1、说实话,今天也许是在我的生命中离大学毕业最近的一天了。今天我想向你们讲述我生活中的三个故事。不是什么大不了的事情,只是三个故事而已。The first story is about connecting the dots.第一个故事是关于“因”和“果”。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我在Reed大学读了
2、六个月之后就退学了,但是在十八个月以后我真正的作出退学决定之前,我还经常去学校。我为什么要退学呢？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 ado
3、pted 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 biolo
4、gical 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.故事从我出生的时候讲起。我的亲生母亲是一个年
5、轻的,没有结婚的大学毕业生。她决定让别人收养我, 她十分想让我被大学毕业生收养。所以在我出生的时候，她已经做好了一切的准备工作，能使得我被一个律师和他的妻子所收养。但是她没有料到,当我出生之后,律师夫妇突然决定他们想要一个女孩。 所以我的生养父母（他们还在我亲生父母的观察名单上）突然在半夜接到了一个电话:“我们现在这儿有一个不小心生出来的男婴,你们想要他吗？”他们回答道:“当然！”但是我亲生母亲随后发现，我的养母从来没有上过大学,我的父亲甚至从没有读过高中。她拒绝签这个收养合同。但是在几个月以后,我的父母答应她一定要让我上大学,那个时候她才同意。 And 17 years later I di
6、d 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.Aftersix months, I couldnt see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going
7、 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 cou
8、ld stop taking the required classes that didnt interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.在十七岁那年,我真的上了大学。但是我很天真的选择了一个几乎和你们斯坦福大学一样贵的学校, 我父母还处于蓝领阶层，他们几乎把所有积蓄都花在了我的学费上面。在六个月后, 我已经看不到其中的价值所在。我不知道我想要在生命中做什么,我也不知道大学能帮助我找到怎样的答案。 但是在这里，我几乎花光了我父母这一辈子的所有积蓄。所以我决定要退学,我觉得这是个正确的决定。不能否认
9、,我当时确实非常的害怕, 但是现在回头看看,那的确是我这一生中最明智的一个决定。在我做出退学决定的那一刻, 我终于可以不必去读那些令我提不起丝毫兴趣的课程了。然后我还可以去修那些看起来有点意思的课程。It wasnt all romantic. I didnt 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 S
10、unday 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:但是这并不是那么罗曼蒂克。我失去了我的宿舍,所以我只能在朋友房间的地板上面睡觉,我去捡5美分的可乐瓶子，仅仅为了填饱肚子, 在星期天的晚上,我需要走七英里的路程，穿
11、过这个城市到Hare Krishna寺庙（注：位于纽约Brooklyn下城）,只是为了能吃上饭这个星期唯一一顿好一点的饭。但是我喜欢这样。我跟着我的直觉和好奇心走, 遇到的很多东西,此后被证明是无价之宝。让我给你们举一个例子吧：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 calligrap
12、hed. Because I had dropped out and didnt 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
13、 was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science cant capture, and I found it fascinating. Reed大学在那时提供也许是全美最好的美术字课程。在这个大学里面的每个海报, 每个抽屉的标签上面全都是漂亮的美术字。因为我退学了, 没有受到正规的训练, 所以我决定去参加这个课程，去学学怎样写出漂亮的美术字。我学到了san serif 和serif字体, 我学会了怎么样在不同的字母组合之中改变空格的长度, 还有怎么样才能作出最棒的印刷式样。那是一种科学永远不能捕捉到的、美丽
14、的、真实的艺术精妙, 我发现那实在是太美妙了。 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 dro
15、pped 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,
16、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.当时看起来这些东西在我的生命中，好像都没有什么实际应用的可能。但是十年之后,当我们在设计第一台Macintosh电脑的时候,就不是那样了。我把当时我
17、学的那些家伙全都设计进了Mac。那是第一台使用了漂亮的印刷字体的电脑。如果我当时没有退学, 就不会有机会去参加这个我感兴趣的美术字课程, Mac就不会有这么多丰富的字体，以及赏心悦目的字体间距。因为微软就是苹果的山寨版，可以说世上所有PC都不会有现在这么美妙的字型了。当然我当时不可能预知这事事之间的“因”“果”，但是当我十年后回顾这一切的时候,真的豁然开朗了。Again, you cant connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust tha
18、t 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.再次说明的是,没人可以未卜先知，事事的因果往往只在回首时显现，你得相信，种什么因，得什么果。人总要有些信仰才行，直觉也好，命运也罢，因果轮回，不管什么。去相信因果的联系，会给你信心去跟从自
19、己的意愿，哪怕离经叛道，也绝不止步。只有这样，才能有所成。My second story is about love and loss.我的第二个故事是关于爱和得失的。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
20、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 m
21、e, 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 w
22、as devastating.我非常幸运, 因为我在很早的时候就找到了我钟爱的东西。Woz和我在二十岁的时候就在父母的车库里面开创了苹果公司。我们工作得很努力, 十年之后, 这个公司从那两个车库中的穷光蛋发展到了超过四千名的雇员、价值超过二十亿的大公司。在公司成立的第九年,我们刚刚发布了最好的产品,那就是Macintosh。我也快要到三十岁了。在那一年, 我被炒了鱿鱼。你怎么可能被你自己创立的公司炒了鱿鱼呢 嗯,在苹果快速成长的时候，我们雇用了一个很有天分的家伙和我一起管理这个公司, 在最初的几年,公司运转的很好。但是后来我们对未来的看法发生了分歧, 最终我们吵了起来。当争吵不可开交的时候,
23、董事会站在了他的那一边。所以在三十岁的时候, 我被当众扫地出门。在而立之年，我一生的追求突然不见了, 这真是沉重的打击。I really didnt 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
24、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
25、 start over.在最初的几个月里，我不知所措。我把从前的创业激情给丢了, 我觉得自己让与我一同创业的人都很沮丧。我和David Pack和Bob Boyce见面，并试图向他们道歉。我把事情弄得糟糕透顶了。但是我渐渐发现了曙光, 我仍然喜爱我从事的这些东西。苹果公司发生的这些事情丝毫的没有改变这些, 一点也没有。我被驱逐了,但是我仍然钟爱它。所以我决定从头再来。I didnt see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happen
26、ed 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.我当时没有觉察, 但是事后证明, 从苹果公司被炒是我这辈子发生的最棒的事情。因为，作为一个成功者的极乐感觉被作为一个创业者的轻松感觉所重新代替: 对任何事情都不那么特别看重。这让我觉得如此自由, 进入了我生命中最
27、有创造力的一个阶段。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 t
28、he 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 Apples current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.在接下来的五年里, 我创立了一个名叫NeXT的公司, 还有一个叫Pixar的公司, 然后和一个后来成为我妻子的优雅女人相识。Pixar 制作了世界上第一个用电脑制
29、作的动画电影“”玩具总动员”,Pixar现在也是世界上最成功的电脑制作工作室。峰回路转,Apple收购了NeXT, 然后我又回到了Apple公司。我们在NeXT发展的技术在Apple的复兴之中发挥了关键的作用。我还和Laurence 一起建立了一个幸福的家庭。Im pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadnt been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits yo
30、u in the head with a brick. Dont lose faith. Im convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. Youve 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 trul
31、y 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 havent found it yet, keep looking. Dont settle. As with all matters of the heart, youll 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
