—Jean Jacques Rousseau

Imagine you received a dire diagnosis that you had only a short time to live. How would you feel? What would you do? Would you feel cheated? What would you tell people?

Randy Pausch received such a diagnosis. His story is well known to most people, and this week’s book, The Last Lecture, has had a deep impact on many people since it was published in 2008. Here’s a short review: Everyone should read The Last Lecture. Everyone.

Here’s a longer review: As a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, Pausch always knew there would, at some point, be a last lecture in his career. Due to terminal pancreatic cancer, it came much earlier than he expected. The lecture itself, delivered Sept. 18, 2007, was entitled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” and it wasn’t about dying. In fact, the lecture was about living. As Pausch writes, “I lectured about the joy of life, about how much I appreciated life, even with so little of my own left. I talked about honesty, integrity, gratitude, and other things I hold dear. And I tried hard not to be boring.”

His book fleshes out his lecture and helps him tell his children what he wanted them to know after cancer would claim his life. It’s moving and sad and inspiring, just as you would expect it to be. In sections entitled “Adventures…and Lessons Learned,” “Enabling the Dreams of Others,” “It’s About How to Live Your Life,” and “Final Remarks,” Pausch shares insights and advice suitable for everyone, not just his children.

In one chapter, he shares some great advice about time:

• Time must be explicitly managed, like money.
• You can always change your plan, but only if you have one.
• Ask yourself: Are you spending your time on the right things?
• Develop a good filing system.
• Rethink the telephone.
• Delegate.
• Take a time out.

And then this sobering observation: “Time is all you have. And you may find one day that you have less that you think.” Randy Pausch died on July 25, 2008, less than four months after the book was published. This is an admirable legacy from which we can all benefit.

Find The Last Lecture on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

This little journey we’re on that we call life takes some interesting turns. Sometimes we reach a new summit and the view is breathtaking, only to later find ourselves in another valley, unsure of where the road is leading.

To end up on peaks of significance, the key is to take time and find our bearings. In Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance, author Bob Buford suggests that life has two halves, and we need to use a personal halftime to effectively transition from a focus on success to a focus on significance. As Buford states,

One of the most common characteristics of a person who is nearing the end of the first half is that unquenchable desire to move from success to significance. After a first half of building a career and trying to become financially secure, we’d like to do something in the second half that is more meaningful—something that rises about perks and paychecks into the stratosphere of significance.

After outlining “The First Half” and “Halftime,” Buford explains different ways one can find significance in “The Second Half”—identifying a life mission, lifelong learning, money issues, etc.

The legendary management guru Peter Drucker, whose wisdom is sprinkled throughout the book, was a mentor to Buford. Toward the end of the book, he writes, “Peter once said to me, ‘The beginning of adult life is when you ask the question, “What do I want to be remembered for?”’ Essentially, this is the question of halftime.”

What do you want to be remembered for? Get this book and answer that question.

Find Halftime on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

Research has shown that money motivates well for rudimentary tasks but isn’t that effective for more complex work.

What we really crave is self-direction, mastery and the desire to make a contribution.

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Think with the end in mind and be proactive, not reactive.

Only then will you change and create using your imagination, conscience and willpower.

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In his classic Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington tells the following story about Frederick Douglass.

Douglass was once traveling and was forced, on account of his skin color, to ride in the baggage car, in spite of the fact that he had paid the same price for his passage that the other passengers had paid.

When some of the white passengers went into the baggage car to console him, one of them said to him, “I am sorry, Mr. Douglass, that you have been degraded in this manner.”

Frederick straightened himself up on the box upon which he was sitting, and replied,

“They cannot degrade Frederick Douglass. The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me.”

What an awe-inspiring example self-control. We waste so much time and energy being angry and hurt over injustices.

We wallow in our pain because it gives us an excuse to blame others for our results in life and our happiness.

“I didn’t get that promotion because my boss was a total jerk.”

“I can’t have a better relationship with my husband because of the way my father treated me.”

“I have this addiction because I was so hurt by _______________ circumstance/person.”

I don’t mean to diminish the real pain suffered by innocent people. Yes, we get hurt, and yes, that pain is real. Yes, bad things happen to good people. I myself have suffered excruciating pain throughout my life.

But as Frederick Douglass so poignantly demonstrated, the problem comes when we hold onto pain and refuse to let it go.

By holding onto our pain, we relinquish our power to choose and to act.

As my friend Stephen Palmer wrote:

Power is to love in the face of hatred.
To forgive cruelty without hesitation or
reservation.
Power is to love those who hurt you as much as
you love those who honor you.
Power is to eradicate all feelings of revenge,
bitterness, enmity, and malice from your being.
To replace hate with love, bitterness with
understanding, pride with humility, vengefulness
with forgiveness, cruelty with mercy and
compassion.
Effortless it is to follow the beaten path of immediate
impulse, the customary routine of
stimulus/response; to obey the animal instinct.
But it is not in these familiar reflexes where
power is to be found.
Power is overcoming them, rising above them.
Power is to subdue and control them, to conquer
and triumph over them.
The ability is inherent in all of us, yet scarcely
employed by any of us.
Know this: The moment you set out to avenge a wrong
is the moment you become the thing
you are fighting against.
Fighting fire with fire only makes the blaze
of hatred burn brighter until it consumes all.

Never relinquish your power to choose how you respond to injustice and pain. You have the power within you. Now use it.

At the age of 17 Benjamin Franklin felt like a failure. He sat down and asked himself what his highest priorities were and what he valued the most.

He came up with the following 12 “virtues”:

• TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
• SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
• ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.
• RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
• FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.
• INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
• SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
• JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.
• MODERATION. Avoid extreams; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.
• CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.
• TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.
• CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.

He then showed his list to a friend, which he writes about in his autobiography:

“My list of virtues contain’d at first but twelve; but a Quaker friend having kindly informed me that I was generally thought proud; that my pride show’d itself frequently in conversation; that I was not content with being in the right when discussing any point, but was overbearing, and rather insolent, of which he convinc’d me by mentioning several instances; I determined endeavouring to cure myself, if I could, of this vice or folly among the rest, and I added Humility to my list.”

Franklin then broke his year up into 13-week cycles and focused on one value for each week. At the age of 79 he wrote that this exercise was the foundation of his success.

“It may be well my posterity should be informed that to this little artifice, with the blessing of God, their ancestor ow’d the constant felicity of his life, down to his 79th year, in which this is written…

“I hope, therefore, that some of my descendants may follow the example and reap the benefit.”

Governing values are those principles, behaviors, and relationships that matter most in life. By writing yours down, you learn to live by design, not by default. You write your own story, rather than acting out others’ scripts.

Benjamin Franklin was a fairly accomplished guy. Will you follow his example and write down and live your governing values?

May God bless you with discomfort
At easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships,
So that you may live deep within your heart.
May God bless you with anger
At injustice, oppression and exploitation of people,
So that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.
May God bless you with tears
To shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger, and war,
So that you may reach out your hand to comfort them
And turn their pain into joy.
And may God bless you with enough foolishness
To believe that you can make a difference in the world,
So that you can do what others claim cannot be done
To bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.
Amen.

“If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.”
- Wes Jackson, named by Smithsonian Magazine as one of 35 “Innovators of Our Time.”

What’s your life’s work? Share with the community by commenting below.

Separated from his parents by slavery, he grew up an orphan. As a child, his health was so poor he was given “women’s work” — washing clothes and cleaning — by the white farmer, Moses Carver, who took him in.

The Carvers couldn’t afford to send George to school. George memorized the only book the Carvers had: Webster’s Speller.

Determined to receive his education, George struck out on his own, sleeping in haylofts and working odd jobs for food. According to George, “white folks’ washing” paid for his high school education.

George was accepted into the University of Iowa, only to be rejected because of his race. He opened a laundry and saved enough money to attend Simpson College.

Washing, scrubbing, and house cleaning got him through three years of college.

He continued on to complete four years of agricultural study at Iowa State University. He landed a spot on the faculty upon graduation.

Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute, offered him a job. Washington wanted an agricultural laboratory, but there was no laboratory nor funds for George to work with.

Another problem for George: the soil was sandy, eroded, and defiant. According to the biographical sketch published in Reader’s Digest in 1942, George got to work; he found the tools for his lab with seemingly useless stuff:

“For heat he rigged up a salvaged barn lantern. His mortar was a heavy kitchen cup; he used a flat piece of iron for a pulverizer.”

“Beakers were made by cutting off the tops of old bottles rescued from the school dump.  He turned an ink bottle into an alcohol lamp and made his own wick.”

“He sent his students into the swamps and woods armed with baskets and pails.  Day after day, they brought back muck and leaf mold and covered the ground with it.  On those acres, he demonstrated that the South’s worst soil can be made to produce — not one sweet potato crop per year, but two.”

Today, his work is still remembered in history books and by the American Peanut Council, which credits him with recognizing the intrinsic value of the peanut as a cash crop.

George is also credited with fueling the expansion of the now billion-dollar peanut farming industry, the $2 billion peanut retail industry in the US, and finding over 300 uses for the peanut crop.

George succeeded in spite of the obstacles. Giving in to failure was not an option.

During his lifetime, he advocated a simple formula: Start where you are with what you have.

His legacy continues to inspire us to use our ingenuity.

Whatever the odds against you, work to overcome them as George did.

Set your goals and aspirations high, and then work doggedly to achieve them. In doing so, you’ll start a legacy of your own.