The last lecture (3 page)

M
Y IMAGINATION
was always pretty hard to contain, and halfway through high school, I felt this urge to splash some of the thoughts swirling in my head onto the walls of my childhood bedroom.

I asked my parents for permission.

“I want to paint things on my walls,” I said.

“Like what?” they asked.

“Things that matter to me,” I said. “Things I think will be cool. You’ll see.”

That explanation was enough for my father. That’s what was so great about him. He encouraged creativity just by smiling at you. He loved to watch the spark of enthusiasm turn into fireworks. And he understood me and my need to express myself in unconventional ways. So he thought my wall-painting adventure was a great idea.

My mother wasn’t so high on the whole escapade, but she relented pretty quickly when she saw how excited I was. She also knew Dad usually won out on these things. She might as well surrender peacefully.

For two days, with the help of my sister, Tammy, and my friend Jack Sheriff, I painted on the walls of my bedroom. My father sat in the living room, reading the newspaper, patiently waiting for the unveiling. My mother hovered in the hallway, completely nervous. She kept sneaking up on us, trying to get a peek, but we remained barricaded in the room. Like they say in the movies, this was “a closed set.”

What did we paint?

Well, I wanted to have a quadratic formula on the wall. In a quadratic equation, the highest power of an unknown quantity is a square. Always the nerd, I thought that was worth celebrating. Right by the door, I painted:

Jack and I painted a large silver elevator door. To the left of the door, we drew “Up” and “Down” buttons, and above the elevator, we painted a panel with floor numbers one through six. The number “three” was illuminated. We lived in a ranch house—it was just one level—so I was doing a bit of fantasizing to imagine six floors. But looking back, why didn’t I paint eighty or ninety floors? If I was such a big-shot dreamer, why did my elevator stop at three? I don’t know. Maybe it was a symbol of the balance in my life between aspiration and pragmatism.

Given my limited artistic skills, I thought it best if I sketched things out in basic geometric shapes. So I painted a simple rocket ship with fins. I painted Snow White’s mirror with the line: “Remember when I told you that you were the fairest? I lied!”

On the ceiling, Jack and I wrote the words “I’m trapped in the attic!” We did the letters backwards, so it seemed as if we’d imprisoned someone up there and he was scratching out an S.O.S.

Because I loved chess, Tammy painted chess pieces (she was the only one of us with any drawing talent). While she handled that, I painted a submarine lurking in a body of water behind the bunk bed. I drew a periscope rising above the bedspread, in search of enemy ships.

I always liked the story of Pandora’s box, so Tammy and I painted our version of it. Pandora, from Greek mythology, was given a box with all the world’s evils in it. She disobeyed orders not to open it. When the lid came off, evil spread throughout the world. I was always drawn to the story’s optimistic ending: Left at the bottom of the box was “hope.” So inside my Pandora’s box, I wrote the word “Hope.” Jack saw that and couldn’t resist writing the word “Bob” over “Hope.” When friends visited my room, it always took them a minute to figure out why the word “Bob” was there. Then came the inevitable eye-roll.

Given that it was the late 1970s, I wrote the words “Disco sucks!” over my door. My mother thought that was vulgar. One day when I wasn’t looking, she quietly painted over the word “sucks.” That was the only editing she ever did.

Friends who’d come by were always pretty impressed. “I can’t believe your parents let you do this,” they’d say.

Though my mother wasn’t thrilled at the time, she never painted over the room, even decades after I’d moved out. In fact, over time, my bedroom became the focal point of her house tour when anyone came to visit. My mom began to realize: People thought this was definitely cool. And they thought she was cool for allowing me to do it.

Anybody out there who is a parent, if your kids want to paint their bedrooms, as a favor to me, let them do it. It’ll be OK. Don’t worry about resale value on the house.

I don’t know how many more times I will get to visit my childhood home. But it is a gift every time I go there. I still sleep in that bunk bed my father built, I look at those crazy walls, I think about my parents allowing me to paint, and I fall asleep feeling lucky and pleased.

I
T’S IMPORTANT
to have specific dreams.

When I was in grade school, a lot of kids wanted to become astronauts. I was aware, from an early age, that NASA wouldn’t want me. I had heard that astronauts couldn’t have glasses. I was OK with that. I didn’t really want the whole astronaut gig. I just wanted the floating.

Turns out that NASA has a plane it uses to help astronauts acclimate to zero gravity. Everyone calls it “the Vomit Comet,” even though NASA refers to it as “The Weightless Wonder,” a public-relations gesture aimed at distracting attention from the obvious.

Whatever the plane is called, it’s a sensational piece of machinery. It does parabolic arcs, and at the top of each arc, you get about twenty-five seconds when you experience the rough equivalent of weightlessness. As the plane dives, you feel like you’re on a runaway roller coaster, but you’re suspended, flying around.

My dream became a possibility when I learned that NASA had a program in which college students could submit proposals for experiments on the plane. In 2001, our team of Carnegie Mellon students proposed a project using virtual reality.

Being weightless is a sensation hard to fathom when you’ve been an Earthling all your life. In zero gravity, the inner ear, which controls balance, isn’t quite in synch with what your eyes are telling you. Nausea is often the result. Could virtual reality dry-runs on the ground help? That was the question in our proposal, and it was a winner. We were invited to Johnson Space Center in Houston to ride the plane.

I was probably more excited than any of my students. Floating! But late in the process, I got bad news. NASA made it very clear that under no circumstances could faculty advisors fly with their students.

I was heartbroken, but I was not deterred. I would find a way around this brick wall. I decided to carefully read all the literature about the program, looking for loopholes. And I found one: NASA, always eager for good publicity, would allow a journalist from the students’ hometown to come along for the ride.

I called an official at NASA to ask for his fax number. “What are you going to fax us?” he asked. I explained: my resignation as the faculty advisor and my application as the journalist.

“I’ll be accompanying my students in my new role as a member of the media,” I said.

And he said, “That’s a little transparent, don’t you think?”

I just wanted the floating…

“Sure,” I said, but I also promised him that I’d get information about our experiment onto news Web sites, and send film of our virtual reality efforts to more mainstream journalists. I knew I could pull that off, and it was win-win for everyone. He gave me his fax number.

As an aside, there’s a lesson here: Have something to bring to the table, because that will make you more welcome.

My experience in zero G was spectacular (and no, I didn’t throw up, thank you). I did get banged up a bit, though, because at the end of the magical twenty-five seconds, when gravity returns to the plane, it’s actually as if you’ve become twice your weight. You can slam down pretty hard. That’s why we were repeatedly told: “Feet down!” You don’t want to crash land on your neck.

But I did manage to get on that plane, almost four decades after floating became one of my life goals. It just proves that if you can find an opening, you can probably find a way to float through it.

I
LOVE FOOTBALL.
Tackle
football. I started playing when I was nine years old, and football got me through. It helped make me who I am today. And even though I did not reach the National Football League, I sometimes think I got more from pursuing that dream, and
not
accomplishing it, then I did from many of the ones I did accomplish.

My romance with football started when my dad dragged me, kicking and screaming, to join a league. I had no desire to be there. I was naturally wimpy, and the smallest kid by far. Fear turned to awe when I met my coach, Jim Graham, a hulking, six-foot-four wall-of-a-guy. He had been a linebacker at Penn State, and was seriously old-school. I mean,
really
old-school; like he thought the forward pass was a trick play.

On the first day of practice, we were all scared to death. Plus he hadn’t brought along any footballs. One kid finally spoke up for all of us. “Excuse me, Coach. There are no footballs.”

And Coach Graham responded, “We don’t need any footballs.”

There was a silence, while we thought about that…

“How many men are on the football field at a time?” he asked us.

Eleven on a team, we answered. So that makes twenty-two.

“And how many people are touching the football at any given time?”

One of them.

“Right!” he said. “So we’re going to work on what those
other
twenty-one guys are doing.”

Fundamentals. That was a great gift Coach Graham gave us. Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals. As a college professor, I’ve seen this as one lesson so many kids ignore, always to their detriment: You’ve
got
to get the fundamentals down, because otherwise the fancy stuff is not going to work.

Coach Graham used to ride me hard. I remember one practice in particular. “You’re doing it all wrong, Pausch. Go back! Do it again!” I tried to do what he wanted. It wasn’t enough. “You owe me, Pausch! You’re doing push-ups after practice.”

When I was finally dismissed, one of the assistant coaches came over to reassure me. “Coach Graham rode you pretty hard, didn’t he?” he said.

I could barely muster a “yeah.”

“That’s a good thing,” the assistant told me. “When you’re screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means they’ve given up on you.”

That lesson has stuck with me my whole life. When you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a bad place to be. You may not want to hear it, but your critics are often the ones telling you they still love you and care about you, and want to make you better.

There’s a lot of talk these days about giving children self-esteem. It’s not something you can
give;
it’s something they have to build. Coach Graham worked in a no-coddling zone. Self-esteem? He knew there was really only one way to teach kids how to develop it: You give them something they can’t do, they work hard until they find they can do it, and you just keep repeating the process.

When Coach Graham first got hold of me, I was this wimpy kid with no skills, no physical strength, and no conditioning. But he made me realize that if I work hard enough, there will be things I can do tomorrow that I can’t do today. Even now, having just turned forty-seven, I can give you a three-point stance that any NFL lineman would be proud of.

I realize that, these days, a guy like Coach Graham might get thrown out of a youth sports league. He’d be too tough. Parents would complain.

I remember one game when our team was playing terribly. At halftime, in our rush for water, we almost knocked over the water bucket. Coach Graham was livid: “Jeez! That’s the most I’ve seen you boys move since this game started!” We were eleven years old, just standing there, afraid he’d pick us up one by one and break us with his bare hands. “Water?” he barked. “You boys want water?” He lifted the bucket and dumped all the water on the ground.

We watched him walk away and heard him mutter to an assistant coach: “You can give water to the first-string defense. They played OK.”

Now let me be clear: Coach Graham would never endanger any kid. One reason he worked so hard on conditioning was he knew it reduces injuries. However, it was a chilly day, we’d all had access to water during the first half, and the dash to the water bucket was more about us being a bunch of brats than really needing hydration.

Even so, if that kind of incident happened today, parents on the sidelines would be pulling out their cell phones to call the league commissioner, or maybe their lawyer.

It saddens me that many kids today are so coddled. I think back to how I felt during that halftime rant. Yes, I was thirsty. But more than that, I felt humiliated. We had all let down Coach Graham, and he let us know it in a way we’d never forget. He was right. We had shown more energy at the water bucket than we had in the damn game. And getting chewed out by him meant something to us. During the second half, we went back on the field, and gave it our all.

I haven’t seen Coach Graham since I was a teen, but he just keeps showing up in my head, forcing me to work harder whenever I feel like quitting, forcing me to be better. He gave me a feedback loop for life.

When we send our kids to play organized sports—football, soccer, swimming, whatever—for most of us, it’s not because we’re desperate for them to learn the intricacies of the sport.

What we really want them to learn is far more important: teamwork, perseverance, sportsmanship, the value of hard work, an ability to deal with adversity. This kind of indirect learning is what some of us like to call a “head fake.”

There are two kinds of head fakes. The first is literal. On a football field, a player will move his head one way so you’ll think he’s going in that direction. Then he goes the opposite way. It’s like a magician using misdirection. Coach Graham used to tell us to watch a player’s waist. “Where his belly button goes, his body goes,” he’d say.

The second kind of head fake is the
really
important one—the one that 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.

This kind of head-fake learning is absolutely vital. And Coach Graham was the master.