The Last Lecture

Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 2008

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Section 2, Chapters 6-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Section 2: “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”

Section 2, Chapters 6-7 Summary

Pausch outlines how he pursued his dreams. He exhorts the reader, “It’s important to have specific dreams” (31). Pausch had a childhood dream of “floating,” not necessarily of being an astronaut. When he was a faculty advisor, NASA organized a contest for college students to experience zero gravity. Pausch’s group applied and won, but as a faculty advisor he was unable to fly with them. So he researched loopholes and changed his status to journalist, so he could experience floating with them. The lesson here is that “if you can find an opening, you can probably find a way to float through it” (34).

In Chapter 7 Pausch reminisces about his “romance with football” (35). Though he never achieved his dream of making it to the NFL, he reflects, “I sometimes think I got more from pursuing that dream, and not accomplishing it, than I did from many of the ones I did accomplish” (35). He learned a lot from football—especially from his old school coach, Jim Graham—and applied those lessons to his teaching. Most people may not appreciate having an especially demanding coach, but Pausch learned to value Coach Graham’s toughness. The assistant coach put Graham’s style into perspective for Pausch when he told him that it was good Coach was so tough on him, because “when you’re screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means they’ve given up on you” (37). The sort of “no coddling zone” Pausch learned to play football in taught him a lot about how children need to build self-esteem. Perhaps the biggest lesson and technique that Pausch learned from Coach Graham was the importance of the “head fake,” which “teaches people things they don’t realize they’re learning until well into the process. If you’re a head-fake specialist, your hidden objective is to get them to learn something you want them to learn” (39).

Section 2, Chapters 6-7 Analysis

These two chapters demonstrate Pausch’s tenacity and creativity when it comes to solving problems. The zero gravity experience teaches us that to achieve our dreams, we may have to think laterally and look for atypical routes to meet our goal. This lesson will connect to later chapters, in which Pausch encourages readers not to complain about or allow obstacles to defeat them, but to instead view them as brick walls that can be overcome with persistence and inventive problem-solving.

During his reminiscence about Coach Graham, Pausch espouses the necessity of helping children build their own confidence by “giving them something they can’t do [so they] work hard until they find they can do it” (37). Without Coach Graham’s lessons, Pausch may not have had nearly as many chances at achieving what he wanted. Through the football anecdote Pausch also asserts there there’s value even in unrealized dreams. Though he never became a professional player, Pausch still learned several important life lessons through football. Namely, it helped him develop a never-give-up attitude and taught him about the “head fake.”

In fact, Pausch regards this experience as the ultimate “head fake,” because the true purpose of his football days was less about sports and more about life, and because he learned these important life lessons by playing football, not by studying a book on how to be successful. The head fake motif will reappear throughout the book, especially in the final section.