The interesting thing about Pausch's last lecture is I've met people who don't normally go for self-discovery, self-help type motivational materials who have really identified with it/recommend it to their friends. My boss even has the book.
I think most motivational content is a scam because it is heavily tilted/skewed in favor of positive-only (e.g. don't talk about real failures). Randy Pausch wasn't trying to make a motivational speech - he was trying to deliver an important message (to his kids). He was real and passionate.
The Last Lecture is absolutely worth watching (and reading, there is a book). Just as a note for those who haven't seen it yet, Randy was rejected from Carnegie Mellon when applying there for graduate school. He was also rejected when he applied to be an Imagineer with Disney. Eventually he ended up getting his PhD from CMU and was offered a job as an Imagineer. You'll have to watch/read the Last Lecture to find out exactly how all of it went down :-).
Another similar story is about John Lasseter (one of the founding members of Pixar, who is also responsible for drawing the BSD daemon) was fired from Disney after trying to introduce 3D technology into their animation pipeline.
He never gave up and after a brief stint at Lucasfilm went onto founding Pixar with Ed Catmull and Steve Jobs.
Disney ended up purchasing Pixar in 2006 for about $7.4 billion
Two years ago on News.YC, I posted a well-received* four page article by the author here. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20032 It summarizes the essence of founding Tripod and his "I'm not smart, just hard working" attitude more than Gabrielle's blog post does.
(*Of course, back then, 40 upvotes was incredible.)
I was at the College of William and Mary for three years as a graduate student. One of those years, a girl was graduating who did something similar to get in. Her application was wait-listed, so she showed up on campus with a sandwhich board saying so, and that she desperately wanted to come to WM. She did, and she did well.
Here's some unsolicited advice for anybody: a) build the product b) charge money for it c) get to ramen profitable. Then you can try asking for investment again. If they say yes this time, great. If not, you are in a pretty good situation for continuing development and proceeding down the boring path of taking money from people.
Go far enough down that path and you'll have to beat off investors with a stick.
[Edit to add: It is really scandalously cheap to get something on the Internet these days if you have a programmer on board. People used to cite "thousands" of dollars a lot, and thousands is a darn low number compared with "real" businesses. If someone was asking me for advice I'd say its much easier to do if you have "hundreds" but I have empirical experience that it is possible with "tens".]
This anecdote fills me with hope for what a determined person is capable of. Lately I've been stuck thinking credentials are supremely important. I'm happy that people can challenge this and become successful!
I think the key here was that the kid called up and said he wanted to play ball. he didn't call to strong arm the admission office, he called and essentially said "what do I need to do to be a stronger applicant next year?"
That's just a winning attitude in general. It shows the guy's got a goal and is willing to do what it takes to make it happen.
When I was at university and doing a course that I wasn't really interested in (but which was the only one I could get into with my poor marks), I attempted to do an internal transfer to a degree in Computers. I was rejected. I ended up doing it different to this story ... I was young, angry and annoyed - couldn't they see my passion and enthusiasm? I left university that year and began teaching myself what I wanted to learn. My success has been nowhere near the college drop-outs you hear of in the news, but in just a few years I was earning a very good salary programming. I'm from Australia, where a degree seems to be not as important as in other countries - most jobs will have "degree or industry experience" so if you can get the experience somewhere small, you can work your way up. However, sometimes I wish I'd gone to university, and I still play with the idea of getting a degree - but I've got too much work to do on my startup now. Maybe later I will.
It's true that determination can help you do wonders. And in my case, that initial rejection just added more steel to mine.
>Lately I've been stuck thinking credentials are supremely important. I'm happy that people can challenge this and become successful!
Credentials are supremely important. For every plucky kid who does something like this and succeeds, there are a hundred plucky kids that try something like this and still don't get accepted.
"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."
If you haven't heard this phrase, you really should watch his "Last Lecture": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo