If you only had a short time to live, what would you do?

A lot of professors give talks titled 'The Last Lecture'. Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?

When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give 'a last lecture' lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. But the lecture he gave, 'Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams', wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment because 'time is all you have and you may find one day that you have less than you think'. It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.

Randy's lecture about the joy of life – his legacy to his three young children – has become a worldwide phenomenon, as has his book written on the same principles, celebrating the dreams we all try to make a reality. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.