Browsing Quotes, page 113
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Some old-school types complain these days that higher education too often feels like it is all about customer service. Students and their parents believe they are paying top dollar for a product, and so they want it to be valuable in a measurable way. It’s as if they’ve walked into a department store, and instead of buying five pairs of designer jeans, they’ve purchased a five-subject course load.
I don’t fully reject the customer-service model, but I think it’s important to use the right industry metaphor. It’s not retail. Instead, I’d compare college tuition to paying for a personal trainer at an athletic club. We professors play the roles of trainers, giving people access to the equipment (books, labs, our expertise) and after that, it is our job to be demanding. We need to make sure that our students are exerting themselves. We need to praise them when they deserve it and to tell them honestly when they have it in them to work harder.
Most importantly, we need to let them know how to judge for themselves how they’re coming along. The great thing about working in a gym is that if you put in effort, you get very obvious results. The same should be true of college. A professor’s job is to teach students how to see their minds growing in the same way they can see their muscles grow when they look in the mirror.Speaker: Randy PauschPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:53 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.
Speaker: Randy PauschPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:52 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I did, however, do a lot of my winning out of view of my family. And I know that increased suspicions. But I found the best way to bag stuffed animals is without the pressure of a family audience. I also didn’t want anyone to know just how long it took me to be successful. Tenacity is a virtue, but it’s not always crucial for everyone to observe how hard you work at something.
Speaker: Randy PauschPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:52 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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.
Speaker: Randy PauschPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:51 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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.
…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.
…It saddens me that many kids today are so coddled.Speaker: Randy PauschPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:51 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
When I was finally dismissed, one of the assistant coaches came over to reassure me. “Coach Graham rode you pretty hard, didn’t he?”
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.”Speaker: Randy PauschPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:50 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
My mother, meanwhile, knew plenty, too. All my life, she saw it as part of her mission to keep my cockiness in check. I’m grateful for that now. Even these days, if someone asks her what I was like as a kid, she describes me as “alert, but not precocious.” We now live in an age when parents praise every child as a genius. And here’s my mother, figuring “alert” ought to suffice as a compliment.
When I was studying for my PhD, I took something called “the theory qualifier,” which I can now definitively say was the second worst thing in my life after chemotherapy. When I complained to my mother about how hard and awful the test was, she leaned over, patted me on the arm and said, “We know just how you feel, honey. And remember, when your father was your age, he was fighting the Germans.”
After I got my PhD, my mother took great relish in introducing me by saying: “This is my son. He’s a doctor, but not the kind who helps people.”Speaker: Randy PauschPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:47 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
We now live in an age when parents praise every child as a genius. And here’s my mother, figuring “alert” ought to suffice as a compliment.
Speaker: Randy PauschPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:46 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for a truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:44 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I gave the boy back into Parvati’s arms, and wiped a hand across my face and into my hair. Looking at the people, listening to the breathing, heaving, laughing, struggling music of the slum, all around me, I remembered one of Khaderbhai’s favorite phrases. Every human heartbeat, he’d said many times, is a universe of possibilities. And it seemed to me that I finally understood exactly what he’d meant. He’d been trying to tell me that every human will has the power to transform its fate. I’d always thought that fate was something unchangeable: fixed for every one of us at birth, and as constant as the circuit of the stars. But I suddenly realized that life is stranger and more beautiful than that. The truth is that, no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:42 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“It is always a fool’s mistake,” Didier once said to me, “to be alone with someone you shouldn’t have loved.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:39 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Luck is what happens to you when fate gets tired of waiting,” she murmured.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:38 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
There are few things more discomfiting than a spontaneous outburst of genuine decency from someone you’re determined to dislike for no good reason.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:38 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Kavita stood to give me a hug. It was the tender, close hug that a woman gives a man when she knows she can trust him, or when she’s sure his heart belongs to someone else. It was a rare enough embrace between foreigners. Coming from an Indian woman, it was uniquely intimate in my experience. And it was important. I’d been in the city for years; I could make myself understood in Marathi, Hindi, and Urdu; I could sit with gangsters, slum-dwellers, or Bollywood actors, claiming their goodwill and sometimes their respect; but few things made me feel as accepted, in all the Indian worlds of Bombay, as Kavita Singh’s fond embrace.
I never told her that – what her affectionate and unconditional acceptance meant to me. So much, too much, of the good that I felt in those years of exile was locked in the prison cell of my heart: those tall walls of fear; that small, barred window of hope; that hard bed of shame. I do speak out now. I know now that when the loving, honest moment comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again. And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare from heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tries too late to reach for them.Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:37 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everything has its cause and its meaning. Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see. Sometimes, we see the past so clearly, and read the legend of its parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose, and a kind of message is enfolded in it. Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:35 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Fate always gives you two choices,” Scorpio George once said: “the one you should take, and the one you do.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:33 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
But I was alone, and for two reasons. The mafia was theirs, not mine. For them, the organization always came first. But I was loyal to the men, not the mafia; to the brothers, not the brotherhood. I worked for the mafia, but I didn’t join it. I’m not a joiner. I never found a club or clan or idea that was more important to me than the men and women who believed in it.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:33 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Every door is a portal leading through time as well as space. The same doorway that leads us into and out of a room also leads us into the past of the room and its ceaselessly unfolding future. People knew that once, deep within the ur-mind, the ur-imagination. You can still find those who decorate doorways, and reverently salute them, in every culture, from Ireland to Japan. I stepped up one, two steps, and reached out with my right hand to touch the doorjamb and then touch my chest, over the heart, in a salaam to fate and a homage to the dead friends and enemies who entered with me.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:32 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
And that was the elated moment I’d called glorious, in my mind, as I ran into the guns: that stupid waste of lives, that friendly fire. There wasn’t any glory in it. There never is. There’s only courage and fear and love. And war kills them all, one by one. Glory belongs to God, of course; that’s what the word really means. And you can’t serve God with a gun.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:32 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I realized that I didn’t need their brilliance any more: it couldn’t help me. All the cleverness in all the world couldn’t stop my stomach from knotting around its prowling fear. When you know you’re going to die, there’s no comfort in cleverness. Genius is vain, and cleverness is hollow, at the end. The comfort that does come, if it comes at all, is that strangely marbled mix of time and place and feeling that we usually call wisdom. For me, on that last night before the battle, it was the sound of my mother’s voice, and it was the life and death of my friend Prabaker.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:31 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment!
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