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乔布斯斯坦福大学演讲英文原文(中文译文):
Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says
Steve Jobs说,你得找出你爱的 (You’ve got to find what you love.)。
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
以下是苹果计算机公司与Pixar动画制作室执行长Steve Jobs在2005年六月12日对全体史丹佛大学毕业生的演讲内容。
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.
今天,有荣幸来到各位从世界上最好的学校之一毕业的毕业典礼上。我从来没从大学毕业。说实话,这是我离大学毕业最近的一刻。今天,我只说三个故事,不谈大道理,三个故事就好。
The first story is about connecting the dots.
第一个故事,是关于人生中的点点滴滴怎么串连在一起。
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?
我在里德学院(Reed college)待了六个月就办休学了。到我退学前,一共休学了十八个月。那么,我为什么休学?
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 h
ad 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.
这得从我出生前讲起。我的亲生母亲当时是个研究生,年轻未婚妈妈,她决定让别人收养我。她强烈觉得应该让有大学毕业的人收养我,所以我出生时,她就准备让我被一对律师夫妇收养。但是这对夫妻到了最后一刻反悔了,他们想收养女孩。所以在等待收养名单上的一对夫妻,我的养父母,在一天半夜里接到一通电话,问他们「有一名意外出生的男孩,你们要认养他吗?」而他们的回答是「当然要」。后来,我的生母发现,我现在的妈妈从来没有大学毕业,我现在的爸爸则连高中毕业也没有。她拒绝在认养文件上做最后签字。直到几个月后,我的养父母同意将来一定会让我上大学,她才软化态度。
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 the ones that looked interesting.
十七年后,我上大学了。但是当时我无知选了一所学费几乎跟史丹佛一样贵的大学,我那工人阶级的父母所有积蓄都花在我的学费上。六个月后,我看不出念这个书的价值何在。那时候,我不知道这辈子要干什么,也不知道念大学能对我有什么帮助,而且我为了念这个书,花光了我父母这辈子的所有积蓄,所以我决定休学,相信船到桥头自然直。当时这个决定看来相当可怕,可是现在看来,那是我这辈子做过最好的决定之一。当我休学之后,我再也不用上我没兴趣的必修课,把时间拿去听那些我有兴趣的课。
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 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:
这一点也不浪漫。我没有宿舍,所以我睡在友人家里的地板上,靠着回收可乐空罐的五先令退费买吃的,每个星期天晚上得走七里的路绕过大半个镇去印度教的 Hare Krishna神庙吃顿好料。我喜欢Hare
Krishna神庙的好料。追寻我的好奇与直觉,我所驻足的大部分事物,后来看来都成了无价之宝。举例来说:
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 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.
当时里德学院有着大概是全国最好的书法指导。在整个校园内的每一张海报上,每个抽屉的标签上,都是美丽的手写字。因为我休学了,可以不照正常选课程序来,所以我跑去学书法。我学了rif与san rif字体,学到在不同字母组合间变更字间距,学到活版印刷伟大的地方。书法的美好、历史感与艺术感是科学所无法捕捉的,我觉得那很迷人。
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, its 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.
我没预期过学的这些东西能在我生活中起些什么实际作用,不过十年后,当我在设计第一台麦金塔时,我想起了当时所学的东西,所以把这些东西都设计进了麦金塔里,这是第一台能印刷出漂亮东西的计算机。如果我没沉溺于那样一门课里,麦金塔可能就不会有多重字体跟变间距字体了。又因为Windows抄袭了麦金塔的使用方式,如果当年我没这样做,大概世界上所有的个人计算机都不会有这些东西,印不出现在我们看到的漂亮的字来了。当然,当我还在大学里时,不可能把这些点点滴滴预先串在一起,但是这在十年后回顾,就显得非常清楚。
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.
我再说一次,你不能预先把点点滴滴串在一起;唯有未来回顾时,你才会明白那些点点滴滴是如何串在一起的。所以你得相信,你现在所体会的东西,将来多少会连接在一块。你得信任某个东西,直觉也好,命运也好,生命也好,或者业力。这种作法从来没让我失望,也让我的人生整个不同起来。
My cond story is about love and loss.
我的第二个故事,有关爱与失去。
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 began 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.
我好运-年轻时就发现自己爱做什么事。我二十岁时,跟Steve Wozniak在我爸妈的车库里开始了苹
果计算机的事业。我们拼命工作,苹果计算机在十年间从一间车库里的两个小伙子扩展成了一家员工超过四千人、市价二十亿美金的公司,在那之前一年推出了我们最棒的作品-麦金塔,而我才刚迈入人生的第三十个年头,然后被炒鱿鱼。要怎么让自己创办的公司炒自己鱿鱼?好吧,当苹果计算机成长后,我请了一个我以为他在经营公司上很有才干的家伙来,他在头几年也确实干得不错。可是我们对未来的愿景不同,最后只好分道扬镳,董事会站在他那边,炒了我鱿鱼,公开把我请了出去。曾经是我整个成年生活重心的东西不见了,令我不知所措。
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 had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
有几个月,我实在不知道要干什么好。我觉得我令企业界的前辈们失望-我把他们交给我的接力棒弄丢了。我见了创办HP的David Packard跟创办Intel的Bob Noyce,跟他们说我很抱歉把事情搞砸得很
厉害了。我成了公众的非常负面示范,我甚至想要离开硅谷。但是渐渐的,我发现,我还是喜爱着我做过的事情,在苹果的日子经历的事件没有丝毫改变我爱做的事。我被否定了,可是我还是爱做那些事情,所以我决定从头来过。
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 of my life.
当时我没发现,但是现在看来,被苹果计算机开除,是我所经历过最好的事情。成功的沉重被从头来过的轻松所取代,每件事情都不那么确定,让我自由进入这辈子最有创意的年代。
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 worlds 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, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
接下来五年,我开了一家叫做NeXT的公司,又开一家叫做Pixar的公司,也跟后来的老婆谈起了恋爱。Pixar接着制作了世界上第一部全计算机动画电影,玩具总动员,现在是世界上最成功的动画制作公司。然后,苹果计算机买下了NeXT,我回到了苹果,我们在NeXT发展的技术成了苹果计算机后来复兴的核心。我也有了个美妙的家庭。
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 hits 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 your 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,