I bumped into a friend this past weekend and I heard that he was dealing with the death of his father. I asked him if he had ever heard of the the book The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. He had not. And since I consider this person a very well read person it surprised me. I decided to start a personal poll and ask those that I bumped into, if they had read or heard about the book. Most had not.

Randy was a dynamic professor at Carnagie Mellon who had a family with three small children when he heard that he had a particularly virulent form of cancer and only had 6 months to live.

Here’s ABC Special about  The Last Lecture and below is the actual lecture.

For my friends in the music business: you must go and watch some of these videos produced by Derek Sivers.

Derek is the creator of CD Baby and put up a bunch of mini-interviews of people that he met at the recent South by Southwest Conference.  Derek’s posting on his site.

Here’s Derek’s presentation at the conference:

We’re all scrambling for time. What if we just gave up 1 percent of our collective TV watching time and applied it in more productive ways?

I found this video by Clay Shirky on what he calls the “Cognitive Surplus.”

Here some food for thought from his presentation:

• The whole Wikipedia project represents about 100 million hours of effort.
  Here in the U.S. we watch about that, in TV ads, on a weekend!

• The internet population of the world watches about a trillion hours of TV a year.
  If we just used 1 percent of that time for more worthwhile endeavors, that’s about 100 Wikipedia projects a year.

Hmmmm…I think I can give up 1 percent a year.