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“What truly matters?” The only thing that mattered for Katie and Sam was a healthy delivery. Yet everyone involved wasted precious time on distractions.
We may be too caught in routines to pay attention. We may lack confidence in our abilities and focus on largely irrelevant details rather than confront the difficult and challenging work in front of us.
On every walk, we would pass tourists who were visiting the Supreme Court, and they never recognized the Chief. I recall once, when we had to make our way through a crowd of rambunctious middle schoolers, that the Chief suggested to their teacher that she might want to keep her students from blocking the sidewalk. She responded with a look that suggested, pretty clearly, that you might want to mind your own business, old man. I smiled and thought, If only she knew!
Yet his mindset mattered as well. The Chief approached his whole life the same way he approached cases. He clearly thought about what truly mattered in every facet of his life.
“Is this a real meeting or a fake meeting?”
Professor Pausch’s underlying premise was that you should be as efficient as possible at work so that you can do all of the things outside of work that matter just as much, like spending time with family and friends, or pursuing hobbies and other passions. He was agnostic about what those things might be and wasn’t interested in telling the audience what they should value.
