Week 2: Achieving Your Dreams

This week was filled with a lot of good material, and I took away a lot. One of the videos and transcripts we were given to look over was seminar done by Randy Pausch and it was called "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams". It was a well-spoken talk and after reading most of it I went back and watched the entire video. The series it was a part of was called "Last Lecture" to give the speaker the challenge of what they would say if it was their last lecture. Randy was in an interesting place in his life when he gave this talk because he was suffering from cancer and was only given a couple of months to live. 

In his lecture he went through a list of childhood dreams he had and then explained how he went on to achieve them. His list was short and to the point. Experiencing zero gravity, playing in the NFL, being an author for an article in the World Encyclopedia and finally being Captain Kirk from Star Trek. As he went through and described each one and how he had achieved it I think the main reason he was so successful was that he was willing to keep trying and keep failing until he made it happen. When he was on the faculty a group of students and him won a competition where they would be able fly. Unfortunately, there was only one major rule and that was that faculty was not allowed to, only the students. So instead of coming as their teacher he decided he would come as journalist because the students were allowed to bring one and that person could fly. He made it happen. 

With each dream that he had he found a way to try, work hard and accomplish whatever it took. I think that having dreams is so important. It fills us with hope and optimism for the future and that if we work hard enough towards what we want, our dreams will come true. It makes the mundane life more exciting when you have something that you dreamt of become an actual reality. I believe that most of the inventions and businesses that we all know, and love would not be here without people who had dreams of making them come true. 

Children have the wonderful ability of imagination which I think is where most of our dreams come from. I can remember many times when I was a kid playing with my imaginary friends and creating complete worlds with my cousins that seemed so real to us. My dreams as a kid were very much in that realm. I wanted to be a princess, but not just a normal princess, of course. I wanted to be a princess who needed rescue from a prince. A prince who would save me, protect me and we would live happily ever after. I made this very clear as I dressed like a princess every Halloween and played this game with my cousins often. We would use old pink bed sheets as our capes so that it was more dramatic as we were running away from the pretend danger a princess was always facing. Though I am not a princess today, I did marry a wonderful man who is my husband. He does protect me and save me in many ways. So even though those dreams were always very imaginary, they still became true in their own ways.