乔布斯斯坦福大学演讲词英文版

2024年2月26日发(作者：葛浣)

乔布斯斯坦福大学毕业典礼演讲

Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from

one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never

graduated from college and this is the clost I've ever gotten to a

college graduation.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No

big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed

around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit.

So why did I drop out It started before I was born. My biological mother

was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for

adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college

graduates, so everything was all t for me to be adopted at birth by a

lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the

last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on

a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got

an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him" They said, "Of cour."

Mybiological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated

fromcollege and that my father had never graduated from high school.

Sherefud to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few

monthslater when my parents promid that I would go to college.

This was the start in my life. And venteen years later, I did go

to college, but I naively cho a college that was almost as expensive

as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent

on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't e the value in it.

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college

was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money

my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and

trustthat it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but

lookingback, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I

droppedout, I could stop taking the required class that didn't interest

me andbegin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the

floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent

deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the ven miles across town

every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.

I loved much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and

intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy

instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every

label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Becau I had

dropped out and didn't have to take the normal class, I decided to take

a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about rif and

sans-rif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different

letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was

beautiful,historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't

capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.

But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer,

it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the

first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on

that single cour in college, the Mac would have never had multiple

typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied

the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on

thatcalligraphy class and personals computers might not have the

wonderfultypography that they do.

Of cour it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when

I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years ,

you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them

looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect

in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny,life,

karma, whatever--becau believing that the dots will connect down the

road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads

you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference

My cond story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I

loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage

when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from

just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000

'd just relead our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and

I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from

a company you started Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought

was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or

so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge,

and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors

sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What

had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let

the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the

baton as it was being pasd to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce

and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure

and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly

began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple

had not changed that one bit. I'd been rejected but I was still in love.

And so I decided to start over.

I didn't e it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple

was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of

being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again,

less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative

periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company

named

NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing

woman

who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first

computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the most

successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to

Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's

current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired

from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient

needed

it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't

lo

faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that

I

loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as

true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large

part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what

you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love

what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't ttle.

As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like

any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll

on. So keep looking. Don't ttle.

My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went

something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday

you'll

most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then,

for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked

mylf, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do

what I am about to do today" And whenever the answer has been "no" for

too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering

that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered

to help me make the big choices in life, becau almost everything--all

external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure

--the things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what

is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best

way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lo. You

are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago, I was diagnod with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30

in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even

know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly

a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no

longer than three to six months. My doctor advid me to go home and get

my affairs in order, which is doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means

to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten

years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that

everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your

family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy

where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into

my

intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from

the

tumor. I was dated but my wife, who was there, told me that when

they

viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying,

becau it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that

is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.

This was the clost I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the

clost I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now

say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a uful

but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want

to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the

destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it

should be, becau death is very likely the single best invention of life.

It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new.

right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will

gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic,

but it's quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone

el's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results

of other people's thinking. Don't let the noi of others' opinions drown

out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know

what you truly want to become. Everything el is condary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole

Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was

created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park,

and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late

Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all

made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like

Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. It

was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and

his team put out veral issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then

when it had run its cour, they put out a final issue. It was the

mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue

was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find

yourlf hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the

words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they

signed off. "Stay hungry, stay foolish." And I have always wished that

for mylf, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Thank you all, very much

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone

el's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with

the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noi

of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and

intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to

become. Everything el is condary.

"If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll

most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and

since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror

every morning and asked

mylf, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want

to do what I am about to do today" And whenever the answer has

been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change

something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most

important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big

choices in life, becau almost everything--all external

expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure

--the things just fall away in the face of death, leaving

only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going

to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking

you have something to lo. You are already naked. There is

no reason not to follow your heart.