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.
谢谢大家。很荣幸能和你们，来自世界最好大学之一的毕业生们，一块儿参加毕业典礼。老实说，我大学没有毕业，今天恐怕是我一生中离大学毕业最近的一次了。
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." My biological mother found out later 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 go to college.
我在里得大学读了六个月就退学了，但是在十八个月之后--我真正退学之前，我还常去学校。为何我要选择退学呢？这还得从我出生之前说起。我的生母是一个年轻、未婚的大学毕业生，她决定让别人收养我。她有一个很强烈的信仰，认为我应该被一个大学毕业生家庭收养。于是，一对律师夫妇说好了要领养我，然而最后一秒钟，他们改变了注意，决定要个女孩儿。然后我的排在收养人名单中的养父母在一个深夜接到电话，“很意外，我们多了一个男婴，你们要吗？”“当然要！”但是我的生母后来又发现我的养母没有大学毕业，养父连高中都没有毕业。她拒绝在领养书上签字。几个月后，我的养父母保证会让我上大学，她妥协了。
This was the start in my life. And venteen years later, I did go to college, but I naively c
ho 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 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 the ones that looked far more interesting.
这是我生命的开端。十七年后，我上大学了，但是我很无知地选了一所差不多和斯坦福一样贵的学校，几乎花掉我那蓝领阶层养父母一生的积蓄。六个月后，我觉得不值得。我看不出自己以后要做什么，也不晓得大学会怎样帮我指点迷津，而我却在花销父母一生的积蓄。所以我决定退学，并且相信没有做错。一开始非常吓人，但回忆起来，这却是我一生中作的最好的决定之一。从我退学的那一刻起，我可以停止一切不感兴趣的必修课，开始旁听那些有意思得多的课。
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 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.
事情并不那么美好。我没有宿舍可住，睡在朋友房间的地上。为了吃饭，我收集五分一个的旧可乐瓶，每个星期天晚上步行七英里到哈尔-克里什纳庙里改善一下一周的伙食。我喜欢这种生活方式。能够遵循自己的好奇和直觉前行后来被证明是多么的珍贵。让我来给你们举个例子吧。
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.
当时的里得大学提供可能是全国最好的书法指导。校园中每一张海报，抽屉上的每一张标签，都是漂亮的手写体。由于我已退学，不用修那些必修课，我决定选一门书法课上上。在这门课上，我学会了“rif”和"sans-rif"两种字体、学会了怎样在不同的字母组合中改变字间距、学会了怎样写出好的字来。这是一种科学无法捕捉的微妙，楚楚动人、充满历史底蕴和艺术性，我觉得自己被完全吸引了。
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.
一开始实在看不出所有这些会对我的实际生活应用有任何帮助。但是十年后当我们在设计
苹果第一台电脑的时候，这些东西都跑出来了，我把它们全都设计到了电脑里。那是第一台有漂亮字体的电脑。如果我从来没有选过那门课，苹果电脑就不会有那些漂亮的字型，又因为微软是完全拷贝苹果，很有可能，个人电脑就不会有这些漂亮的字体了。If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.如果我没有退学，我就不会去修那门写字课，个人电脑就不会像现在这样有令人愉悦的字体了。
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 later. 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--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.
当然，当我还在大学时向前预测是完全不可能把这些点滴串联起来的，然而十年后再回顾
时，就显得很明朗了。再说一遍，往前看，是连接不起这些点滴的，只有往后看才行。所以你必须相信，那些点点滴滴，会在你未来的生命里，以某种方式串联起来。你必须相信一些东西--你的勇气、宿命、生活、因缘，随便什么--因为相信这些点滴能够一路连接会给你带来循从本觉的自信，它使你走离平凡，变得与众不同。
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 employees. We'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 previo
us 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.
