RockneCAST

Lessons from Randy Pausch's Last Lecture (#270, 3 Dec. 2024)

Overview

In this episode of the Rockne Cast, Rockne Cole explores the profound lessons from Randy Pausch's book, 'The Last Lecture,' and his viral YouTube lecture. He draws parallels between Pausch and Ulysses S. Grant, emphasizing themes of resilience, optimism, and the importance of leaving a legacy. The conversation delves into stoicism, the concept of memento mori, and the power of gratitude, culminating in practical advice for listeners on how to live a fulfilling life.

Chapters

00:00 - Introduction to Randy Pausch and His Legacy

02:47 - Randy Pausch's Last Lecture: A Life-Affirming Message

06:11 - Connecting Randy Pausch and Ulysses S. Grant

09:03 - Lessons from Randy Pausch's Life and Philosophy

11:50 - Stoicism and the Concept of Memento Mori

15:09 - Vignettes from The Last Lecture: Crayons and Optimism

26:51 The Power of Gratitude and Thank You Notes

Show links

Randy's Last Lecture

Randy's Book

Duration:: 46m
Broadcast on:: 03 Dec 2024
Audio Format:: other

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For this episode of The Racking Cast, I'm going to share with you the work of Randy Pausch and his book, The Last Lecture, and his YouTube video. Dudes for this episode of The Racking Cast. I'm going to explore with you how I learned about Randy. What he shares in common with Ulysses S. Grant because he shares one really cool thing with U.S. Grant. Yeah, that grant. You like the Civil War General. I'm going to share with you kind of a little story about how I rediscovered Randy Pausch. We're going to do a stoic exercise based upon this book. He doesn't discuss stoicism in the book, but this book has all sorts of stoic lessons. And then I'm going to share one with you. Then I'm going to share with you my two favorite parts of this book. It's chock full of good stuff in this book, Life's Lessons in this book. And then we're going to give you a little piece of advice you can share with your kids. Okay, so I'm going to also help you out there, and it has to do. I will give it away. You'll have to listen to the damn podcast to learn about this little tidbit that you can get for the kids. So first off, who is Randy Pausch? I discovered Randy Pausch in 2007-2008 on YouTube like many people did when he literally went viral. He was a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, like one of these mega-smart people, super good job, wife, three kids, and in August of 2007 received a terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. I don't know what you know about pancreatic cancer, but it's bad. If you get pancreatic cancer, start getting your affairs in order, at least at the time in 2006, or 2007, pretty much a death sentence. So how did Randy become famous? Well, evidently there was his tradition at Carnegie Mellon for retiring professors to give a last lecture. And so he gave a last lecture at Carnegie Mellon, as he would have had as he was going to retire from Carnegie Mellon. At the time, he had already resigned his position his wife's family lived in Virginia. So they decided for the last year of his life that they would move the family so that they can all be closer to the kids and no longer reside in Pittsburgh. I'll share with you the link to the last lecture in the show notes. It is good. And one of the aspects of this particular kind of cancer is that even though you have this kind of death sentence six to nine months out after you start experiencing the symptoms, you don't look like you have cancer. So one of the fun things about the last lecture in terms of the YouTube video, he looks perfectly healthy. And he basically says that at the beginning of the video. He said, you know, I don't look sick. In fact, I'm healthier than most of you where I can do a lot of things that you probably can't do when he started doing pushups, so calisthenics and like this is a guy after my own heart. And then he gave this just fantastic last lecture and I can't really do it justice. He's just going to have to watch it. It's one of these kind of timeless lectures are articulating the difficulties of life on your own summit. It's very happy. It's it's not sad. It's it's very life affirming. And so that's kind of how he came on my radar. And I actually watched it when it came out. And I don't remember whether I used to watch instead of preparing like getting up early and pairing podcasts for all of you and doing journaling and things like that. And at that time in my life, I probably either watched it really late at night as I was, you know, having a few glasses of wine. Or sometimes I would get up in the morning and watch some YouTube before I'd go to work. I still read a lot at that time. But I definitely watched a lot more TV than I do now. But that's how he came on my radar screen. Really good. Totally check it out. You're going to thank me for putting you on to the last lecture. And you may already know about it. So this is in the 2007. This is the fall of 2007. Randy Pausch then goes on to live about eight more months. So he lived longer than the diagnosis. But almost perfectly, you know, based upon the doctor's prediction, he died in July of 2008. And then he kind of got off my radar screen. And until I was in the aims of all places, aims, goodwill. And I came across his book, the last lecture that he had written within the last year that he died. And he did it with the assistance of a journalist named Jeffrey Zaslow. So I often put book for like 25 cents. And then didn't read it for like two or three years, like kind of a couple years ago, I found Reddit in the last month. I'm so glad that I did. And there's no excuse not to read this book because the whole book is it's relatively small. It's kind of like, you know, Mitch albums book Tuesdays with Laurie. It's about a hundred and about 200 page book. It's relatively small. And the format is it's chock full of little stories and anecdotes and lessons that Randy Pausch proved throughout the course of his career. And it's so good. It's so transferable. It's the type of book you should read, your spouse should read, you should give to your kids, because it's just there's so much good stuff. But I'm going to get into some of the, some of the lessons, not all because he ought to actually read the book. I still think it's in front of it's a way to support his family. But it's just so good. So you have no excuse not to read this book. And Kevin, I don't know if you can like get it on books on tape, but maybe just can have to read the damn thing. So no, no lessons on books on tape, read the frickin thing. It's only 200 pages. It'd be good to give to your son too. So let's talk a little bit about what Randy Paus shares with the US grant. As many of you know, US grant for me is like rivals Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. He may be my favorite US president. It's kind of close between Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and US Grant. But I think probably US Grant is probably my favorite president. For a variety of reasons that I'm not going to go on a long time, but we'll have luck. In fact, one episode I did on the US grant, I said I had mad crush on US Grant. I totally do. I love US Grant. So what does US Grant have in common with Randy Paus? Here's was just really cool. US Grant in the last year of his life received horrible news. He had been the victim of a financial Hanzi scheme by the Bernard Madoff of his day. There was some financial wizard that had built up this Hanzi scheme. And so US Grant in the last year of his life, although he learned this news, he did not know that he only had a year left to live, but he had essentially been totally bankrupted. So imagine you checking your 401ks, you're feeling good, sending money to the kids. And one day you wake up and you're not worth 35 million, you're worth $35. That literally happened to US Grant. And then it gets worse. About a month or two later, he's eating some peaches and he feels a scratch in his throat. And it turns out he has terminal throat cancer. So it's very similar to Randy Pausch. He had learned that he did not have much time to live. The other piece of it is that he had no resources, zero zilch. So imagine the news that you get that. And for both of these men, they have a year left to live. Now I think that Randy probably was in relatively good financial shape. He had been a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, probably had some really nice life insurance policies set up for his wife and his kids. So I don't think she would have been destitute. But I think he also didn't want to kind of leave this legacy for his spouse. It's expensive to live on the East Coast. You got to send your kids to fancy schools and however much they had probably wasn't enough because he had at least another plenty of years in his working history to build a build up for his retirement. And so Randy Pausch did exactly what US Grant did in US grants last year. What did he do? He wrote one of the best-selling autobiographies of all time in his own hand as he was dying from throat cancer. And he finished it about a week before he died. Mark Twain published it. And as a result of this book, his wife received a check of royalties for $200,000 in 1880s money, which is equivalent to like, I don't know, five to six million dollars, something like that. Or Randy Pausch did the same thing. So he does this last lecture. It goes totally viral. And once you actually see the YouTube video, you'll know why it's so good. And it's just so much in there. And it really teaches you how to live even amidst the worst parts of it, right, of getting a terminal diagnosis. But then that spring, his health continued to be good all that full. And into the spring, he did a ton of interviews. In fact, I think that this book was probably written February, March of 2008. And then he ended up dying a lot of saying July of 2008. So it was the book itself was probably completed, at least a month or two before he kind of had this the final descent into deaths. But you don't really get that sense in the book. It's so good. And like us grant, I think this book was best-selling book, Randy Pausch's book, the last lecture, I'll put a link in the show notes, you can actually still order it. Yeah, I think he got like royalties are in advance of like $6.2 million in the last year that he left live. The other thing that I love about this book, in terms of the wisdom that is in this book, is that it is, we're still fighting for this. So we're still reaping the harvest of this beautifully well-lived life. And there are so many good lessons that are transferable to you, to your kids, to your mom, to your dad, your dog probably is not going to get it. But most human beings, you read this, you're like, yes, this is really so good. And so we're going to share with you only two of these little vignettes kind of show you how good it is and why these vignettes really resonate. And that's kind of the format of the book. And if you have, if you don't like to read a lot, each of these chapters is like two pages and like, come on, you can, you can read two pages. It's very, very accessible. It's a good, it's a good book that you can read with like a, and then at the end at night, you can get some of these lessons, but it's a very easily digestible book. So we're going to do class, our first Stoic exercise. One of the reasons why absolutely adore Stoicism is that in its related to Randy Powell, so I'm not going into some ADHD based digression. The Stoics have so many, it's a philosophy of life as it is. And there are so many paradoxical aspects of Stoicism. And probably the most paradoxical is the joy that you get when you learn about the phrase, the Mento Laurie, remember your death. The Mento Laurie, remember your death. Now you would think, why would this make me super happy and live life really fully? Why? It's like you'd think that would make you depressed, like say, if we're all going to die, why don't we just jump off a bridge? Because what's the point? We're going to die at some point, we might as well expedite it. No, that's just the opposite. The Mento Laurie, one of the exercises that Stoics talk about all the time, whether it's Seneca, or whether it is Marcus Aurelius, is to remember your death. And the reason why that's so, there's so many things about this, because when you remember your death, and you know that you're going to die, you live each day as if it's this total and wonderful gift. It's something that you just, you know, you only have so many days. And if you think about it, this is true with all of us, even if we have a gazillion dollars or no dollars, the gift of life that we're given is time, the ability to soak up time. And when you remember your own death, when you remember that time is finite, you live your life richly and deeply in a way that you can imagine, as opposed to someone who's just always miserable and not super happy. And if you look at, no, I think that U.S. Fran was an actually a bit of pain while he was writing this book. I don't think, at least Pausch doesn't indicate this. I don't think at this time that he was writing the book, one of the, I guess if he could say good things about pancreatic cancer is that the symptoms you have like three to six months of really, really good else. And so when he was doing all these activities from the fall of 2007, through the spring of 2008, he was doing zero gravity exercises on planes. He was still working out. He was going to Halloween with his kids. He was doing all he's been convertible and he shares that he got in the sack to me. So, you know, he was banging his life like crazy, you know, and just just living life and writing this book. And so I just totally loved this book. I thought it was so, so good. And I hope you have the opportunity to read this book. So, I'm going to share with you now two of kind of my favorite vignettes that I absolutely loved in the in this particular book. And this shows that I'm actually going to read the vignette because it's so small. And then I'm going to briefly riff on it. It's literally like less than two pages. So I'm not going to like read this for years. It's going to take like two minutes for you to listen to this portion of the actual book. It's a page 164. And this, this one really resonated with me. A lot of them did, but I'm only doing two, you got to read the book to get them all. Get in touch with your crayon box. What's that about? People who know me, and this is Randy writing, people who know me sometimes complain that I see things in black or white. In fact, one of my colleagues would tell people, go to Randy if you want black and white advice. But if you want gray advice, he's not the guy. Okay, I stand guilty as charge, especially when I was younger. I used to say that my crayon box had only two colors in it, black and white. I guess that's why I love computer science. Because most everything is either true or false. As I've gotten older, though, I've learned to appreciate that a good crayon box might have more than two colors. But I still think that if you run your life the right way, you'll wear out black and white before the newest colors. In any case, whatever the color I love grants. At my last lecture, I brought along several hundred of them. I wanted everyone to get one when they walked into the lecture hall, but in the confusion, I forgot to have the folks at the door pass them out too bad. My plan was this. As I spoke about my childhood dreams, I'd asked everyone to close their eyes and rub their hands in the fingers to feel the texture, the paper, the wax. Then I'd have them bring their crayons up to their noses and take a good, long sniff. Smelling a crayon takes you right back to childhood, doesn't it? I once saw a colleague do a similar crayon routine with a group of people, and it inspired me. In fact, then, since I'm often cured of crayon and making it my shirt pocket, whenever I need to go back in time, I put it under my nose and I'd take another bit. Easy crayons, never. I'm partial to the black crayon and the white crayon, but that's just me. And any color has the same potency. Breathe it in and you'll see. Oh my god, this is so good. So a couple different aspects of what I just loved this particular thing yet. First off, I like, and I don't know, he doesn't really elucidate a lot like he loves black and white. I tend to be, you know, it's kind of funny, you start life with this amazingly simplistic view of the world, and then you learn, you're going to college and you learn about nuance and text and subtlety and not overgeneralizing and not seeing the world in black and white. And I think that's what he's saying here, is that I believe, you know, I believe that there are these timeless principles of life that are transferable to everyone. And that's one of the reasons why I love this wellness concept and sharing what I've learned with you because it's not idiosyncratic to me. And of course, to some degree, it is I get that there are different types of brand colors. But for the most part, there are these truths that I think are, Kevin, you better like this one truth. So talking about truth, there are these truths that are universal that we all come from a creator, all things, the creator of light and art, that we are of the earth, that we have these biological mechanisms that you've evolved over time that have certain needs and wants and desires, and there are activities that you can do to make yourself healthy or unhealthy, to let to be, you know, Benjamin Franklin says early to rise, early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. Yeah, I mean, how one really does? Who is going to become work to just illustrate this point? Say you don't drink any alcohol, you go to bed at 830, you get seven to eight hours of deep rustle, restorative sleep, you get up in the morning, your journal, your exercise, you do a podcast for your your friends, you're gonna feel good, like I guarantee it, I guarantee it conversely, if you start doing fentanyl, and you start like snorting mess, you're not going to be healthy. If you join a gang, you're probably going to die at a very, very young age. You might get late a lot, but you're not going, you might have a little cash, you're going to be totally stressed out. There are these timeless principles that are true, not only for me, but for you. And so I think that's what he's getting at, is that there are these black and white truths. And I think some of the, one of the things I'm not against subtlety, I do have a liberal arts education, I do understand nuance. And yes, I'm aware that's what's true for me, isn't necessarily true for you. But I think what he's getting at, he's acknowledging their subtlety, he's acknowledging that there are shades of gray, but he's also affirming that for the most part, there are these black and white principles. And when he's talking about computer programming, all of computer programming is based upon zeros and ones on us. That is computer programming in terms of Boolean logic, that is the essence of computer programming. And this is precisely why he likes that it's rigorous, it's analytical. When I was an undergraduate, one of the reasons why I took mathematics, I loved it's, it's logic. It's purity. It's ability to prove that you are right about a thing without subtlety or context. Then don't get me wrong. I do love some nuance. And I do believe that there are things that you can learn in the gray areas. And I'm not against that. But I think the problems with too much nuance, too much, hey, we're all constructing our own realities, man, is that we lose sight of the simple timeless truths that are available to everyone. And I absolutely love that. And then this vignette, I'll sniffing the brand. You know, I think it was my daughter that came up with, there's not really at least I'm not aware of it. There's not really a word for the memories that you have when you smell something. Like, I remember once, like, I smelled your car cologne once. And it took me back to when I was like, 19, you know, you get all drunk and you splash on some car cologne. Did you do just do that? Like, I don't put it on now because I'm not 19 years old, but totally took me back to that moment. And crayons sniffing, I think I'm going to do that. I'm going to buy some brands. And I'm going to send some crayons. Now, as far as I can tell, I think crayons are non toxic. So I'm not trying to get you addicted. But I know exactly what he's getting at. And he's saying, go sniff a crayon, man. What he's talking about is that will take you right back to your childhood. And you'll, and as far as I can tell, there's no word for it. And I think at one point, I acknowledge this. And that was on Facebook trying to figure out people what what the word is for a smell memory. And I think we came up with like olfactory deja vu, like olfactory smell deja vu. I don't know what is something like that. You smell something and he'd go right back to that moment. It also, by the way, applies to taste. But there's something very powerful about smell to smell that ran. And then to go back like you're in second grade, this bars class, the circle B bar ranch trading stuff with like Williams and various other people that I knew Jason Hanson, just just having those experience. And I think the other thing that he gets at in terms of, you know, a lot of high school graduations are like, have the sense of wonder of a child. I do think it is why, why are children some children are super unhappy? But when children are outside and they play and they're unencumbered by the world, that sense of wonder and creativity, you know, when I was at a city council conference, they did a team building exercise. And they had a whole bunch of people trying to figure out a way to put something together. And it was kind of like this, you know, exercise to build teams and dumb. But one of the things they talked about though, is that typically it's doing way better on some creativity problem solving tasks than adults. And one of the reasons why they do way, way better is that they're totally unencumbered by. And my gosh, what will everyone else think? That's probably one of the most damaging parts of junior high for a lot of people, is that they get so caught up in what everyone else thinks, and trying to conform with the group that they lose their own sense of wonder and individuality and creativity and the ability to express their unique red throughout the world. So I think that's what he's getting at. So this is just two pages, two pages of this book, buy this book, it is so good, buy it for yourself, and then maybe give it to your dad or something like that. And hopefully your dad gets something out of it. The other thing that he talks a little bit about, and I absolutely love this, he doesn't really call it fight against toxic positivity. But he kind of gets into this issue of optimism in the face of a terminal diagnosis. And I'll read the passes that I'll kind of reflect on a little bit. This is at page 182. And then this is the last one I'm going to do, and then I'm going to tell you a little tip that he can get for your kids. And hopefully for you, so you can, you can get a little bit, have a little sense of gratitude in your own life. And here he says, a way to understand optimism. After I learned that I had cancer, one of my doctors gave me some advice. It's important, he said, to behave as if you're going to be a wild for a while. I was already way out of him. Doc, I just bought a new convertible and got a vasectomy. What do you want from me? Look, I'm not in denial about my situation. I'm maintaining my clear-eyed sense of the inevitable. I'm living like I'm dying, but at the same time, I'm very much living like I'm still living. Some oncologist's offices will schedule appointments for patients six months out. For the patients, it's an optimistic signal that doctors expect them to live. There are terminally ill people who look at the doctor's appointment cards on their bulletin boards that say to themselves, I'm going to make it to that. And when I'm there, I'm going to get good news. Herbert Zeh, my surgeon in Pittsburgh, says that he worries about patients who are inappropriately optimistic or ill-informed. At the same time, he is upset. When patients are told by friends and acquaintances that they have to be optimistic, or their treatments will work, it pains them to see patients who are having a tough day, health-wise, and assume it's because they weren't positive enough. My take on optimism is that as a mental state, it can enable you to do tangible things to improve your physical state. If you're optimistic, you're better able to endure brutal chemo or keep searching for late-breaking medical treatments. Dr. Zeh calls me the poster boy for the healthy balance between optimism and realism. He sees me try to embrace my career as a cancer, as another life experience. But I love that my exacting me doubled as both my appropriate birth control and as an optimistic gesture about my future. I love driving around in my new convertible. I love thinking I might be the one guy, the one million guy who beats this late-stage cancer. But even if I don't, it's better mindset to help me get through the day. I love this. When I was 14, I read the book, "Sour, Positive Thinking," and by Norman Vincent Peele, and I absolutely loved it. As a result of that book, I don't necessarily practice it all the time, but it is something that just means so much to me. There's all sorts of good Bible verses that I got from that. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. If you believe if nothing shall be impossible to you, if God is for us who can be against us, like these positive Christian buttress and verses that are so good. I know exactly what he's getting here because, on the one hand that I understand what people are talking about when they're talking about toxic positivity, I think it is important when you're feeling anxious or when you're feeling depressed or when you're feeling negative that you do interact with those feelings and that you engage in a state of mindfulness and that you deal with those feelings rather than completely cover them up because if you just cover them up, your mind keeps a score. It knows that you're not addressing those underlying issues. And of course, if you're like, oh my God, I'm just going to spend like a drunken sailor because I'm optimistic. And I'm just going to ignore all the underlying facts. I'm just going to put everything on the kind of car because maybe I'll win the lottery. I think people who are optimistic, no one is saying that. No one is saying be oblivious. Be optimistic and oblivious to the underlying facts. No one's saying to ignore what's going on and to just be untethered for reality as you like. Always look at the bright side of life. This is the energy of electrification. Available type-desk high performance variant with nearly 500 horsepower and 278 mile EPA range range. Choose from our complimentary charging packages so you can charge how you want the all-electric Acura ZDX. This is the energy of innovation, Acura, precision-crafted performance. This is your local Acura dealer to lease the all-electric ZDX for $389 a month. I've got a lot of grandbabies, like a lot a lot. And when it comes to finding a gift for each of them, you know, it could add up. But this year, while I was making my way through Walmart, I realized I don't have to spend a lot to get the gifts they'll love. And OPI mini-mani sets. I'm gonna do so much nail art. Oh, yeah, a LEGO set. My own a wall of water bottle. Ooh, and that's just half of them. Shop great gifts they're sure to love for $25 and under at Walmart. That's the life of Ryan. By the way, that's totally hilarious. For those of you who haven't seen the movie, it's one of the guys in the cross talking to Jesus about always look at the bright side of life. I mean, things could be worse even when you're on the cross. It's kind of sacrilegious, but it is kind of hilarious. But in any event, we get it. Those of us who are optimistic, we absolutely get that you got to look at the underlying facts. I got a day full of work ahead of me. And I'm not gonna say, oh my God, I just believe everything's gonna be great. No, that's not true. But here's where I think that it optimism, and I think it's related cousin gratitude, enables you to do such powerful things. First of all, most of the time when you can be in a positive mental state, and he doesn't get into this, but I know this just from my study of mind, body connection, you're literally relaxing and getting your body into state of kind of flow. And when you're in flow and you're not stressed, like that has tangible benefits for your body's ability to heal. When you're constantly in fight or flight, when you're negative, when you're when you're when you're absorbing all this negative energy, and you don't have a healthy way to discharge it through activity, through the belief that you can address it, and you just carry it with you, and you just nurse it, that's not going to be healthy. And the second tangible thing that it does is that enables you to get started to believe that it could work. And once you believe in something, it is incredibly powerful. And it's not imaginary, your body physiologically changes happier, the more optimistic, the more positive you are. Imagine, for example, if you have, you know, like a gratitude practice, they've said that a gratitude practice is as effective as SSR-I inhibitors, like rosak, in treating depression, you think, how can that possibly be? Well, if you have gratitude, thanks for things that you have, what does it do? It makes you think about your assets. One of the reasons when you have a lot of assets, you feel confident, and that confidence is necessary to relax and know that yes, you are the one that has the skill to get started on that project. But through your actions, you can change the outcome that you have in your life by these daily applications. And there's strategies that you can use. I hope you get the chance to read my book, Atomic Habits, because that is so good as if these daily little things that you can do to improve your life. But the other thing is, is that, you know, of course, Randy got it. He had a year to live. And he, and it was essentially a binary, yes, no chance. He could quiver his butt cheeks and be super sad and cry all day. Or he could say, "Hey, you know what? I'm gonna get a vasectomy. I'm gonna bat my life. I'm gonna drive around in my convertible. I'm gonna go to Disney World. I'm gonna write a book, leave a legacy that's still bearing through. This is a book I'll probably read over and over and over again. I may even send a copy to my daughter. It's so good. And it is something that is just very, very powerful as a way to kind of look at life and the intangible life lessons. And so he chose positivity. He chose to use and soak up every day that he had as a total gift and max out each day. And I think he probably made more, like it's six million bucks. He made more in six months than I have yet in 50 years. So it kind of makes me feel a little guilty. I need needless to say I'm not anywhere close to that number, minus about six million bucks, but in any event. But yeah, so think about what he achieved. And that's still bearing fruit. And it was because he was positive. And he's sharing what he learned. The other thing I love about Randy's house is he and he addresses this in his book. He was probably a little bit abrasive. He was one of these kind of characters that was very much new. He was really smart, and he worked really hard, and he achieved great things and was demanding of themselves. So he was very demanding of other people. And so I you very much get that from reading this book that he could be a little abrasive. But I think he gets it. He's a realist. And so he says, yeah, I know that I only have six months to live. Don't worry. I get I get that. And I get where the doctor was coming from when people aren't, you know, progressing. Imagine you're in the bed, and your lungs are chock full of cancer to have someone come up and say, well, you just didn't pray or stuff, or you weren't positive enough, or you didn't say, I can do all things through Christ, your strength is being a no one saying that. But what you're saying is, is if you don't believe you can win on the field and you don't even go out, you fail 100% of the times you don't take a swing. You fail 100% of the time you don't take a swing, you're guaranteed to fail. If you swing, you're at now percentages. And that is the quintessals of life. Isn't that so good? So that's these two vignettes. This book is chock full of vignettes that are so good. The other thing that I'm going to buy all thing that I'm going to give with you, and I'm actually going to write it, write it out to my daughter sharing this little piece of advice with her. The power of writing a thank you note. This is the kind of tip that you can give to your kids. The thank you note, a hand written thank you note, is so powerful and meaningful for people and thoughtful. And it's so simple. As posh says, it doesn't necessarily mean it makes you an A student. But in the eyes of professor, he says that the difference between a B plus and an A student. And then he shares this little story of a person that had applied to his, I think it was his graduate program, and did not have, I mean, she had good grades, but I like the top of the top credentials to get into Carnegie Mellon. And she had come and she had interviewed, and she did good too while with her interview. But during the course of the application process, Randy Cauch discovered that this young woman had written a thank you note not to Randy Cauch, but had written a thank you note to one of the staff that had helped her out once she was riding on campus for a tour. And Cauch was blown away because he was like, Oh my God, she wrote a thank you note, expressed gratitude to someone who didn't know that for no purpose other than just a purely expressed gratitude. As opposed to when you write a thank you note to like the guy that's gonna marry you, it's a little suck up, but it's still kind of a nice gesture, but it's just kind of good to do. You know, I think when I was in Starbucks and I was sitting when I lived there, there was a lot of thank you notes from Kirk Ferrance, and that he obviously has a lot of this stuff figured out. I'm gonna do an episode on Kirk Ferrance because I want to figure out like the principles of Kirk Ferrance that I agree with. For those of you who don't live in Iowa, he's the end football coach, and really good, but he's a little conserved of a plate falling and that kind of drives people nuts. But Kirk does thank you notes. And he clearly has a lot of good principles because it seems always win. They're not great, but they probably do about as well as he possibly can in Iowa. But he is very, very good. He's very, very talented. And it just shows the power of a thank you note. So this is something that you can take with you. If you have a colleague that's done something thoughtful for you, send them a thank you note. If you haven't reached out to your mom in a while, send her a note and just say, "Hey, mom, I was just thinking of you." If your kids are away in college, send them a little note, a little something that they would have to say. I've had this little habit of writing notes to my daughter, and she hasn't written me back yet, but one of these days she's gonna write me back. And I'm demonstrating for her that this is a good habit to get into is to write notes to the people that you care about and you love to let them know that you're thinking about them. And it's a way to carry through and explore the power and the newness of each day. So I hope you found this particular episode good. I hope I did it justice. This is my goal of every rocky cast to share these principles that I've learned these books, these kernels of wisdom with you, these little moments of light that you can then use this. Can I hope once you get Randy Poush's book that you will pass it on and, you know, pay it forward to someone else, that you will then do something for someone else. Buy Randy Poush's book. Morality's will be one of his family, and I don't think that they're starving and out begging and new deli, but hey, it's part of this legacy. And then buy it for someone else. Do that, and I think you will feel very good about yourself. And then send a thank you though. Super simple. And the other thing I love about a lot of these principles, anyone can do it. Anyone can go to bed at eight o'clock. Anyone can get up at four o'clock. Trust me, you can do it. And if you're sleeping in, you're wasting your life away, remember the mental more. We only have so many days on this way. And you got to show go each day. Now, what's on my agenda for today? I'm going to partition that I am going to see the Dietrich Bonhoeffer biofilm. Go watch this movie in theaters to support this film. It was inspired by the book of Eric Metaxas on Bonhoeffer, who's kind of this loser and badass, the killer Hitler, with these really badass radical Lutherans. I know it sounds like an oxymoron, but it's true. Really, really good. And listen to disturbed the sound of silence, this excitement and garfunkle remake. And it's been married to this particular movie. So good. I'm going to be doing that this afternoon. And I hope you get the chance to see it at some point, too. This is a fricking, awesome movie. And as a Lutheran, we don't have too many heroic radical figures. So gave for Lutheranism. And I think, oh, I guess he wasn't the LCA because he was a merger in the 80s. But he was a Lutheran. So we claim him. And he's a Lutheran badass, we definitely. So I'll do some separate podcasts on this. If you enjoyed this particular podcast, please give me pods of reviews of Apple and Spotify. Share this with someone else. Spread the news of what we're trying to achieve. It's essentially a good news podcast. Good news, good vibes, good habits, good life. That's the essence of the rocking cast. So that's it for the rocking cast. I got to get it to work until you and I see each other next on the Rockney Chas.