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. 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. (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
entrepreneursdown- 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 returned 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, andthe 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. Havinglived
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
others' 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
thebibles 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
inpaperback 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 tobegin anew, I wish that for
you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/10/05/steve-jobs-2005-stanford-commencement-address/
1.
unwed 單身
2.
deposits
存款
3.
stumbled
迷糊
4.
calligraphy
書法
5.
subtle 微妙
