Over the last two days, I’ve watched two lectures from a guy named Randy Pausch on YouTube. He is a professor at Carnegie Mellon who is dying of cancer. The first one I watched was his "Last Lecture" where he talked about childhood dreams, following your dreams and enabling others to follow their dreams. The second one I watched was about time management.
Here are the links if you’d like to watch them yourself.
Randy Pausch’s Time Management lecture
The Last Lecture didn’t speak to me as much as I expected it would but here is the quote I will take away from it.
Remember, brick walls let us show our dedication. They are there to separate us from those people who don’t really want to achieve their … dreams.
This is the lecture I watched yesterday and I’ve thought about this point he made several times in the last 24 hours. As I think back over the years about how I’ve always loved photography, the things that stopped me prior to now are so insignificant that I find them embarrassing. The next time you encounter a road block on your way to making your dreams happen, think to yourself that it’s there to separate the wheat from the chafe – to identify the real achiever from the wanna-be. One more lesson from this lecture I thought was pertinent on this journey of mine -
Experience comes with time and it’s really, really valuable and there is no short cuts to getting it. Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment. So if things aren’t going well, that probably means you’re learning a lot and it will go better later.
Today I watched his lecture on Time Management. I think the time I spent watching this lecture was well worth it. But then again, I’ve always loved this sort of thing. Stephen Covey is a rock star to me. Anyway, here are a few things I learned from Randy today. He talked about opportunity costs in his lecture. About the fact that some of the poor choices we make in how we spend our time come at a cost because we can never get that time back. For example – one of my new year’s resolutions was to spend less time playing webkinz. Webkinz is not a bad thing but it is not time well spent in my desire to become a successful photographer running my own business. The time I spent playing that game is time I can never get back. Wikipedia defines Opportunity Cost as
the loss of potential gain from the best alternative to any choice. Thus, opportunity cost is the cost of pursuing one choice instead of another. Every action has an opportunity cost. For example, someone who invests $10,000 in a stock denies oneself the interest that one can easily earn by leaving the $10,000 dollars in a bank account instead. Opportunity cost is not restricted to monetary or financial costs: lost time, pleasure or any other benefit that provides utility should also be considered.
Opportunity cost is a key concept in economics because it implies the choice between desirable, yet mutually-exclusive results.
Webkinz isn’t bad. I play games with my children, I’m a part of their world and I send them virtual gifts while I’m entertained for a time. Yet at the end of a year, I would have accumulated a lot of virtual items in my webkinz world but no experience for my real world business. I’m sure this is a concept that will impact my free time decisions over the coming weeks.
Randy also quoted Walt Disney who said
If you can dream it, you can do it.
Randy went on to say
If you refuse to allow yourself to dream it, I know you won’t do it. The power of dreams is that they give us the power to take the first step toward an accomplishment.
Then Randy talked about how the original Disneyland park was built in 366 days. From the first shovel full of dirt being moved until the first paying ticket holder entered the park – 366 days. If Disneyland can go from a plan to reality in one year, why can’t I go from an enthusiastic amateur photographer to a capable photographer beginning her business in a year? No reason at all. I can. According to Randy when someone asked Walt how he did it in 366 days he responded, "We used every one of them."
Another thing he covered actually came from Stephen Covey. Being a Covey fan, I’m surprised I’d forgotten this. Perhaps it was just hearing it from a new source that struck me today but Randy covered Covey’s four quadrant to do list. He talked about how much time we spend in quadrant 3 and 4 that is really a waste of time. Don’t know why, but today a light bulb went off over my head while he was talking.
One final lesson I got from the time management lecture was this. He said to find your creative time and defend it ruthlessly. As aspiring photographers, we all need creative time. I know for myself, I frequently find myself thinking I’ll do/learn/watch/read after my children are put in bed. Then once that finally happens I find myself worn out and too far removed from any creative spirit I might have had earlier in the day. Even if I only set aside creative time once a week, I’m sure I would benefit from it.
Well, that’s all I have to share today. Maybe we could each throw up a prayer for a man named Randy who is dying of cancer who made the world a little bit better of a place.
Stay focused!
-A
