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. Audiences can’t help but mull the same questions: 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?

Randy Pausch was a professor of Computer Science, Human Computer Interaction, and Design at Carnegie Mellon University. From 1988 to 1997, he taught at the University of Virginia. He was an award-winning teacher and researcher, and worked with Adobe, Google, Electronic Arts (EA), and Walt Disney Imagineering, and pioneered the non-profit Alice project, an innovative 3-D environment that teaches programming to young people via storytelling and interactive game-playing. He also co-founded The Entertainment Technology Center (ETC is the premier professional graduate program for interactive entertainment as it is applies across a variety of fields) at Carnegie Mellon with Don Marinelli.

When he was asked to give such a lecture, he didn’t have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal 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.

In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humor, inspiration, and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come. It has inspired many people, including me. It's sad to say that Randy lost his battle with pancreatic cancer on July 25th, 2008. He is missed by readers, his students, his family and his friends. Rest in peace Randy Pausch.