“Entire original Disneyland was completed from first shovel dig to first paid admission in 366 days!” What is the magic of it?  “If you can dream it, you can do it. – Walt Disney” “Because they use every single day out of it.” Randy Pausch said.

Randy was a Professor of Computer Science, HCI at Carnegie Mellon University, and co-founder of the ETC. He also served as the Director of CMU Stage 3 research group and led researchers who created Alice, a revolutionary way to teach computer programming. He inspired countless students in the classroom and others worldwide through his highly acclaimed the last lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, which was delivered in Carnegie Mellon, September 2007.

Jan 20th 2011, ETCers in silicon valley campus watched the video talk called “Time Management” from Randy Pausch. In October 1998, Randy gave this talk to University of Virginia where he had taught for nine years. And 10 years later, On Nov. 27 2007, Randy returned to U.Va. to reprise that lecture. Before the talk, U.Va. CS professor Gabe Robins introduced Randy as the perfect mentor – a combination of Yoda, Captain James T. Kirk and Jim Carrey. With ”three to six months of good health left.”, Randy considered himself an authority about what to do with limited time.

Randy Pausch, a father of three, talked about how to set goals and achieve them, how to delegate, how to learn specific skills and tools to avoid wasting time and how to deal with stress and procrastination. And the overall goal, he said, is to allow time for having fun.

“Never too Early to Delegate.”, “Make calls right before lunch to help keep them short. You may think you’re important, but you’re not as important as lunch.”, “Kill your television .”, “Find your creative time and defend it ruthlessly.”, “Never break a promise, but re-negotiate them if need be.”, ”If you haven’t got time to do it right, you don’t have time to do it wrong.”…

“Time management makes you figure out what’s important and what’s not,” he said. “Time is all we have. You may find one day that you have less than you think.”

P.S. I also saw this great talk right 2 years ago before I joined ETC. The lecture is roughly an hour but very informative. The talk video is posted online at Randy’s website: www.randypausch.com or Youtube Carnegie Mellon.