How to Live Before You Die
死前如何生活
By Steve Jobs, delivered on June 12, 2005
由史蒂夫·乔布斯于2005年6月12日交付
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世界上最好的大学之一的毕业典礼。我从来没有大学毕业。说实话，这是我离大学毕业最近的一刻。今天我想告诉你们我生命中的三个故事。够了就要这些。有什么了不起！只有三个故事。
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?
我在里德学院学习了6个月后就退学了，但是在我真正退学之前，我又在学校待了18个月左右。那我为什么退学呢？
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.
它在我出生之前就开始了。我的亲生母亲是一个年轻的、没有结婚的大学毕业生，她决定让别人收养我。她强烈地认为我应该被大学毕业生收养，所以一切都准备好了，我要由一个律师和他的妻子在我出生时被收养。但是当我出生时，他们在最后一分钟决定他们想要一个女孩。所以我的父母，他们在候选名单上，在午夜接到了一个电话：“我们有一个意外的男婴，你们想要他吗？”他们说：“当然可以，”我亲生母亲随后发现，我的养母从来没有上过大学，我的父亲甚至从没有读过高中。她拒绝在最后的收养文件上签字。她只是在几个月以后，我的父母答应她一定要让我上大学。
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 looki
ng 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.
17年后，我真的上了大学。但我很天真地选择了一所几乎和斯坦福一样贵的大学，我所有工薪阶层父母的积蓄都花在了我的大学学费上。六个月后，我没有看到它的价值。我不知道我一生中想做什么，也不知道大学能帮我解决什么问题。在这里，我几乎花光了我父母一生的积蓄。所以我决定退学，并且相信一切都会好起来。我当时非常害怕，但回头看，这是我做过的最好的决定。在我退学的那一刻，我可以停止那些我不感兴趣的必修课，开始旁听那些看起来有趣的课程。
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:
这不全是浪漫的。我没有宿舍，所以我睡在朋友房间的地板上，我去捡5美分的可乐瓶子¢退费买吃的，我都会步行7英里穿越市区的每星期日晚上得到一顿在Hare Krishna神庙一周。我喜欢它。跟着我的好奇心和直觉，我偶然发现的许多东西后来被证明是无价之宝。让我举一个例子：
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.
Reed大学在那时提供也许是全美最好的书法指导。整个校园的每一张海报，每个抽屉的标签，都是漂亮的手写体。因为我退学了，不必上普通课，所以我决定去上书法课，学学怎么学书法。我学习了rif和rif字体，学会了如何在不同的字母组合中改变空格的数量，
以及如何才能做出很棒的印刷字体。这是一种科学无法捕捉的美丽、历史和艺术精妙，我觉得它很迷人。
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, 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.
这甚至不希望在我的生命中有什么实际应用。但是十年之后，当我们在设计第一台Macintosh电脑，一切回到我。我们把它都设计成了Mac。它是第一个拥有漂亮字体的计
算机。如果我从未上过大学里的那门课，Mac就不会有多种字体或比例间距字体。又因为Windows抄袭了Mac，很可能个人电脑就不会有这些。如果我从来没有退学过，我就不会去上书法课，个人电脑也不会有这么好的版式。当然这是不可能的我在大学的时候连接点的期待。但它是非常，非常清楚十年后回头看。
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.
再次，你不能把从前的点点滴滴串连起来；你只能在回顾的时候将他们。所以你必须相信这些片断会在你未来的连接。你必须要相信某些东西：你的勇气、命运、生活、因缘，随便。这种方法从来没有让我失望，也让我的人生与众不同。
My cond story is about love and loss.
我的第二个故事是关于爱与失去的。
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 diverg
