Randy Pausch The Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
Courtesy of YouTube.com

The other day, I was asked a question that every girl wishes to be asked but seldom is, especially when she’s well, no longer a girl but a long-in-the-tooth, been-there-done-that-seen-it-all type of woman.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

It stopped me in my tracks. I think that’s a question that’s easiest to answer when you’re a child and you truly believe the world is your oyster. Then you grow up and you realise some oysters are really bad for you.

As Sir Ken Robinson, author of “Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative”, says in this video, children have an extraordinary capacity to be innovative and creative and, most of all, they are not afraid to be wrong.

He tells a story. A little girl was drawing in class. Her teacher asked her what she was doing. “Drawing a picture of God,” she said. “But nobody knows what God looks like,” the teacher replied. “They will in a minute,” the little girl said.

Our education system though strips us out of our creative capacities and by the time we are adults, we are all afraid to be wrong, he says. “If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original,” he says.

In “The Last Lecture” (which, as I write this, has been watched by more than five million viewers on YouTube) – the late Randi Pausch spends a lot of time talking about childhood dreams, and enabling the childhood dreams of others.

As a young boy, he spent a lot of time dreaming of what he wanted to be – from being a astronaut to being in the football league to being an author to meeting Captain Kirk to winning stuffed animals …

His belief was it's okay if you don't achieve all your dreams – what is as important is actually having a go at it.

Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted, he said. And “most of what we learn, we learn indirectly …”

His words struck a particular chord with me because I was reading his book on a flight back from Hong Kong where I had just attended International Youth Choir Festival. I was accompanying a friend whose nine-year-old daughter’s choir was competing in the under-12 category.

I did not expect to enjoy the festival as much as I did. There were youths of all ages from all over Asia. The children’s choirs were especially delightful. The young ones were adorable and sweet. The older ones were seriously good, especially the groups from China and it was no surprise when a Chinese choir walked away with the grand prize.

The eye-opener for me though were the grown-ups – the parents and teachers of the competitors. It was almost as though they were the ones competing.

During one of his lectures when he was on a particular project, Pausch said he even had parents who came to the classroom. “I found it somewhat flattering but scary.”

In an early episode of the TV series, The Sopranos, Tony’s sister gets into a punch-up with another mother over their daughters who were playing in a soccer match. “She kicked my daughter,” she screamed as she landed a right hook on the other mother’s face. When she tucks her daughter into bed that night, her daughter says, “I am so embarrassed, Mum. How am I going to face my friends again?” And when her mother asked if she had done something before going to bed, she said, “No. Are you going to punch me?”

Thankfully, my friend’s daughter’s choir, the IJ Choristers, won in their category and so it was a happy ending for them and I had to laugh when at the end of the competition, I overheard one of the children say to her teacher, “At least we won $1,000.”

To Pausch, “millions of kids having fun while doing something hard” is especially satisfying and it made me think that sometimes when we have our eyes too set on the destination, we miss the indirect lessons.

So maybe it’s not that important to know what you want to be when you grow up, it’s the never growing up and enjoying every minute of it.

As Pausch says at the end of his 75-minute lecture, “It’s not about how to achieve your dreams, it’s about how you lead your life.”

Well written. I'm glad you found an indirect lesson in watching the kids in Hong Kong. For me, I realised how deep the pride of a mother can be :)