Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

Dying of pancreatic tumors isn't a thing many people would see the good side of, but Carnegie Mellon university professor Randy Pausch transformed that. Individuals across the world had been motivated and changed when Randy's "The Last Lecture" video went viral on-line.

In contrast to a lot of viral movies, The Last Lecture, was not supposed to be comedy, it wasn't inadvertently captured on video and Randy didn't try to promote it. It was its concept that made it blow up across the net. A beautiful look at living your young wishes, it grabbed the attention of mainstream mass media with Pausch being invited to speak on Oprah as well as a 60 minute long appearance with Diane Sawyer on ABC. Right after his eventual passing from the terminal cancer, ABC even ran a homage to Randys life and his currently well-known lecture.

Watching Randy discuss his childhood dreams of zero gravity, sports and Star Trek, you recognized just how typical Randy was but how he became extraordinary with his desire to complete these aspirations and much more throughout his life. His powerful desire to achieve his dreams was only overshadowed by his wish to see others achieve theirs. For example his only team member who had not moved from the University of Virginia to Carnegie Mellon with him. This team member's dream was to work on the next Star Wars movie. The reason he failed to move with Pausch to Carnegie Mellon? He accepted a position working at Lucasfilm, where he eventually worked on three Star Wars films.

In a world with a lot of bad things happening every day and crazy videos of men and women being hit in the balls with soccer balls going viral it was a nice change to see Pausch's remarkable lecture with over 1,000,000 views on the web within 30 days of it being uploaded.