Randy Pausch Quotes

educators best serve students by helping them be more self-reflective. The only way any of us can improve—as Coach Graham taught me—is if we develop a real ability to assess ourselves. If we can’t accurately do that, how can we tell if we’re getting better or worse?

Get to know yourself. Know your own failings, passions, and prejudices so you can separate them from what you see. Know also when you actually have thought through to the nature of the thing with which you are dealing and when you are not thinking at all... Knowing yourself and knowing the facts, you can judge whether you can change the situation so it is more to your liking. If you cannot--or if you do not know how to improve on things--then discipline yourself to the adjustments that will be necessary.

'What am I missing?' is a much more important question than 'How cool am I?'

You have to attempt to be objective about yourself.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

I'm the greatest critic of my work.

It's funny because sometimes one doesn't actually consider these things for one's self until one's in a situation like this press conferece where one has to kind of think about it.

That is the hardest thing of all. It is much harder to judge yourself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself, it's because you're truly a wise man.

Many leadership problems are driven by low self-awareness.

You need to take a long, hard look in the mirror and not come away thinking, "Hey, there's something wrong with this mirror."

If someone is self-aware, then they can always continue to grow. If they're not self-aware, I think it's harder for them to evolve or adapt beyond who they already are.

Be sensitive to your mistakes. Put it on the wall for a couple of weeks. It may be that you can learn more from the study of your own work than from others.

We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.

The real preparation for education is the study of one's self.

Self-awareness is our capacity to stand apart from ourselves and examine our thinking, our motives, our history, our scripts, our actions, and our habits and tendencies.

I wish I could say confidently that pacing remains my weak point, if you could talk about your own stuff without sounding like you're self-obsessed. But I think you kind of have to be.

I wish I had been more self-aware earlier, but I think that just comes with age.

Without proper self-evaluation, failure is inevitable.

Whenever we discover a dislike in us, toward any one, we should ever be a little suspicious of ourselves.

The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.

To question your own process is a necessity. If you don't question yourself, it's impossible to improve.

I'm not good at watching myself.

I'm learning a lot about myself being alone, and doing what I'm doing.

I am a scholar of life. Every night before I go to sleep, I analyze every detail of what I did that day. I evaluate things and people, which helps me avoid mistakes.

People learn the most about themselves by confronting those with whom they deeply disagree..