这是苹果公司和Pixar动画工作室的CEO Steve Jobs于2005年6月12号在斯坦福大学的毕业典礼上面的演讲稿。
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.
今天我想告诉大家来自我生活的三个故事。没什么大不了的，只是三个故事而已。The first story is about connecting the dots.
第一个故事，如何串连生命中的点滴。
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six 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? 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 fathe
r 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18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，他们改变了主意，决定要个女孩儿。然后我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 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 w orking-class parents' savings were being spent on my c ollege 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 f igure it out, and here I was, spending all the money m y 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 a nd 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 C ollege 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.
当时的里德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 b ack 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 w ould 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.
当时我并不指望书法在以后的生活中能有什么实用价值。但是，十年之后，我们在设计第一台 Macintosh计算机时，它一下子浮现在我眼前。于是，我们把这
些东西全都设计进了计算机中。这是第一台有这么漂亮的文字版式的计算机。要不是我当初在大学里偶然选了这么一门课，Macintosh计算机绝不会有那么多种印刷字体或间距安排合理的字号。要不是Windows照搬了 Macintosh，个人电脑可能不会有这些字体和字号。
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.
要不是退了学，我决不会碰巧选了这门书法课，个人电脑也可能不会有现在这些漂亮的版式了。
Of cour it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I
was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards ten 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，我在大学里不可能从这一点上看到它与将来的关系。十年之后再回头看，
两者之间关系就非常、非常清楚了。你们同样不可能从现在这个点上看到将来；
只有回头看时，才会发现它们之间的关系。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，它使你远离平凡，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 20. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the
two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company w ith over 4,000 employees. We'd just relead our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier,
and I'd just turned 30, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from
a company y ou started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone w ho 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 30, 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 f rom 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.
第二个故事是关于爱与失的。我很幸运，很早就发现自己喜欢做的事情。我二十岁的时候就和沃茨在父母的车库里开创了苹果公司。我们工作得很努力，十年后，苹果公司成长为拥有四千名员工，价值二十亿的大公司。我们刚刚推出了最好的创意，Macintosh操作系统，在这之前的一年，也就是我刚过三十岁，我被解雇了。你怎么可能被一个亲手创立的公司解雇？事情是这样的，在公司成长期间，
我雇佣了一个我们认为非常聪明，可以和我一起经营公司的人。一年后，我们对公司未来的看法产生分歧，董事会站在了他的一边。于是，在我三十岁的时候，
我出局了，很公开地出局了。我整个成年生活的焦点没了，这很要命。一开始的
几个月我真的不知道该干什么。我觉得我让公司的前一代创建者们失望了，我把传给我的权杖给弄丢了。我与戴维德·帕珂德和鲍勃·诺埃斯见面，试图为这彻
头彻尾的失败道歉。我败得如此之惨以至于我想要逃离硅谷。但有个东西在慢慢地叫醒我：我还爱着我从事的行业。这次失败一点儿都没有改变这一点。我被逐了，但我仍爱着我的事业。我决定重新开始。
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 P ixar 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.
当时我没有看出来，但事实证明“被苹果开除”是发生在我身上最好的事。成功
的重担被重新起步的轻松替代，对任何事情都不再特别看重，这让我感觉如此自由，进入一生中最有创造力的阶段。接下来的五年，我创立了一个叫NeXT的公司，接着又建立了Pixar，然后与后来成为我妻子的女人相爱。Pixar出品了世界第一个电脑动画电影：“玩具总动员”，现在它已经是世界最成功的动画制作
工作室了。
In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT a nd 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.
在一系列的成功运转后，苹果收购了NeXT，我又回到了苹果。我们在NeXT开发的技术在苹果的复兴中起了核心作用，另外劳琳和我组建了一个幸福的家庭。
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.
我非常确信，如果我没有被苹果炒掉，这些就都不会发生。这个药的味道太糟了，但是我想病人需要它。有些时候，生活会给你迎头一棒。不要丧失信心。我确信
唯一让我一路走下来的是我对自己所做事情的热爱。你必须去找你热爱的东西，
对工作如此，对你的爱人也是这样的。工作会占据你生命中很大的一部分，你只有相信自己做的是伟
大的工作，你才能怡然自得。如果你还没有找到，那么就继续找，不要停。全心全意地找，当你找到时，你会知道的。就像任何真诚的关系，随着时间的流逝，只会越来越紧密。所以继续找，不要停。
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 y ou'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
