Speech In Stanford
在斯坦福的演讲
乔布斯
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, 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.
我很荣幸今天能和你们一起参加毕业典礼，毕业典礼是世界上最好的大学之一。我从未从大学毕业。说实话，这是我离大学毕业最近的一次。今天我想给大家讲三个我生命中的故事。就这样。没什么大不了的。只有三层楼。
The first story is about connecting the dots.
第一个故事是关于连接点。
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
我在里德大学读了六个月就辍学了，但在我真正辞职之前，我又在里德大学待了18个月左右。那我为什么退学？
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college 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 have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of cour." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refud to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promid that I would someday go to college.
在我出生之前就开始了。我的生母是一个年轻未婚的大学研究生，她决定收养我。她非常强烈地认为我应该被大学毕业生收养，所以一切都安排好了，让我在出生时被一个律师和他的妻子收养。但当我出来的时候，他们在最后一刻决定他们真的想要一个女孩。所以，我的父母，谁是在等待名单上，接到一个电话在半夜问：“我们有一个意外的男婴，你想要他吗？”他们说：“当然。”我的生母后来发现我的母亲从未从大学毕业，我的父亲也从未从高中毕业。她拒绝签署最后的收养文件。几个月后，当我父母答应有一天我会上大学时，她才松口。
And 17 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 how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required class that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on th
e ones that looked interesting.
17年后我上了大学。但我天真地选择了一所几乎和斯坦福大学一样昂贵的大学，我工薪阶层父母的所有积蓄都花在了我的大学学费上。六个月后，我看不出其中的价值。我不知道我想用我的生活做什么，也不知道大学将如何帮助我找到答案。在这里，我花掉了我父母一生积蓄的所有钱。所以我决定退学，相信一切都会好起来的。当时很吓人，但回想起来，这是我做过的最好的决定之一。从我退学的那一刻起，我就可以停止上那些我不感兴趣的必修课，开始上那些看起来很有趣的课程。
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 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And 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. Bec
au 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 san 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.
不全是浪漫。我没有宿舍，所以我睡在朋友房间的地板上，我把5美分押金的可乐瓶退了回来买食物，每个星期天晚上我会步行7英里穿过城镇，在哈雷克里希纳神庙每周吃一顿美餐。我喜欢它。后来，我在好奇心和直觉的驱使下偶然发现的许多东西都是无价之宝。我给你一个例如：里德学院当时提供了全国最好的书法教学。在整个校园里，每一张海报，每一个抽屉上的每一个标签，都是漂亮的手写体。因为我已经退学了，不用上普通的课，所以我决定去上书法课，学习怎么做。我学会了衬线和san衬线字体，学会了在不同的字母组合之间改变空间大小，学会了什么使伟大的印刷术变得伟大。它是美丽的，历史的，艺术的微妙的方式，科学无法捕捉，我发现它迷人。
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, w
hen 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 this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography 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 ten years later.
这些在我的生活中都没有任何实际应用的希望。但十年后，当我们设计第一台Macintosh电脑时，一切都回到了我的脑海。我们把它设计成了Mac。这是第一台印刷精美的电脑。如果我在大学里没上过这门课，Mac电脑就不会有多个字体或按比例隔开的字体。而且由于Windows刚刚复制了Mac，很可能没有个人电脑会拥有它们。如果我没有退学，我就不会去上书法课了，个人电脑可能也不会像他们那样有这么好的排版。当然，在我上大学的时候是不可能把这些点联系起来的。但十年后回首往事却非常清楚。
Again, 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. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
同样，你不能向前看，你只能向后看，把这些点连接起来。所以你必须相信这些点会在你的未来以某种方式连接起来。你必须相信一些东西-你的直觉，命运，生活，因果报应，无论什么。这种方法从来没有让我失望，它使我的生活发生了变化。
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 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just relead our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. 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 be
gan to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
