Thankyou. I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of thefinest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated fromcollege. This is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today Iwant to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just threestories.
The firststory is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after thefirst 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or sobefore I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It startedbefore I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduatestudent, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly thatI should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me tobe adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped outthey 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 hadnever graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from highschool. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a fewmonths later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almostas expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings werebeing spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the valuein it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how collegewas going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money myparents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that itwould all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it wasone of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stoptaking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in onthe ones that looked interesting。Itwasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor infriends' 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 goodmeal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbledinto by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless lateron. Let me give you one example:
ReedCollege at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in thecountry. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, wasbeautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have totake the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how todo this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying theamount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes greattypography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a waythat science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None ofthis had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten yearslater, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back tome. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer withbeautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course incollege, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionallyspaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that nopersonal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would havenever dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might nothave the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible toconnect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, veryclear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, youcan't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them lookingbackwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in yourfuture. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma,whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all thedifference in my life.
My secondstory is about love and loss. I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early inlife. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We workedhard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage intoa $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finestcreation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then Igot fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Applegrew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company withme, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of thefuture began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, ourBoard 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 wasdevastating.
I reallydidn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previousgeneration of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was beingpassed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize forscrewing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought aboutrunning away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — Istill loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that onebit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to startover.
I didn'tsee it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thingthat could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful wasreplaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure abouteverything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During thenext 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 onto create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and isnow the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn ofevents, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developedat NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I havea wonderful family together.
I'm prettysure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It wasawful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hitsyou in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the onlything that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find whatyou love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your workis going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be trulysatisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do greatwork is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don'tsettle. 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 rollon. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My thirdstory 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 mostcertainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for thepast 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 aboutto do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too manydays in a row, I know I need to change something.
Rememberingthat I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to helpme make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all externalexpectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these thingsjust 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 trapof thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is noreason not to follow your heart.
About ayear ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, andit clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreaswas. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that isincurable, 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'scode for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything youthought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. Itmeans to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy aspossible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I livedwith that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where theystuck 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 wassedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cellsunder a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be avery rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had thesurgery and I'm fine now.
This wasthe closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for afew more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bitmore certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:Noone wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to getthere. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escapedit. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single bestinvention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make wayfor the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, youwill gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, butit is quite true. |
Your timeis limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped bydogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't letthe noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And mostimportant, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehowalready know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I wasyoung, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, whichwas one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow namedStewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life withhis poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers anddesktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroidcameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Googlecame along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and greatnotions.
Stewartand his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then whenit had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and Iwas your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of anearly morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on ifyou were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. StayFoolish." 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.
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万维涛
如果有中文字幕就更好了。
winterbeartae
stay hungry, stay foolish