.
His name is Randy Pausch, and this is his "last lecture," a tradition in which an academic hypothesizes the last lecture they would ever give if they knew they were going to die.
Randy is going to die. He has inoperable cancer and a few months to live. About a million people have viewed his full, hour-long lecture online already: this is an 11-minute version, and I found it genuinely inspiring. Now, it's from an episode of Oprah: she is both the best and worst aspects of the self-help industry rolled into one ginormous brand, but this, for me, is what it is: a man with everything who is going to lose it all and chooses to live each day focusing on what he has, not what he is going to lose. I find that genuinely inspiring, and I'm not moved by much. If he can do it - this guy who is going to leave his three young children soon for no good reason other than his pancreas sucks - then I can too, right?
So I recommend that you watch this. If you've got an hour, you can see the full-length version here. In case you don't have the 11 minutes that this shorter version takes, here are the big lessons in a nutshell: choose people over things; work hard and the rest will come; decide to have fun every day; live your life the right way and things will sort themselves out for the most part.
I don't know why I need a dying man to tell me that, but I'm glad he did.
posted by Max at 10:56 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home