Living your childhood dreams: Randy Pausch

In my experience, I find that ever so often some of my peers and closest friend are so easy to succumb to the fears in life and different roadblocks that they encounter. Individuals are frequently complaining about an insurmountable disaster in their lives and never seem to want to step up to the plate to take on the challenge. You may wonder, "What does this have to do with anything?" Well before you turn away because you think I'm ranting aimlessly, read on a little further.

A few months ago while browsing the internet, I came across an awe-inspiring and heartfelt story; it was an incredible story about a dying man who taught America how to live. His name was Randy Pausch. Pausch was known for giving his version of "The Last Lecture"; known really as an old tradition where those in the field of academia were to allowed one lecture to sum up and pass on to their students the wisdom and important lessons they have learned through the years. Well Pausch did just that and he reached out to millions in the process. A 47-year old father to three young children who was earlier diagnosed with a terminal case of pancreatic cancer gave his version of the last lecture to a packed hall at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. In just over an hour, Pausch delivered a touching speech which told stories about his life and different experiences he went through to accomplish what he had.Because of technological advances in our day in age, this video was syndicated virtually everywhere and within a few weeks Pausch eventually found himself a spot on the Oprah show discussing some of the important topics he spoke about just a few weeks prior.

I mention this famous lecture because it is one that has really hit the head on the nail for me and probably so many others out there. When you see your life through an hourglass and step back for a moment, it gives you a sense that maybe your problems aren't so big after all and some real perspective is finally exposed. Pausch not only exemplifies the quintessential individual to give a last lecture, but he also shows with some cognitive dissonance he is able to not only stay composed during the lecture, but also do it is a comedic manner. An important theme that Pausch mentions throughout his lecture is to accept that there are inevitably going to be failures in your life, but you have to diligently work past them. He couldn't have thought of it in a better way, "The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something." 

Although it is a difficult task to describe the brevity and effects this speech had on millions without actually watching the lecture, I hope I have at least sparked some topics of interest to reflect upon.  And if you are not one of the 12 million people that have already viewed it on youtube.com, you can put aside an hour of your time to watch him speak.

Finding My Soul Mate

In my quest to find my “bookmarking soul mate”, as some might call it, I found many useful users via the social bookmarking website delicious that would be valuable towards contributing interesting and insightful content for my blog. A bookmarking soul mate is one that has some, if not many, of the same interests and similarities as you. By being able to find that very soul mate you are more readily able to access material and information without having to google everything and spend cherished minutes, if not hours, browsing through irrelevant information. I stumbled upon (no pun intended) the user “zensei8” and found many of the bookmarked websites to be gratuitously filled with information and topics that I would be able to discuss in my blog that I am trying to build traction on. I can tell that many of the bookmarked sites are relatively well-known judging by the number of times other delicious users have also bookmarked them. This gives my soul mate some credibility that he is able to find legitimate sites out there that are of interest to the topic. Zensei8 is somewhat of a frequent user and bookmarker—he bookmarks about every 3-4 days with his total bookmark number currently at 362. Most of his bookmarked web pages are scattered with no rhyme or reason, but as I continue to explore through his bookmarks they all have a discussable issues and appear to focus around personal development and conscious everyday living.

There were two particularly good websites that I caught my attention when first coming across this user’s bookmarked web pages. The first website is from goodlifezen.com and his bookmarked link led me to find a blog post called “The ultimate personal growth guide: 100 best posts”. This post is essentially an aggregate of the top posts from different authors around the internet that have written on the subject of personal development. There are 100 links listed in numerical order of a variety of different topics centered about personal growth and development. This was an extremely good find for me. Another website worth noting is lifereboot.com. This website was bookmarked over a thousand times by delicious users and the content available is not only useful, but its wide range of topics makes it worth adding to my list of bookmarks for personal development.

As afore mentioned these websites are will be excellent for some of my readers to scroll through and browse the content. Most of the information is so well-varied that no matter what specific area of your life you want to tidy up on, the information is likely to be in some form on one of these websites. For future reference I will likely mention these sites to compare some of the content and solutions to some of the problems that I am likely to encounter. Hopefully through the help of my diligent social bookmarking soul mate I am more easily able to find practical websites and topics to discuss further in detail through my blog. I hope to you all are going to continue reading on, see you next week!

Trifecta

Hello World!
My blog will be devoted to the topic of personal development. Specifically, I will try to go into detail about how personal development has quickly emerged as such an integral part of many people’s lives and what it means to those who swear by it.

For as long as I can remember, I have been interested in the subject of self improvement and its relationship with what life has to offer. Initially, this deep-fueled interest of personal development and self improvement began several years ago when I was introduced to a “self-help” tape by a friend. After hearing him speak as though this tape had such a miraculous effect on his life, I doubted my friend’s recommendation and brushed off the tape, as well as other priorities in my life.

I was initially stubborn as a mule and really showed no effort in listening to the tapes he recommended. After all, how can you teach an old dog new tricks right? Boy was I wrong. I really expected something with nothing more than a few can-do-attitude mantras. When I finally pushed my ego aside and picked up the tapes, I found that everything preached (I hate using the word preach) had such a strong correlation and applicability to my life. In a sense, I felt that the person on the tape was giving me guidance and advice that I had already known; but nonetheless, it was advice that I needed to hear directly from an influential and successful individual in order to truly take initiative in directing my life.

Understandably, self-help programs and motivational speakers are not perceived as simple and innocent as the experience that I shared above. Many view motivational speakers as leaders of a marketing scam  that lures and exploits the naïve for commercialized reasons; authors and speakers as merely disingenuous individuals ironically attempting to “help” others for their own self-affluency. Barbara Ehrenreich, a widely read columnist, has made it publicly known that she strongly opposes particular self-help thinking. Just last year, Ehrenreich published her book, Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.

At this point, there are no specific topics that I’d like to blog about in regards to personal development; but the areas for discussion are endless. This blog will be used as a tool to analyze different personal development options, as well as act as sort of an online soapbox for everyone to objectively understand the different types of self-help methods and how it has been and can become implemented in our everyday lives.

Whether or not my audience believes the notion of self-help as a credible method of improving a person’s life, there are without a doubt hundreds of life coaches, professionals, speakers, and authors that have become successful as a result of the success that they have brought upon others. There are countless professional speakers and authors who earn millions of dollars each year to simply give advice to CEOs, presidents, and those with authority and power in our society. It is difficult to believe that these individuals we hold to such high regard would pay large sums of money for a product viewed as phony as the shaw-wow.

With this blog I’m going to question the validity and credibility of what these professional “know-it-alls” have to say about their areas they claim to possess expertise in. Specifically, this will include the writers and speakers that I have found helpful and contributors to who I am today. Read on!
 
Profiling Steve Pavlina
As my blog is just in its infancy and I try to gather up different ideas to blog about that interest me, it would be difficult not to mention a blogger that I have found to be very helpful in the past. Steve Pavlina is a relatively popular and prolific blogger who has virtually started his blog up writing about specific areas on the topic of personal development and now makes over six figures a year writing a couple blog entries a week. His story is extremely interesting and inspirational. Steve graduated Cal State University, Northridge in a short three semesters of college (without summer school) coming out with two degrees, one in computer science and another in mathematics. He attributes most of his collegiate success to simple time management and planning. His blog has numerous topics that are covered in detail and really aims to help the ordinary person fine tune his or her life. It would be a bit difficult to truly epitomize his entire blog with a singular topic, but a major common theme I continue to see pertains to self-improvement on various levels.

There are a couple blog entries that I want to mention because I found them to be exceptionally helpful and interesting. One of his entries discusses in detail the law of attraction and how it can take hold of us and attract into our lives whatever we constantly manifest our everyday thoughts over. This is something that I really found interesting because isn’t that usually the case with most things in our lives? We continue to think about a particular idea or goal that we have and it somehow or someway will find its way into our lives and ends up a reality. This train of thought really embodies the idea of a work-hard and goal-driven mind-set.

There was also well written post I found about self-discipline which related specifically to persistence and working past the some of the bumps in the road we are bound encounter.  He writes about the importance of staying motivated so that you continue to take action toward your goal regardless of your emotional state of mind. I have found that is is rather easy to simply put something off  and say to yourself “I’m not in the mood”. Its not something I'm proud of but surely it’s probably something we all can relate to, right? These two entries really only begin to scratch the surface of what his entire blog has to offer, but they are good places to start for someone who is just beginning to read through it.

Another interesting tidbit I discovered about Steve’s blog is that he just recently, in the past year, added many different new tools for those interested in becoming more interactive. There is a forum you are can utilize, an RSS feed, and some really interesting podcasts if you are feeling lazy-eyed. It’s clear that many of these different media tools (RSS feed, podcast, and forum) are posted to build high traffic, but I believe that he really puts some uniquely written content up. In trying to bring this all back to my blog, I think Steve’s blog helps analyze and sort through the daunting life challenges and anomalies which would most definitely give me a variety of topics to comment on in my blog in the future. Hopefully everyone else will find it just as fascinating and helpful as I have. See you next week!
 
Voice Critique
Steven Mills is a blogger who gives some very insightful perspectives through the use of his blog. His website, ratracetrap.com, covers developmental topics anywhere from financial independence to the science of success. Aside from the many topics covered, he has the ability to create for his audience comprehensive ways to conceptualize what he is trying to get across to them through his diction and sentencing. There are a couple posts that are worth scrutinizing as to how he is able to convey his message so concisely. His post titled, “The Brain Surgeon, the Janitor, and the Six-Inch Pizza” is a fine example of the how he is able to utilize different words and textual cues to develop his voice. The author chooses not to truly engage his audience until the middle of his post.

He begins with a very informal and non-interactive type of writing. But toward the middle of the post the reader is clearly able to distinguish the different forms of interaction and engagement that the author creates through vivid imagery seemingly as thoughtfully written as Emily Dickenson might have. He goes about his post by telling his audience to “Imagine a Brain Surgeon’s office. Certainly the janitorial duties at the office are critical to success.” This sentence nearly forces you to depict an office in your mind and by telling you that janitorial duties are “certainly” critical to success, you are almost sure to agree. Millis then asks his audience, “Does this mean the surgeon should perform the janitorial duties?” and quickly answers for us “Absolutely not and everyone can see that.” By structuring his questions and answers this way, the author is able to mold our thoughts so we form a similar agreement with his thought process.

Another post which conveys the authors particular use of diction and sentence phrasing is his post titled “You Cannot Choose the Wrong Path”. In this post the author discusses the familiar Robert Frost issue of deciding which road to take. The decision may be a career choice or something less urgent like whether to take up a hobby or not. The author chose to take a different route than the last method from the post which I previously described. This time Millis uses words such as "we", "our", and "you" to include his audience so that we feel highly connected; by doing this he can more easily form his argument in a certain direction.

The author begins by stating halfway into his post “You have the power to make these decisions in such a way to ensure you cannot make a bad choice.” The author uses “you” twice in one sentence and by the time I’m through reading it, I practically believe him. Another note to mention is that this sentence is also in bold letters and italicized; this gives that extra oomph and emphasis needed so that his audience can pay extra attention to what he feels so strongly about. Shortly after, he goes on to say that “We start obsessing over all the pros and cons. Should I or shouldn’t I?” The author’s utilization of “we” appears again as it creates another camaraderie between him and the audience. Then when he immediately asks the question afterwards it allows readers to agree with him again and wonder if they also question themselves in a comparable manner. Similar to Millis, having the ability to create persuasion, trust, and that familiar kinship simply through ones utilization of diction is key to making my blog interesting and engaging for readers.

Voice Critique

Steven Mills is a blogger who gives some very insightful perspectives through the use of his blog. His website, ratracetrap.com, covers developmental topics anywhere from financial independence to the science of success. Aside from the many topics covered, he has the ability to give his audience different ways to conceptualize what he is trying to get across to them through his choice of words and sentencing. There are a couple posts that are worth scrutinizing as to how he is able to convey his message so comprehensively. His post titled, “The Brain Surgeon, the Janitor, and the Six-Inch Pizza” is a fine example of the how he is able to utilize different words and textual cues to develop his voice. The author chooses not to truly engage his audience until the middle of his post. He begins with a very informal and non-interactive type of writing. Toward the middle of the post the reader is clearly able to distinguish the different forms of interaction and engagement that the author creates through particular sentence choices and questions. He goes about his post by telling his audience to “Imagine a Brain Surgeon’s office. Certainly the janitorial duties at the office are critical to success.” This sentence forces you to depict an office in your mind and by telling you that janitorial duties are “certainly” critical to success, you are almost sure to agree. Millis then asks his audience, “Does this mean the surgeon should perform the janitorial duties?” and quickly answers for us “Absolutely not and everyone can see that.” By structuring his questions and answers this way, the author is able to mold our thoughts and ideas so that we form a similar agreement with his thought processes.

Another post which conveys the authors particular use of diction and sentence phrasing is his post titled “You Cannot Choose the Wrong Path”. In this post the author discusses the issue of our incessant fixation on deciding the right path to take when given two choices to choose from. The decision may be a career choice or something less urgent like whether to take up a hobby or not. The way that the author chooses to structure this post was different than the last post which I described. Throughout the post author uses words such as "we", "our", and "you" to include his audience so that we feel highly connected; by doing this he can more easily form his argument in a certain direction. The author begins by halfway into his post by stating “You have the power to make these decisions in such a way to ensure you cannot make a bad choice.” The author uses “you” twice in one sentence and by the time I’m done reading it, I almost believe him because I feel like he is speaking directly to me. Another note to mention is that this sentence is also in bold letters and italicized. This gives that extra oomph and emphasis so that his audience gives extra attention to what he feels so strongly about. Shortly after, he goes on to say that “We start obsessing over all the pros and cons. Should I or shouldn’t I?” The author’s utilization of “we” appears again as it creates another camaraderie between him and the audience. Then when he immediately asks the question afterwards it allows readers to agree with him again and wonder if they also question themselves in a similar manner.



Here is a link to his website: ratracetrap.com