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Perhaps, for a dying man, the first thing he would want is to make sure that his family would be alright, even without him and for Randy Pausch, an award-winning professor and computer scientist who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he got the assurance through delivering his "last lecture."
The Last Lecture is a non-fiction book based on the phenomenal speech made by Pausch at the Carnegie Mellon University where he taught for almost a decade. It was co-written by Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow who took interest at Pausch's story when he attended the last lecture. The speech was themed as The Last Lecture, a tradition of the academe where the best professors were asked to deliver a speech about the wisdom that they want to impart to the world if they knew that it was their last lecture but for Pausch, he knew that it was really his last.
Pausch was diagnosed of pancreatic cancer at the age of 46. A year after going to treatment, Pausch's cancer came back and he was given an average of three to six months left to live. This inspired him to pursue his lecture because he believed that by doing so, the wisdom that we will share through the audience would become a way for him to "guide" his three young children: Dylan, 6, Logan, 3 and Chloe, 18 months,...