He gave the lecture to leave something concrete for his children, not to be remembered generally

Pausch was explicit that his actual audience for the Last Lecture wasn't the packed auditorium of colleagues and students in front of him, but his three young children — too young at the time to remember him clearly — who would eventually watch the recorded talk once they were old enough to understand what their father wanted them to know.

This reframes the entire lecture's purpose: rather than a general meditation on mortality for a broad audience, it's a specific, practical inheritance, aimed at particular people he knew and loved, built from stories he wanted them to have rather than abstractions about legacy.

The specificity mattered more to him than the scale of the audience — he'd rather leave three children something precisely useful than leave a broader audience something vaguely inspiring.

Takeaway: when thinking about what you want to leave behind, aim at the specific people who'll actually use it, not a generalized notion of "legacy."