I was guest speaker at the Spring 2008 PTK Induction:

The following was the text of my address:

Congratulations to all of you, inductees, parents, relatives and friends for what you have already accomplished and best wishes for the many great things that lie in your future. The officers and members of Theta Omega, your faculty advisors, and the rest of your Wilbur Wright family want to do everything we can to support you in your ongoing success. By joining PTK you are continuing to demonstrate your ability to do anything.

You know, if you wanted to visit a new country or to explore a place where you had never been, don't you think you would want to have someone who has already been there, to be your guide? Or would you rather want to have someone show you around who has never been there, someone who doesn't know the language, someone who lives a million miles away?

The question is where are you headed? The answer, you are headed to the future.

Who can you go to for directions? Nobody, because nobody has been there yet.

I wish I could give you detailed directions, but at best I can only play a supporting role in a production in which you are the lead character. You are the star! I can try to point out things to watch out for - but ultimately you are the one who has to decide what you do with your life. Based on what you've already done, I know you will be OK. Even though at some point you may have a job that doesn't even exist today, perhaps in a brand new industry that also doesn't exist. Just keep on doing what you have done so far and you will continue to be OK.

Have you heard of Simon's Cat, Ron Paul's message, or Frozen Grand Central? Do you know what they have in common with Twitter in Plain English, Phun 2D physics in a sandbox, Gary Brolsma, Anita Renfroe, and Randy Pausch? Let me tell you, they have all gone viral. In case you didn't know, going viral means creating a video clip which really catches on. It means that you have created something which millions of people around the world are seeing and telling everyone else about.

Some of the videos are funny, some are educational, some are pure nonsense, but all of them have somehow made an impression on enough people that they wanted to tell their friends about it. The whole concept of posting videos on the internet is a totally new phenomenon. There are several hundred social network sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Myspace where people can meet their friends and interact with them and many of them have been around since before the turn of the millenium.

The newest kid on the block, YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. YouTube was created just three years ago in February of 2005 to display a wide variety of video content. On October 2006, Google announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the company for $1.65 billion. According to a listing on Wikipedia, there are 76,000,000 video clips on the site. That's about one video clip for every four people in the US.

Television networks, motion picture studios, the music industry and many others are starting to realize that the "long tail syndrome" is killing them. For those of you who haven't had a course in statistics, the long tail syndrome is when there are so many choices available that you can give everyone a different choice and you don't need a whole lot of people taking that choice. For example, fifty years ago there were only three television networks so everyone who wanted to watch television had to watch one of those three. Since then VCR's DVD's and Cable television changed all that and made it feasible for a show to be seen even if it had very limited audience appeal.

But today, the long tail syndrome of the internet has made it possible for anyone to be successful at anything even if they only appeal to a fraction of a percent of the population - with 6 and a half billion people in the world, even a very small fraction can be a very large number. You Tube with its 76,000,000 video clips is providing personalized entertainment that The Suits who tried to dictate our tastes and our fads can't match.

People like 19 year old Gary Brolsma from Saddle Brook, New Jersey became famous overnight by lip syncing a Romanian pop song that he called the numa numa song. 45 year old Anita Renfroe who lives in suburban Atlanta became known around the world as the William Tell Mom when she recorded a frenetic song to the tune of the William Tell Overture.

All of which brings me to another video that went viral one that I want to share with you. The other day I was sent a link to a lecture called "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" The person giving the lecture is Randy Pausch, a 47 year-old Professor of Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, and Design at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Dr Pausch has very impressive credentials. He received his bachelor's degree from Brown University and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He has been a co-founder of CMU's Entertainment Technology Center. He has been a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator, and a Lilly Foundation Teaching Fellow. He has done sabbaticals at Walt Disney Imagineering and at Electronic Arts, and consulted with Google on user interface design. Pausch is the author of five books and over 70 articles, and the founder of the Alice software project. Pausch received two awards from ACM in 2007 for his achievements in computing education. These are the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award and the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education.[1] He was also inducted as a Fellow of the ACM in 2007.

Dr. Pausch was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2006, and after a long and difficult fight, on August 15th, 2007, he was told he had three to six months left. There's an academic tradition called the 'Last Lecture.' The idea is, if you knew you were going to die and you had one last lecture, what would you say to your students? The video clip I saw was recorded on the Oprah show and it was a summary of his Last Public Lecture. The lecture is very upbeat and talks about what should be important in your life.

I'd like to share some of the things he said about his childhood dreams and how they came true.

He started by asking "So what were my childhood dreams?

They were:

Being in zero gravity,

Playing in the National Football League,

Authoring an article in the World Book Encyclopedia

Being Captain Kirk

Being one of the guys who won the big stuffed animals in the amusement park, and

Being an Imagineer with Walt Disney.

Let's start with being in zero gravity. Now it’s important to have specific dreams. I did not dream of being an astronaut, because when I was a little kid, I wore glasses and they told me astronauts can’t have glasses. And I was like, mmm, I didn’t really want the whole astronaut gig, I just wanted the floating. It turns out that NASA has something called the Vomit Comet that they used to train the astronauts. And this thing does parabolic arcs, and at the top of each arc you get about 25 seconds where you’re ballistic and you get about, a rough equivalent of weightlessness for about 25 seconds. And there is a program where college students can submit proposals and if they win the competition, they get to fly. And I thought that was really cool, and we ... put a team together and they won and they got to fly. And I was all excited because I was going to go with them. And then I hit the first brick wall, because they made it very clear that under no circumstances were faculty members allowed to fly with the teams. I was heartbroken. I was like, “I worked so hard!” And so I read the literature very carefully and it turns out that the competition was part of NASA's outreach and publicity program, and it turns out that the students were allowed to bring a local media journalist from their home town. So I called up the guys at NASA and I said, I need to know where to fax some documents. And they said, what documents are you going to fax us? And I said my resignation as the faculty advisor and my application as the journalist. And he said, that’s a little transparent, don’t you think? And I said, yeah, but our project is virtual reality, and we’re going to bring down a whole bunch of VR headsets and all the students from all the teams are going to experience it and all those other real journalists are going to get to film it. And because I had something to bring to the table the guy said here’s the fax number. We kept our end of the bargain, and so, childhood dream number one, check.

OK, let’s talk about football. My dream was to play in the National Football League. And most of you know that I actually did not make it to the National Football League, but I probably got more from that dream and not accomplishing it than I got from any of the ones that I did accomplish. I signed up when I was nine years old. I was the smallest kid in the league, by far. And I had a coach, Jim Graham, who was six-foot-four, he had played linebacker at Penn State. He was just this hulk of a guy and he was old school. And I mean really old school. For him it was all about fundamentals. Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals. You’ve got to get the fundamentals down because otherwise the fancy stuff isn’t going to work. There was one practice where he just rode me all practice. You’re doing this wrong, you’re doing this wrong, go back and do it again, you owe me, you’re doing push-ups after practice. And when it was all over, one of the other assistant coaches came over and said, yeah, Coach Graham rode you pretty hard, didn’t he? I said, yeah. He said, that’s a good thing. He said, when you’re screwing up and nobody’s saying anything to you anymore, that means they gave up. And that’s a lesson that stuck with me my whole life. When you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a very bad place to be. Your critics are your ones telling you they still love you and care. I’m very glad that football was a part of my life. And if I didn’t get the dream of playing in the NFL, that’s OK. I’ve probably got stuff more valuable. One of the expressions I learned at Electronic Arts, which I love, which pertains to this, is that experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted. And I think that’s absolutely lovely.

My next goal was a simple one, being an author in the World Book Encyclopedia. When I was a kid, we had the World Book Encyclopedia on the shelf. For you freshman, this is paper. We used to have these things called books. And after I had become somewhat of an authority on virtual reality, but not like a really important one, I was at the level of people the World Book would badger. They called me up and I wrote an article, and you can read the article if you go to your local library where they still have copies of the World Book. Look under V for Virtual Reality, and there it is. And all I have to say is that having been selected to be an author in the World Book Encyclopedia, I now believe that Wikipedia is a perfectly fine source for your information because I know what the quality control is for real encyclopedias. They even let me in.

All right, the next one, Being Captain Kirk. At a certain point you just realize there are some things you are not going to do, so maybe you just want to stand close to the people. And I mean, my god, what a role model Captain Kirk is for young people. I mean, this is everything you want to be, and what I learned, what carried me forward in leadership later, is that, you know, he wasn’t the smartest guy on the ship. I mean, Spock was pretty smart and McCoy was the doctor and Scotty was the engineer. And you may ask, what skill set did he have to get on this damn thing and run it? And, you know, clearly there is this skill set called leadership, and, you know, whether or not you like the series, there’s no doubt that there was a lot to be learned about how to lead people by watching this guy in action. And he just had the coolest damn toys! I mean, my god, I just thought it was fascinating as a kid that he had this Star Trek Communicator and he could talk to the ship with it. I just thought that was just spectacular, and of course now I own one and except it’s smaller and it's called a cell phone. So that’s kind of cool and I think I got to achieve this dream.

All right, winning stuffed animals. This may seem mundane to you, but when you’re a little kid and you see the big buff guys walking around the amusement park and they’ve got all these big stuffed animals, right? Well, I’ve won a lot of these animals, and this was just a big part of my life and my family’s life.

All right, my last dream was Being an Imagineer. This was the hard one. Believe me, getting to zero gravity is easier than becoming an Imagineer. When I was a kid, I was eight years old, and our family took a trip cross-country to see Disneyland. And if you’ve ever seen the movie National Lampoon’s Vacation, it was a lot like that! It was a quest. And I just thought this was just the coolest environment I had ever been in, and instead of saying, gee, I want to experience this, I said, I want to make stuff like this. And so I bided my time and then I graduated with my Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon, thinking that meant I was infinitely qualified to do anything. And I dashed off my letters of applications to Walt Disney Imagineering, and they sent me some of the damned, nicest go-to-hell letters I have ever gotten. I mean it was just like, “we have carefully reviewed your application and presently we do not have any positions available which require your particular qualifications.” Now think about the fact that you’re getting this from a place that’s famous for guys who sweep the street. So that was a bit of a setback. But remember, 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. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people.

All right, fast forward to 1991. We did a system back at the University of Virginia called Virtual Reality on Five Dollars a Day. Just one of those unbelievable spectacular things. this was just this unbelievable hit because at the time, everybody needed a half a million dollars to do virtual reality. And everybody felt frustrated. And we literally hacked together a system for about five thousand dollars in parts and made a working VR system. And people were just like, oh my god, you know, the Hewlett Packard garage thing. This is so awesome. And so I’m giving this talk and the room has just gone wild, and during the Q and A, a guy named Tom Furness, who was one of the big names in virtual reality at the time, he goes up to the microphone and he introduces himself. I didn’t know what he looked like but I sure as hell knew the name. And he asked a question. And I was like, I’m sorry did you say you were Tom Furness? And he said yes. I said, then I would love to answer your question, but first, will you have lunch with me tomorrow? And there’s a lot in that little moment, there’s a lot of humility but also asking a person where he can’t possibly say no. And that was the beginning of a long relationship with Disney.

Those were his childhood dreams.

And I want to leave you with a question, what are your dreams?