Achieving your childhood dreams

Dr. Randy Pausch gave what is known as his last lecture called Really achieving your childhood dreams. This speech was given on September 18th 2007 at Carnegie Mellon University, the occasion for this was a tradition that CMU has when a professor is retiring. The retiring professor is required to give an hour long speech that is essentially their goodbye.The purpose of the speech is to say everything they would want to say if they were dying, Pausch who is a professor at CMU was actually dying he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and only had 3 to 6 months to live. Pausch gave his last lecture front of 400+ colleagues and students.
The subject of Pausch's speech was achieving your childhood dreams, his speech had 3 main points; enabling the dreams of others, how you can achieve your dreams, and lessons learned. With each topic Pausch used a variety of slides, pictures, props, and stories to support his speech. At one point during the speech Pausch talked about achieving one of his childhood dreams which was to experience zero gravity, he showed his achievement by showing the audience a video of himself at zero gravity. Pausch used a picture of a brick wall throughout the speech with a caption that said “Brick walls are there for a reason, they let us prove how badly we want things” (18:23) he constantly used this picture to cement it in his audience's head. The use of pictures, props etc were very effective in Pausch’s speech, because the audience had a chance to see exactly who and what he was talking about.
The use of the powerpoint slides really contributed to the speech because, the audience could easily follow along throughout the speech without difficulty. I also think that incorporating the videos that went along...

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...d a lot about the people who inspired him or who he looked up to and one his mentors had said “You obviously don’t know where the bar should be and you’re doing them a disservice by putting it anywhere.” (35:09) I thought it was great that Pausch put this into his speech because his whole speech was on achieving something, and that quote directly applies to it by saying don’t set yourself at a certain standard always aim beyond that.
What I learned from Pausch’s speech that would make me a better speaker would be to speak about my subject in a passionate way because the more passionate that you are about what you have to say the more likely you’ll make a connection with your audience, which is important Pausch’s speech was more like a conversation between himself and the people he was speaking to he engaged them. I think that’s the most important thing I learned.