Blayne Sucks

I am beginning to slowly comprehend the extent to which Randy Pausch is sneaky smart. Maybe. I honestly don’t know, but he’s absolutely got me enthralled in a riddle.

If you don’t know who Randy Pausch is or you haven’t already read my previous posts about Dr. Pausch’s “Last Lecture” and about his Time Management Talk I would recommend you at least read those posts to fully appreciate this enigma.

Now, there’s only one truly important item in this post and it’s not the riddle. The riddle is amusing and I’ll discuss it in a bit, but I want the focus of this post to be clear.

I consider myself a rather introspective person and as a result I’m always trying to improve my abilities by setting aside a little time to think about my approach to things. It seems like a natural extension to my engineering instincts to look for a way to “engineer” the way I get things done. In that spirit, I first watched Dr. Pausch’s Time Management Talk about a month ago on the hunch that he was an excellent presenter for the “Last Lecture” and I thought it might carry over into his time management talk.

I was impressed enough to add it to my blog, which was not something I did for any of the previous time management techniques I have tried with varying degrees of success. I didn’t have a particular reason except that the field of personal productivity is, well, personal. There are a lot of different approaches because there are a lot of different people, and I figure what worked for me might not work for very many others. I once heard or read (I can’t remember where, but I think it was Merlin Mann’s Google Tech Talk) that the art of time management was essentially “Advanced Common Sense,” which is the best three word description I could give to Dr. Pausch’s talk. So I posted it.

I can’t impress upon you strongly enough that even if you saw the previous Time Management Talk I linked, you should watch the new version. It has been updated after ten years of practice, insight and feedback and I guarantee you the return on investment in watching the talk is worthwhile. In short, it is fantastic. I have embedded if you want to watch it right now or you can find it online here and watch it when you have an hour. Please set aside some time to watch this video. It is the best thing you can find in this post.

Now with the really important stuff covered, I can delve into the riddle. When I finished watching the original time management talk I thought to myself that I would try to implement a few pieces of it for a month and then take stock to see how it worked out. I was able to do some of it exceedingly well, and I was unable to do some of it at all. That’s sort of the point though. If you make incremental improvements you’ll eventually become fantastic at managing your time.

Fast forward to today. It’s “dead week” here at NCSU, which has traditionally been one of the most hectic weeks of the year, both for me and for many other students, in terms of time management.

(Are you ready for the riddle yet?)

I got an email from Randy Pausch to notify me of the updated version of the talk and compliment me on a couple of posts.

First, I need to tip my hat to Randy for the heads up and for the lecture. The new lecture should be required viewing for, at the very least, all graduate students.

My initial thought upon seeing the email was that someone was using his address to spam people in the hopes that they would read it, but once I read the email I was utterly blown away to find that (it appears) he actually emailed me. I mean, how freaking cool is that?? Of course, when I really thought about about it I found some serious weirdnesses. Here’s a brief list:

1. The fact that it had been almost exactly a month when he contacted me, which was the deadline I set for myself to review how some of his techniques worked out, was eerie coincidence.
2. Despite what some may claim, the path to fame and fortune is not to create a blog. I don’t get gobs of fan mail complimenting me for my blog posts, so getting an email from a recognized expert about something I posted on my blog is highly unusual and arguably a first for me.
3. I’m a computer science graduate student. I spend much of my time trying to get useful information out of computer science professors, so getting an unsolicited email with useful information from a computer science professor is highly unusual and absolutely a first for me.
4. If there is humor in extremes, the fact that Randy Pausch emailed me about my blog is comedic gold. The readership of my blog is pretty small. I am pretty sure the list of people who *don’t* read my blog includes my own mother and my PhD adviser. The exposure that Randy Pausch’s site and talks have deservedly earned is enormous. His story has been covered by the Wall Street Journal, Good Morning America, ABC World News, CBS Evening News, and Oprah.
5. While watching the new version of the talk, around minute 52, the camera pans into the crowd and lands on Mark Sherriff, a fun-loving recent PhD graduate of NCSU’s Computer Science Department now a professor at the University of Virginia. I worked in the lab with Mark over the summer. I was at a party with him last Friday night. He did not mention the talk to me and yet Randy Pausch did!

I could continue with this list, but I think I will move on to the riddle: First, how? How did he find my blog post on the topic? Second, why? Why email me? I’m hardly all that important. Why email anyone? His press basically is writing itself. In fact, there’s already a book deal in the works.

Perhaps there is a sort of Randy-esque nature to it though. Each of Randy’s talks has a central theme: get more bang for your buck. You only have one spin on this merry-go-round, so you might as well go all out. Now, I have only had a day to think about his email and I haven’t met Randy, but maybe he came to the realization that people don’t affect real change by screaming into a megaphone so much as they can by whispering into someone’s ear. Maybe he figured that calling the national media doesn’t really change as many minds as simply sending out a few emails to a few bloggers.

I have been blessed to have many gifted teachers. All of the best teachers are able to teach you something without even making you aware that they are teaching you. Randy talks about this as a sort of a head fake in his “Last Lecture.” Maybe this was another head fake. Maybe I will never know the answer to the riddles of how or why he emailed me. Maybe I’m simply over-thinking this whole scenario. Maybe he sent out dozens or hundreds of emails like the one he sent me. Maybe it’s actually best that I don’t know the answers to this riddle because for a curious mind, there’s a magic in not knowing why things work the way they do. All I know for sure is that he really got me thinking about life and if there was any planning that went into this at all, it was sneaky, sneaky smart.