The first time I’d heard the term Last Lecture, it was from Professor Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon University. My biggest (academic) regret was not taking his class, Building Virtual Worlds. There was a massive waiting list and I let that deter me.
His Last Lecture is a fantastic talk about achieving your childhood dreams and is a must watch for every single human being. He gave it on September 18th, 2007 and would die on July 25th, 2008 of pancreatic cancer.
Our first article comes from Graham Weaver, founder and managing partner of the private equity firm Alpine Investors, and a lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He also gave a Last Lecture on how to live an asymmetric life. Our first article is a blog post that covers what he talked about (in case you weren’t in the mood to watch it):
How to Live an Asymmetric Life [Graham Weaver] – “I learned that, yes, it is possible to reduce one’s downside, but it is not possible to eliminate it. The better strategy is to seek opportunities where the possibility of gains wildly outweighs what you can lose, which is typically capped at 1x your investment.” It starts with a brief story about investing but the meat is in body of the article when he writes about how to build an asymmetric life, very well done and starts off with a banger – Do Hard Things.
100 ways to slightly improve your life without really trying [The Guardian] – “Whether it’s taking fruit to work (and to the bedroom!), being polite to rude strangers or taking up skinny-dipping, here’s a century of ways to make life better, with little effort involved” There are some silly ideas on this but you may find a few one’s you’ll try.
Why do some artists become famous? [Big Think on Youtube]