[00:00:00] Three Stories from My Life - 英语演讲
[00:00:05] Commencement Address by Steve Jobs
[00:00:09] at Stanford University
[00:00:11] I am honored to be with you today
[00:00:15] at your commencement from one of
[00:00:17] the finest universities in the world.
[00:00:19] I never graduated from college.
[00:00:21] Truth be told, this is the closest
[00:00:24] I've ever gotten to a college graduation.
[00:00:27] Today I want to tell you
[00:00:29] three stories from my life.
[00:00:31] That's it. No big deal.
[00:00:34] Just three stories.
[00:00:35] The first story is about connecting the dots.
[00:00:41] I dropped out of Reed College
[00:00:44] after the first 6 months,
[00:00:46] but then stayed around
[00:00:48] as a drop-in for another 18 months
[00:00:50] or so before I really quit.
[00:00:53] So why did I drop out?
[00:00:55] It started before I was born.
[00:01:00] My biological mother was a young,
[00:01:02] unwed college graduate student,
[00:01:04] and she decided to put me up for adoption.
[00:01:08] She felt very strongly
[00:01:10] that I should be adopted
[00:01:11] by college graduates,
[00:01:13] so everything was all set
[00:01:15] for me to be adopted at birth
[00:01:17] by a lawyer and his wife.
[00:01:19] Except that when I popped out
[00:01:22] they decided at the last minute
[00:01:25] that they really wanted a girl.
[00:01:27] So my parents, who were on a waiting list,
[00:01:30] got a call in the middle of
[00:01:33] the night asking:
[00:01:34] "We have an unexpected baby boy;
[00:01:37] do you want him?"
[00:01:38] They said: "Of course."
[00:01:41] My biological mother later
[00:01:44] found out that my mother
[00:01:45] had never graduated from college
[00:01:48] and that my father had never
[00:01:50] graduated from high school.
[00:01:51] She refused to sign the final adoption papers.
[00:01:55] She only relented a few months later
[00:01:58] when my parents promised
[00:02:00] that I would someday go to college.
[00:02:03] And 17 years later I did go to college.
[00:02:09] But I naively chose a college
[00:02:12] that was almost as expensive as Stanford,
[00:02:14] and all of my working-class
[00:02:17] parents' savings were being spent on
[00:02:19] my college tuition. After six months,
[00:02:22] I couldn't see the value in it.
[00:02:24] I had no idea what I wanted to do
[00:02:27] with my life and no idea
[00:02:29] how college was going to
[00:02:31] help me figure it out.
[00:02:32] And here I was spending all
[00:02:35] of the money my parents had saved
[00:02:38] their entire life.
[00:02:39] So I decided to drop out
[00:02:42] and trust that it would all work out OK.
[00:02:46] It was pretty scary at the time,
[00:02:49] but looking back it was one of
[00:02:51] the best decisions I ever made.
[00:02:53] The minute I dropped out I could stop
[00:02:56] taking the required classes
[00:02:58] that didn't interest me,
[00:02:59] and begin dropping in on the ones
[00:03:02] that looked interesting.
[00:03:03] It wasn't all romantic.
[00:03:07] I didn't have a dorm room,
[00:03:09] so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms,
[00:03:12] I returned coke bottles for the five-cent;
[00:03:17] deposits to buy food with,
[00:03:19] and I would walk the 7 miles
[00:03:22] across town every Sunday night
[00:03:24] to get one good meal a week
[00:03:26] at the Hare Krishna temple.
[00:03:28] I loved it. And much of
[00:03:31] what I stumbled into by following my curiosity
[00:03:34] and intuition turned out
[00:03:36] to be priceless later on.
[00:03:37] Let me give you one example:
[00:03:40] Reed College at that time offered
[00:03:44] perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.
[00:03:47] Throughout the campus every poster,
[00:03:50] every label on every drawer,
[00:03:52] was beautifully hand calligrapher.
[00:03:55] Because I had dropped out
[00:03:57] and didn't have to take the normal classes,
[00:04:00] I decided to take a calligraphy class
[00:04:03] to learn how to do this.
[00:04:05] I learned about serif
[00:04:07] and san serif typefaces,
[00:04:09] about varying the amount of space
[00:04:12] between different letter combinations,
[00:04:14] about what makes great typography great.
[00:04:17] It was beautiful, historical,
[00:04:21] artistically subtle in a way
[00:04:23] that science can't capture,
[00:04:25] and I found it fascinating.
[00:04:27] None of this had even a hope of
[00:04:32] any practical application in my life.
[00:04:34] But ten years later,
[00:04:36] when we were designing the first Macintosh computer,
[00:04:39] it all came back to me.
[00:04:42] And we designed it all into the Mac.
[00:04:45] It was the first computer with beautiful typography.
[00:04:49] If I had never dropped in
[00:04:52] on that single course in college,
[00:04:53] the Mac would have never
[00:04:55] had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.
[00:04:59] And since Windows just copied the Mac,
[00:05:03] its likely that no personal computer
[00:05:06] would have them.
[00:05:07] If I had never dropped out,
[00:05:11] I would have never dropped in
[00:05:12] on this calligraphy class,
[00:05:14] and personal computers might not
[00:05:16] have the wonderful typography
[00:05:18] that they do.
[00:05:19] Of course it was impossible
[00:05:22] to connect the dots looking forward
[00:05:24] when I was in college. But it was very,
[00:05:27] very clear looking backwards ten years later.
[00:05:30] Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward;
[00:05:36] you can only connect them looking backwards.
[00:05:39] So you have to trust
[00:05:43] that the dots will somehow
[00:05:43] connect in your future.
[00:05:45] You have to trust in something -
[00:05:47] your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.
[00:05:51] This approach has never let me down,
[00:05:54] and it has made all the difference in my life.
[00:05:57] My second story is about love and loss.
[00:06:03] I was lucky - I found what I loved to do
[00:06:08] early in life.
[00:06:09] Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage
[00:06:13] when I was 20. We worked hard,
[00:06:16] and in 10 years Apple had grown from
[00:06:19] just the two of us in a garage into
[00:06:20] a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.
[00:06:26] We had just released our finest creation -
[00:06:29] the Macintosh - a year earlier,
[00:06:32] and I had just turned 30.
[00:06:35] And then I got fired.
[00:06:37] How can you get fired from a company you started?
[00:06:41] Well, as Apple grew we hired someone
[00:06:45] who I thought was very talented to
[00:06:47] run the company with me,
[00:06:49] and for the first year or so things went well.
[00:06:52] But then our visions of the future
[00:06:55] began to diverge and eventually
[00:06:58] we had a falling out.
[00:06:59] When we did,
[00:07:01] our Board of Directors sided with him.
[00:07:03] So at 30 I was out.
[00:07:07] And very publicly out.
[00:07:10] What had been the focus of
[00:07:13] my entire adult life was gone,
[00:07:15] and it was devastating.
[00:07:16] I really didn't know what to do for a few months.
[00:07:21] I felt that I had let the previous generation
[00:07:25] of entrepreneurs down -
[00:07:26] that I had dropped the baton
[00:07:29] as it was being passed to me.
[00:07:31] I met with David Packard
[00:07:34] and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize
[00:07:38] for screwing up so badly.
[00:07:39] I was a very public failure,
[00:07:42] and I even thought about running away
[00:07:45] from the valley.
[00:07:46] But something slowly began to dawn on me -
[00:07:49] I still loved what I did.
[00:07:52] The turn of events at Apple had not changed
[00:07:56] that one bit. I had been rejected,
[00:07:58] but I was still in love.
[00:08:01] And so I decided to start over.
[00:08:04] I didn't see it then,
[00:08:08] but it turned out that getting fired
[00:08:10] from Apple was the best thing
[00:08:13] that could have ever happened to me.
[00:08:15] The heaviness of being successful
[00:08:17] was replaced by the lightness of being
[00:08:20] a beginner again, less sure about everything.
[00:08:23] It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
[00:08:28] During the next five years,
[00:08:33] I started a company named NeXT,
[00:08:36] another company named Pixar,
[00:08:39] and fell in love with an amazing woman
[00:08:39] who would become my wife.
[00:08:43] Pixar went on to create the worlds
[00:08:47] first computer animated feature film,
[00:08:49] Toy Story, and is now the most successful
[00:08:53] animation studio in the world.
[00:08:55] In a remarkable turn of events,
[00:08:58] Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple,
[00:09:02] and the technology we developed at NeXT
[00:09:05] is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance.
[00:09:08] And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
[00:09:12] I'm pretty sure none of this
[00:09:17] would have happened
[00:09:17] if I hadn't been fired from Apple.
[00:09:20] It was awful tasted medicine,
[00:09:23] but I guess the patient needed it.
[00:09:26] Sometimes life hits you in the head
[00:09:29] with a brick. Don't lose faith.
[00:09:32] I'm convinced that the only thing
[00:09:34] that kept me going was
[00:09:36] that I loved what I did.
[00:09:38] You've got to find what you love.
[00:09:41] And that is as true for your work
[00:09:44] as it is for your lovers.
[00:09:46] Your work is going to fill a large part
[00:09:49] of your life, and the only way to be
[00:09:52] truly satisfied is to do what you believe
[00:09:55] is great work. And the only way to do
[00:09:59] great work is to love what you do.
[00:10:02] If you haven't found it yet, keep looking.
[00:10:05] Don't settle.
[00:10:07] As with all matters of the heart,
[00:10:10] you'll know when you find it.
[00:10:12] And, like any great relationship,
[00:10:15] it just gets better
[00:10:17] and better as the years roll on.
[00:10:19] So keep looking until you find it.
[00:10:22] Don't settle.
[00:10:25] My third story is about death.
[00:10:29] When I was 17, I read a quote
[00:10:32] that went something like:
[00:10:35] "If you live each day as if it was your last,
[00:10:38] someday you'll most certainly be right."
[00:10:41] It made an impression on me,
[00:10:44] and since then, for the past 33 years,
[00:10:47] I have looked in the mirror every morning
[00:10:50] and asked myself:
[00:10:51] "If today were the last day of my life,
[00:10:54] would I want to do what I am about to do today?"
[00:10:58] And whenever the answer has been "No"
[00:11:02] for too many days in a row,
[00:11:04] I know I need to change something.
[00:11:08] Remembering that I'll be dead soon
[00:11:12] is the most important tool I've ever
[00:11:16] encountered to help me
[00:11:16] make the big choices in life.
[00:11:17] Because almost everything -
[00:11:19] all external expectations, all pride,
[00:11:24] all fear of embarrassment or failure -
[00:11:26] these things just fall away in the face of death,
[00:11:30] leaving only what is truly important.
[00:11:33] Remembering that you are going to die
[00:11:36] is the best way I know to avoid
[00:11:39] the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
[00:11:42] You are already naked.
[00:11:45] There is no reason not to follow your heart.
[00:11:49] About a year ago
[00:11:52] I was diagnosed with cancer.
[00:11:54] I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning,
[00:11:57] and it clearly showed a tumor
[00:11:59] on my pancreas.
[00:12:01] I didn't even know what a pancreas was.
[00:12:04] The doctors told me this
[00:12:07] was almost certainly a type of cancer
[00:12:09] that is incurable,
[00:12:11] and that I should expect
[00:12:12] to live no longer than three to six months.
[00:12:15] My doctor advised me to go home
[00:12:18] and get my affairs in order,
[00:12:20] which is doctor's code for prepare to die.
[00:12:24] It means to try to tell
[00:12:27] your kids everything you thought
[00:12:29] you'd have the next 10 years
[00:12:31] to tell them in just a few months.
[00:12:34] It means to make sure everything
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