People say that nothing focuses your attention like your impending death. 

It has become a tradition as some universities to invite prominent professors to give their “last lecture”.  That is, to imagine that they had one last lecture in which to attempt to communicate their accumulated wisdom and the most important lessons they had learned.

Randy Pausch is a prominent professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.  He was invited to give a last lecture, only for him it was no theoretical exercise – he has metastatic pancreatic cancer and will, barring a miracle, be dead in a year.

He’s 45 years old with a loving wife and three young children.  He’s at the peak of his career and has a world wide reputation.  Now he’s facing death and talking to us about what he’s learned and what’s important. Continue Reading »
What Can You Learn From a Dying Man?

Bookmark to:
         

We all need help sometimes to understand or communicate complex ideas.  There are lots of tools we can use to do that, and metaphors are among the most powerful.  A metaphor indirectly compares one thing to another, implying that they share similar characteristics.  To the extent the comparison is valid, it can help us understand the newly introduced concept.

Metaphors also affect our way of looking at a situation – once we define a comparison, we tend to think in those terms.  This can either serve us or hurt us.

Continue Reading »
Metaphors For Personal Power

Bookmark to: