The Last Lecture: Part IV

The whole tedious ordeal could have stretched to ten or even fifteen minutes. It would have been zero fun for me.

All my life, I’ve been very aware that time is finite.

Here’s what I know:
Time must be explicitly managed, like money.

I’m a big believer in to-do lists. It helps us break life into small steps. I once put “get tenure” on my to-do list. That was naïve.

Want to quickly dispatch telemarketers? Hang up while you’re doing the talking and they’re listening.

It is an accepted cliché in education that the number one goal of teachers should be to help students learn how to learn.

As I always pointed out, especially for No. 3, what your peers think is, by definition, an accurate assessment of how easy you are to work with.

He had had all of these rationalizations, and now here I was, giving him hard data.

I’d been my usual self—a tough teacher with high expectations and some quirky ways—and they weren’t at the point where they appreciated that. I’m a bit of an acquired taste in that sense, and after only one semester, some were still noticeably wary of me.

These were students whose paths might never have had reason to cross, given how autonomous the various disciplines at Carnegie Mellon could be.

Some of my students created completely unlikely existential worlds populated by lovable 3-D creatures they first dreamed about as kids.

The two of us personified the mix of arts and technology; right brain/left brain, drama guy/computer guy.

And, if you have large ambitions and a measure of chutzpah, you can attempt to do it on a grand scale, trying to enable the dreams of millions of people.

In the same way, I am thrilled that future versions of Alice now being developed by my colleagues will be even better than what we’ve done in the past. In upcoming iterations, people will think they’re writing movie scripts, but they’ll actually be learning the Java programming language.

For her PhD dissertation, she built a system called “Storytelling Alice.”