2018-04-24 乔布斯斯坦福大学演讲原文
乔布斯斯坦福大学演讲英文原文：
Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says
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.
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 closest 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.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
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?
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 set 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 course.” 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 refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose 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 see 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 classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
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:
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. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif 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.
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 course 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 course 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. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second 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 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 released 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.
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 passed 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.
I didn’t see 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.
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.
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 lose 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, keep looking. Don’t settle. 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 until you find it. Don’t settle.
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 you’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 myself: “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 tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
乔布斯在斯坦福大学的演讲稿
关于新生，爱以及诉求的那些断想 ——乔布斯斯坦福演讲有感 似乎难以解读的是种种关于成功的诠释，直到他磨洗过岁月后侃侃而谈，在斯坦福，在世界面前；似乎难以企及的是属于他的卓越，直到他创造着奇迹的同时回忆平凡，洗尽铅华，却抹不掉震撼；似乎难以抵抗的是我们终要相信，昂首前进的道路上强有力的，不过新生、爱以及诉求不忘催促我们成长。 像冰山融雪的微凉，似乎冲破束缚的新生总积蕴着神奇的力量。将一段成就的故事抽丝剥茧，亘古的人生寓言也在乔布斯的辉煌背后慢慢变得明晰：是的，他让坎坷塑人的戒律在成功的背景下更为撼人心魄且坚实可信。 在昂贵而偏颇理想的大学门前驻步，在无望而艰难度日的生活中挣扎，在心血灌注的事业里被禁足…生活之于他似乎希望濒危而颓境徒生，他于是说：“我想过逃离，但我看到了曙光；我仍然喜爱我从事的一切，钟爱我所做的事情，我决定从头再来。”就这样直面挫折并破冰行进。生活在每一个人的剧本中上演着颠沛流离，坚强自信的人总是改写剧本于是改变命运，如此新生往往背负着憾人的力量，终于让我们在一次次商业奇迹中见证了乔布斯的辉煌。这就是他告诫我们的，不要以为日新月异的世界不需要磨练成功的道路也能和风细雨；永远感谢那些困难所给予你的力量，感谢它无私的磨砺教会你成长。一如他留给斯坦福的礼物：“虽然命运有时候会拿起板砖猛拍你的脑袋。但你不要失去信仰。” 就让我们相信困难总会过去；相信信仰是新生的希望；相信破冰之后鹏程高远；相信涅槃之后瞵视昂藏。 以一种安然的姿态，爱总是具有最温暖的力量。静默的支持，无声的陪伴在颓境和死亡面前为他竖起一面风帆 ：“所有的荣誉、骄傲、来自难堪和失败所有的恐惧在死亡面前统统消亡，剩下的爱是真正重要的东西。”——乔布斯的笃信中，爱责无旁贷地占据着一份沉甸甸的分量。唯有接近死亡，才看清生活真正的宝藏；被如日中天的事业遗弃、与死神擦肩而过之后，对爱的感怀听来朴实又不乏诚挚。不禁思考，是否成功与爱之间的确有一条纽带，如乔布斯所说在最困难的时刻投下拯救的绳索，拯救前程和殚精竭虑的心境。像视线中一座不灭的灯塔，爱送给每个人相同的光和热，供理想以力量让它扬帆起航，带着它的温柔安定去乘风破浪。 最后的断想关于诉求，似乎作为源头给予凌驾于一切的力量。 “求知若饥，虚心若愚。”——这是他最后留给斯坦福的话，终于告诉我们什么才是他身体里不息运作的硬件，昼夜带他奋进，在一段求索的路尽头镌刻下辉煌。 莫过某种饥渴，某种灵魂深处的诉求和渴望——“如果你还没有找到，继续寻找，不要半途而废。心中有信念，你就会找到的。”他诉求忠于内心的教育和理想、诉求一次次的突破和开创；他满怀 *** 和筹码不停和逆境抵抗，像一股鲜活的力量提醒我聆听理想并倾注全力去追求，去探索，去相信成功就在前方守望。当一份诉求真正从内心破土重生，便会在冥冥之中牵引我们上前勘探，一个个脚印，一次次跌倒后更加接近理想。有理由相信的是，今天乔布斯演绎着传奇让硅谷噤声、令世界惊艳，明天像他一样渴求梦想的人同样会被推向时代的浪尖。当他的故事感动我时，相信你也一样。“不要被其他人喧嚣的观点掩盖你真正的内心的声音。还有最重要的是，你要有勇气去跟随你直觉和心灵。”于是让我们听从这份诉求，听从于渴望，就这样选择一种姿态便把前进的道路走得昂扬。 诸多回想，给予温暖和启迪，关于乔布斯，关于一段五味俱全的故事，名为成功抑或辉煌。
