The Last Lecture: Chapter 25 Summary & Analysis

Achieving your own childhood dreams is thrilling, but enabling the dreams of others might even be better, according to Randy. In 1993, Randy interviewed a student at the University of Virginia named Tommy Burnett to be on his research team. During the interview, Tommy says that his greatest childhood dream was to work on a Star Wars film. Though Randy tells him they’re done making those films, Tommy is resolute that they’ll one day make more, and when they do, he’s going to work on them. When he was a kid, though other kids wanted to be Han Solo, Tommy always wanted to work on the technical aspects. Randy has a flashback to his own experience at Disneyland as a child, so he asks Tommy to join his research team.

Randy is tough on Tommy Burnett, and Tommy compares Randy to a demanding football coach. Tommy says he learned not only about virtual reality programming from Randy, but also “how work colleagues need to be like a family of sorts.” Randy teaches Tommy that being smart isn’t enough—Randy wants people “who will help everyone else feel happy” to be there. Tommy becomes a team player, and Randy brings everyone on the research team down to Disney World as a thank you. When Randy moves on to Carnegie Mellon, he brings every member of his team along except Tommy—not because he doesn’t want to, but because Tommy got hired to work on all of the new Star Wars films.

A few years later, Tommy Burnett invites Randy and his students on a trip to Industrial Light & Magic, which is George Lucas’s effects company. One student asks Tommy how big a part luck plays in the film industry. Tommy says that luck plays a huge part, but being in Randy’s class already makes these kids lucky, because Tommy wouldn’t be where he is without having known Randy. Randy says that day became a turning point with that class of kids, and Tommy had passed on the favor that Randy had granted him many years earlier.