I just finished reading The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch, who was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon working on virtual reality (and spent some time as a Disney Imagineer!). It was a bittersweet tale of a professor in the last few months of his life as he recounted his life's dreams and his preparation for leaving his wife and kids live their life without him. It was inspirational, funny, and thought-provoking, and I was impressed by the humanity and humility of such an intelligent, scientific man. Below is the actual video of his lecture at CMU, and below that are my main takeaways and nuggets from the book. It's so wonderful that he could share such meaningful lessons with the world.
0 Comments
I just finished reading Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman. I had it on my reading list for a while, and several people recommended it to me. The book definitely was inspirational, and I liked many of its Zen-like lessons, such as about paying attention to life, being happy for no reason, and appreciating each moment you have. It also demonstrated the hard work it takes to make real change in life and the value of good teachers. The book reminded me a lot of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; the fact that the teacher was a gas station attendant and car mechanic must have been an implicit nod to the Motorcycle inspirations. What I didn't like were the several totally magical/fantastical/shamanistic elements; if these were brought down to earth and reality and explained as simple visualizations rather than as special powers of the teacher, I think it would have made the book lose less of its seriousness and value. Overall though, I did enjoy it and got many good ideas, inspirations, and butt kicks out of it, so it was all good. I remember reading and enjoying Montaigne's essays in high school French class. A lot of the Stoicism works I've been reading recently referenced Montaigne's essays, so I figured I'd revisit them again by reading How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell. She took an interesting spin on Montaigne by explaining how he was the first writer to write about his own inner thoughts and experiences and what it meant to be alive. This was something new for his time, so you could say he was like the first blogger (with a fountain quill). He wrote about himself so others could see themselves in him and understand humanity overall. He dealt with with his own public issues by writing about his private life and wrote about commonplace things with simple titles, drawing lessons from everything around him. He also read a lot about others and tried to learn from cultures very different from him, which is very rare for someone living in the 16th century. I thought the book was alright, but I found it to be too much about history and background and less about the essays themselves. Like Montaigne, the author of this book would frequently change the subject and write about things unrelated to each chapter's title (maybe that was on purpose to demonstrate directly Montaigne's styles). I would have preferred more discussion of specific essays and the lessons within them and deeper discussion of the title question, "how to live." |
Archives
February 2023
Categories
All
Subscribe |