Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I just like to present you an inspiring speech I discovered just because I was listening to a music track: „The Last Lecture“ from Randy Pausch.

One day I was again looking for some nice music I can listen to while I am working. So I run some searches in YouTube for some chillstep mixes and was quite happy with the results I found. One of these mixes featured the track „To dream“ from Systremo. The really special thing about this track was a quotation from a speech I have never heard of until I was listening to this particular track.

Being inspired by these quotations, I was curious to find out who was the author of these words. After a short google search, I found out that the quotation being used was from the speech „Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams“ of Randy Pausch[1][2].

Randy Pausch was a professor of computer science, human-computer interaction and design. In this case, he was working in the same field of research as I am and a lot of his topics he addressed in „The Last Lecture“ offered some analogies to my very own research and/or ideas. Moreover, the speech was also about the required commitment to achieve certain goals in life.

„Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted“ is a good way see failures in a more positive way. Apart from the direct experiences after a failure, often a lot of time was spent on reaching this point. Even if the final result was a failure, the whole process itself has mostly caused a high experience gain which can be useful in other scenarios or for the next attempt.

„The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.“ Sometimes it seems to be impossible to reach a certain goal. However, if enough effort is put into a thing, most obstacles can be cleared and the goal can be finally achieved. The secret is just to never give up and to stick to the very own goals.

Moreover, one of the other important messages of his speech was to never stop dreaming. On the one hand, it is all about having certain dreams in life for which it is worth working hard.
On the other hand, never stop dreaming in the field of human-computer interaction is also a great way to achieve impressive results. Virtual (game) environments allow us to expand our dreams and to realize things which would not be possible in the real world.

I do not want to write too much about the speech in this article. „Finding of the week“ can also be just about announcing and presenting a special idea I found. In this case, I like to conclude this week’s article with a video of the speech.