Are we the Inspired or the Inspiration?

I haven't had a whole lot of time to sit and take stock these past few weeks with what has been a pretty full on start to my law degree. I've touched on this before but I would like to reiterate just what it is like and how different it is to being at high school. I could easily have gotten away away with doing no reading or research in my first few weeks. Not because it has been easy or anything like that but more from the point of view that there is nobody telling you to do anything. It is up to you to go and look at your lecture and tutorial handouts to see what you need to know or do before you attend. It's taking a lot of getting used to but I think I will adjust to it soon and even learn to enjoy this type of learning, even more so than the spoon feeding techniques used in high school.

So what has finally brought me back to the blank canvas of yet another blog post? Well yesterday wasn't a particularly busy day for me, mainly because I got in at 4 o'clock in the morning and I subsequently slept through until lunchtime. So I found myself at a little but of a lose end because I couldn't really bring myself to do any university work (lets just say I was a little under the weather - you know what I mean) and so I was browsing the internet looking for something a little less strenuous yet not completely useless for me to do. I was on Facebook for quite a while which, I think you'll agree with me when I say is a fairly big waste of your time 9 times out of 10. So I pulled myself away from there and found myself on YouTube looking at a few videos relating to law. Needless to say there's only a certain amount of things like that that you can watch so I tried looking for some lectures which might interest me and I came across the video below. Now I've never heard to this guy before and soon learned that the lecture that I was watching was his last but it has more that 12 million views so I thought it must be pretty good. I watch the whole thing whilst chomping away on a whole box of Ritz crackers and I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. Now you can sit and watch it if you feel the need and you find yourself with a free hour and a bit (if there is such a thing) but I just want to talk about what I was thinking when it had finished rather than the subject of the lecture itself.



When it finished I asked myself a couple of questions: why do I feel better about things now and have I just been inspired? I still haven't really answered either of those questions but I have some up with a couple of interesting ideas. I might have been feeling better because Randy Pausch spoke so well and lifted my mood with what was an excellent piece of speaking which I think is a valid enough reason. It is really the second question that I have been pondering though. Was I inspired by the lecture or was watching the lecture enough for me to inspire myself. Can we inspire ourselves? Does it always have to be someone else that inspires us? I'm going to try and lift my mood by myself over the next week or so and see if I can increase my productivity or just make myself feel a bit better as a result - I just wonder whether I'll need things that other people have done or if I can do some 'solo inspiring'.

I'll leave you with that and I do genuinely recommend that you watch this lecture at some point because it is a funny, moving and uplifting experience; even if you do find yourself 'under the weather'.

Thanks again for reading. I hope to be able to blog on a Sunday from now on or even just shorter ones during the week because it does make me feel better after what up to this point, always seems to be a busy week studying.

Cheers,


Martin