偶看新闻广州市公安局印章备案:乔布斯高校毕业典礼演讲
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乔布斯高校毕业典礼演讲
Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and 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 six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen 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 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've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later 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 go to college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen 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 of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all 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 far more 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 five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven 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 sans-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, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals 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 10 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--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well- worn path, and that will make all the difference.
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 twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, 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, and so at thirty, 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'd 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 in 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 world's 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 and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene 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's going to hit 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 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, and 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. 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 thing 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 doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that 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 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 doctor 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, thankfully, I am fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's 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's 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's 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 others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, 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 Catalogue, 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 Sixties, 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 thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies 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 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.
今天能够在世界上最优秀的高校之一参加各位的毕业典礼，我感到十分荣幸。我本人没能从大学毕业。说句实在话，今天要算我同大学毕业之间距离最近的一次了。现在，我想给诸位讲三个我的人生故事。是的，没什么大道理，只讲三个故事。
第一个故事是关于串起你生命中的点滴。
我在里德学院念了六个月大学后就退学了，但随后我在学校旁听了18个月的课，然后才真正地辍学。那么，我为什么要退学呢？
故事要从我出生前说起。我的亲生母亲是个年轻、未婚的大学毕业生，她决定把我交给别人收养。她很坚持我的养父母也应该是大学毕业，直到我爸妈承诺，将来一定送我读大学才算同意。
17年后，我果然上了大学。念了六个月后，我看不出这种生活有什么价值。对于人生，我不知道应该做什么，也不知道大学生活怎么能帮我解答这个问题。于是我决定退学，相信这条路一定走得通。这在当时是很恐怖的一件事，但是现在回首看去，这是我作过的最好的决定之一。从退学的那一分钟起，我就可以不上无趣的必修课，而且可以去旁听那些让我感兴趣的课程。
这并不是一种很浪漫的生活。我没有宿舍住，睡在朋友宿舍的地板上；收集空可乐瓶，每个瓶子换回押金五美分供我买食物。每周日晚上，我会穿过波特兰市区，走七英里去Hare Krishna神庙去吃顿好的（译注：Hare Krishna神庙是印度教修习场所，周日有灵修活动和免费聚餐）。我很喜欢这顿牙祭。很多在这段跟随自己的好奇心和直觉度过的日子里学到的东西，后来都让我获益匪浅。且让我给你们举个例子：
当时里德学院的书法课程大概是美国国内最好的了。由于已经退学，用不着去上常规课，我就参加了一门书法课，去学写字。我学习serif字体和san serif字体，学习不同字母组合中间隙空间的变化，学习怎么让好看的字体在应用中变得更好看。书法很美，历史悠久，而且有着精妙的艺术感，为科学所无法企及，我对它入了迷。
这些对于我的生活毫无任何实际的用途，我也从没指望有过。但是，10年后，当我们在设计第一台Macintosh电脑的时候，我学的这些又回到我的脑海里。我们在设计中全面应用了这些知识。Macintosh成为第一台拥有漂亮字体的电脑。
假如我当年没旁听这门课程，Mac就不会有多种不同字体以及字符按比例间隔的字形；假如不退学，我就不会旁听书法课，今天的个人电脑就不会带有现在的好看字体。
你没法预知你人生的点点滴滴之间会有怎样的关系；你只能在事后把它们串接起来。因此，你必须相信，这些人生的片段会在你的未来产生联系。你必须相信点什么——你的勇气、命运、生活、因缘，什么都可以。这个办法对我一直都很有效，它造就了我的人生。
我的第二个故事是关于爱与失败的。
我很幸运，在人生早期就找到了喜爱的东西。20岁时我和Woz在我爸妈的车库里建立了苹果公司。我们很努力地工作，10年之后苹果电脑由最初车库中的两个人变成一家有4000多员工、价值20亿美元的公司。那个时候我们最棒的产品Macintosh刚刚推出一年，而我刚刚30岁。
然后我就被解雇了。随着苹果公司的发展壮大，我们请了一个在我看来非常有才能的人来和我一起管理公司。第一年一切都非常顺利。但是后来我们对于未来的看法出现了分歧，最终我们之间起了争论。争执发生之后，我们的董事会站在了他那一边。于是，30岁时我被炒掉了。一直以来都是我成年生活核心的东西，忽然不复存在了。那感觉相当可怕。
有几个月的时间，我完全不知道该干什么。我感到自己辜负了前辈企业家的期望——就像接力棒交到我的手里，而我却丢掉了。我成了一名众所周知的失败者。我甚至想过离开硅谷。然而有一种东西慢慢照亮了我：我依然爱着我所爱的东西。发生在苹果公司的事并没能改变这一点。我被赶走了，但是我的爱依然还在。于是我决定重新开始。
我当时并不知道，实际上被苹果解雇是当时发生在我身上的最好的事了。事业成功所伴随的那种沉重不见了，取而代之的是重回起跑线的那种新手的轻盈。对于一切我都不再确信无疑。我获得了解放，进而开始了我一生中最富有创造力的时期。
在接下去的五年中，我建立了一家名叫NeXT的公司，然后又建立了Pixar公司，并与一位奇妙的女士共堕爱河，她后来成为了我的太太。Pixar创作出了世界上第一部电脑动画电影《玩具总动员》。现在它已经是世界上最成功的动画工作室。再后来，经过一次戏剧性的收购，苹果公司买下了NeXT，我重返苹果。我们在NeXT开发的技术现在成为苹果复兴事业的核心，Laurene跟我也组建了一个美好的家庭。
我很确定，假如苹果没有开除我，所有这一切都不会发生。有时候，生活会用板砖砸你的头。一定不要失去信仰。我知道，唯一支撑我前进的东西就是：我爱我所做的事。你必须找到你所爱的东西。这句话不仅适用于你的工作也同样适用于你的恋爱。
你的工作将构成你生活的大部分，而唯一能让你真正从工作中得到满足的办法就是爱你所做的事。假如你还没有找到它，继续找吧。不要停下脚步。同所有与心灵相关的东西一样，当你找到它时，你会知道的。而且就像那些美好的爱情一样，它会随着岁月的增长而越加醇美。
我的第三个故事关于死亡。
我17岁那年读到过一句话，大意是这样：“假如你把每一天都当成你在人世的最后一天来过，总有一天你会发现自己是对的。”这话给我留下了印象。自那时起，33年来的每个早晨，我都对着镜子自问：“假如今天是我这辈子最后的一天，我还会做我今天要做的这些事吗？”每当连续很多天答案都是“不会”的时候，我就知道有什么东西需要改变了。
记住自己将不久于人世，这是我在作出人生重大选择时的一个最重要的参考工具。因为几乎所有的一切——一切外界对你的期待、一切荣耀、一切对丢脸和失败的恐惧——它们在面对死亡的时候都黯然失色，剩下的只有真正重要的东西。在我看来，记住你终将死去是帮助你避开“我可能会失去xxx”思维陷阱的最佳方法。你已经是赤裸裸的了。没有理由不追随自己的心去生活。
大约一年前，我被查出患有癌症。早上7点半，我做了一次扫描，结果很清楚地显示出我的胰腺里有一个肿瘤。当时我连胰腺是什么都不知道。大夫们告诉我，差不多可以肯定这是一种无法治愈的癌，我估计还能再活三到六个月。我的医生建议我回家去，把事情都做个了结。这是医生的行话，它意味着对这个世界说再见。
一整天我的脑子里只有这个判决。当晚，我做了一次组织切片检查，医生们发现这是一种非常罕见的、通过手术可以治愈的胰腺癌。后来我做了手术，现在已经痊愈了。
迄今为止，这是我距离死亡最近的一次，希望这也是未来几十年里我离死亡最近的一次。没有人想要死。但死亡是我们共同的终点，是生命最好的发明。它是生命的代谢催化剂，去除老朽，迎接新鲜。现在新鲜的是你们，但是用不了太久，某天你们会发现自己已经渐渐变得老朽，将被取代。抱歉说得这么夸张，但这是真理。
我们的时间是有限的，所以请不要浪费时间去过你不想要的生活。不要被教条所迷惑——它诱使你按照他人的思维定势生活。最重要的是，要有勇气追随你的心灵和直觉。它们会知道你真正想要做一个什么样的人。其他的一切都是次要的。
当我还很年轻的时候，有一本刊物名叫《环球百科目录》，是我那一代人必读的圣典之一。它是由一个叫Stewart Brand的人在距此不远的Menlo Park出版的，此人以他富于诗意的工作为这份刊物注入了生命。那是在60年代末，个人电脑和桌面出版还远未发明，因此这本刊物完全是由打字机、剪刀和拍立得相机做出来的。它就像平装本的Google，不过是在Google诞生的35年前：一样是那么的理想主义，充满着简洁的工具和了不起的洞见。
《环球百科目录》出版了数期，生命就走到了尽头。那是70年代中期，我正是你们这个年纪。最后一期封底是一幅清晨乡村公路的照片，在照片下方写着这样的话：“求知若渴，虚怀若愚。（Stay hungry，stay foolish.）”我一直希望自己做到这样。现在，在你们即将毕业的时刻，我用这句话来祝福你们。
求知若渴，虚怀若愚。
谢谢大家。
乔布斯高校毕业典礼演讲
Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and 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 six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen 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 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've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later 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 go to college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen 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 of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all 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 far more 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 five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven 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 sans-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, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals 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 10 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--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well- worn path, and that will make all the difference.
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 twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, 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, and so at thirty, 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'd 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 in 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 world's 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 and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene 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's going to hit 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 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, and 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. 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 thing 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 doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that 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 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 doctor 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, thankfully, I am fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's 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's 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's 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 others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, 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 Catalogue, 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 Sixties, 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 thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies 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 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.
今天能够在世界上最优秀的高校之一参加各位的毕业典礼，我感到十分荣幸。我本人没能从大学毕业。说句实在话，今天要算我同大学毕业之间距离最近的一次了。现在，我想给诸位讲三个我的人生故事。是的，没什么大道理，只讲三个故事。
第一个故事是关于串起你生命中的点滴。
我在里德学院念了六个月大学后就退学了，但随后我在学校旁听了18个月的课，然后才真正地辍学。那么，我为什么要退学呢？
故事要从我出生前说起。我的亲生母亲是个年轻、未婚的大学毕业生，她决定把我交给别人收养。她很坚持我的养父母也应该是大学毕业，直到我爸妈承诺，将来一定送我读大学才算同意。
17年后，我果然上了大学。念了六个月后，我看不出这种生活有什么价值。对于人生，我不知道应该做什么，也不知道大学生活怎么能帮我解答这个问题。于是我决定退学，相信这条路一定走得通。这在当时是很恐怖的一件事，但是现在回首看去，这是我作过的最好的决定之一。从退学的那一分钟起，我就可以不上无趣的必修课，而且可以去旁听那些让我感兴趣的课程。
这并不是一种很浪漫的生活。我没有宿舍住，睡在朋友宿舍的地板上；收集空可乐瓶，每个瓶子换回押金五美分供我买食物。每周日晚上，我会穿过波特兰市区，走七英里去Hare Krishna神庙去吃顿好的（译注：Hare Krishna神庙是印度教修习场所，周日有灵修活动和免费聚餐）。我很喜欢这顿牙祭。很多在这段跟随自己的好奇心和直觉度过的日子里学到的东西，后来都让我获益匪浅。且让我给你们举个例子：
当时里德学院的书法课程大概是美国国内最好的了。由于已经退学，用不着去上常规课，我就参加了一门书法课，去学写字。我学习serif字体和san serif字体，学习不同字母组合中间隙空间的变化，学习怎么让好看的字体在应用中变得更好看。书法很美，历史悠久，而且有着精妙的艺术感，为科学所无法企及，我对它入了迷。
这些对于我的生活毫无任何实际的用途，我也从没指望有过。但是，10年后，当我们在设计第一台Macintosh电脑的时候，我学的这些又回到我的脑海里。我们在设计中全面应用了这些知识。Macintosh成为第一台拥有漂亮字体的电脑。
假如我当年没旁听这门课程，Mac就不会有多种不同字体以及字符按比例间隔的字形；假如不退学，我就不会旁听书法课，今天的个人电脑就不会带有现在的好看字体。
你没法预知你人生的点点滴滴之间会有怎样的关系；你只能在事后把它们串接起来。因此，你必须相信，这些人生的片段会在你的未来产生联系。你必须相信点什么——你的勇气、命运、生活、因缘，什么都可以。这个办法对我一直都很有效，它造就了我的人生。
我的第二个故事是关于爱与失败的。
我很幸运，在人生早期就找到了喜爱的东西。20岁时我和Woz在我爸妈的车库里建立了苹果公司。我们很努力地工作，10年之后苹果电脑由最初车库中的两个人变成一家有4000多员工、价值20亿美元的公司。那个时候我们最棒的产品Macintosh刚刚推出一年，而我刚刚30岁。
然后我就被解雇了。随着苹果公司的发展壮大，我们请了一个在我看来非常有才能的人来和我一起管理公司。第一年一切都非常顺利。但是后来我们对于未来的看法出现了分歧，最终我们之间起了争论。争执发生之后，我们的董事会站在了他那一边。于是，30岁时我被炒掉了。一直以来都是我成年生活核心的东西，忽然不复存在了。那感觉相当可怕。
有几个月的时间，我完全不知道该干什么。我感到自己辜负了前辈企业家的期望——就像接力棒交到我的手里，而我却丢掉了。我成了一名众所周知的失败者。我甚至想过离开硅谷。然而有一种东西慢慢照亮了我：我依然爱着我所爱的东西。发生在苹果公司的事并没能改变这一点。我被赶走了，但是我的爱依然还在。于是我决定重新开始。
我当时并不知道，实际上被苹果解雇是当时发生在我身上的最好的事了。事业成功所伴随的那种沉重不见了，取而代之的是重回起跑线的那种新手的轻盈。对于一切我都不再确信无疑。我获得了解放，进而开始了我一生中最富有创造力的时期。
在接下去的五年中，我建立了一家名叫NeXT的公司，然后又建立了Pixar公司，并与一位奇妙的女士共堕爱河，她后来成为了我的太太。Pixar创作出了世界上第一部电脑动画电影《玩具总动员》。现在它已经是世界上最成功的动画工作室。再后来，经过一次戏剧性的收购，苹果公司买下了NeXT，我重返苹果。我们在NeXT开发的技术现在成为苹果复兴事业的核心，Laurene跟我也组建了一个美好的家庭。
我很确定，假如苹果没有开除我，所有这一切都不会发生。有时候，生活会用板砖砸你的头。一定不要失去信仰。我知道，唯一支撑我前进的东西就是：我爱我所做的事。你必须找到你所爱的东西。这句话不仅适用于你的工作也同样适用于你的恋爱。
你的工作将构成你生活的大部分，而唯一能让你真正从工作中得到满足的办法就是爱你所做的事。假如你还没有找到它，继续找吧。不要停下脚步。同所有与心灵相关的东西一样，当你找到它时，你会知道的。而且就像那些美好的爱情一样，它会随着岁月的增长而越加醇美。
我的第三个故事关于死亡。
我17岁那年读到过一句话，大意是这样：“假如你把每一天都当成你在人世的最后一天来过，总有一天你会发现自己是对的。”这话给我留下了印象。自那时起，33年来的每个早晨，我都对着镜子自问：“假如今天是我这辈子最后的一天，我还会做我今天要做的这些事吗？”每当连续很多天答案都是“不会”的时候，我就知道有什么东西需要改变了。
记住自己将不久于人世，这是我在作出人生重大选择时的一个最重要的参考工具。因为几乎所有的一切——一切外界对你的期待、一切荣耀、一切对丢脸和失败的恐惧——它们在面对死亡的时候都黯然失色，剩下的只有真正重要的东西。在我看来，记住你终将死去是帮助你避开“我可能会失去xxx”思维陷阱的最佳方法。你已经是赤裸裸的了。没有理由不追随自己的心去生活。
大约一年前，我被查出患有癌症。早上7点半，我做了一次扫描，结果很清楚地显示出我的胰腺里有一个肿瘤。当时我连胰腺是什么都不知道。大夫们告诉我，差不多可以肯定这是一种无法治愈的癌，我估计还能再活三到六个月。我的医生建议我回家去，把事情都做个了结。这是医生的行话，它意味着对这个世界说再见。
一整天我的脑子里只有这个判决。当晚，我做了一次组织切片检查，医生们发现这是一种非常罕见的、通过手术可以治愈的胰腺癌。后来我做了手术，现在已经痊愈了。
迄今为止，这是我距离死亡最近的一次，希望这也是未来几十年里我离死亡最近的一次。没有人想要死。但死亡是我们共同的终点，是生命最好的发明。它是生命的代谢催化剂，去除老朽，迎接新鲜。现在新鲜的是你们，但是用不了太久，某天你们会发现自己已经渐渐变得老朽，将被取代。抱歉说得这么夸张，但这是真理。
我们的时间是有限的，所以请不要浪费时间去过你不想要的生活。不要被教条所迷惑——它诱使你按照他人的思维定势生活。最重要的是，要有勇气追随你的心灵和直觉。它们会知道你真正想要做一个什么样的人。其他的一切都是次要的。
当我还很年轻的时候，有一本刊物名叫《环球百科目录》，是我那一代人必读的圣典之一。它是由一个叫Stewart Brand的人在距此不远的Menlo Park出版的，此人以他富于诗意的工作为这份刊物注入了生命。那是在60年代末，个人电脑和桌面出版还远未发明，因此这本刊物完全是由打字机、剪刀和拍立得相机做出来的。它就像平装本的Google，不过是在Google诞生的35年前：一样是那么的理想主义，充满着简洁的工具和了不起的洞见。
《环球百科目录》出版了数期，生命就走到了尽头。那是70年代中期，我正是你们这个年纪。最后一期封底是一幅清晨乡村公路的照片，在照片下方写着这样的话：“求知若渴，虚怀若愚。（Stay hungry，stay foolish.）”我一直希望自己做到这样。现在，在你们即将毕业的时刻，我用这句话来祝福你们。
求知若渴，虚怀若愚。
谢谢大家。