-
You've got to find what you
love,' Jobs says
This is a prepared
text of the Commencement address delivered by
Steve Jobs, CEO
of Apple Computer and
of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.
演讲全文（中英文对照）
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.
很荣幸和大家一道参加这所世界上最好的一座大学的毕业典礼。我大学没毕业，
说实话，
这是我第一次离大学毕业典礼这么近。
今天我想给大
家讲三个我自己的
故事，不讲别的，也不讲大道理，就讲三个故事。
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?
第一个故事讲的是点与点之间的关系。我在里德学院（
Reed
College
）只读了六
个月就退学了，此后便在学校里旁听
，又过了大约一年半，我彻底离开。那么，
我为什么退学呢？
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
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:
you want
him?
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.
这得从我出生前讲起。
我的生母是一名年轻的未婚在校研究生，
她决定将我送给
别人收养。
她非常希望收养我的是
有大学学历的人，
所以把一切都安排好了，
我
< br>一出
生就交给一对律师夫妇收养。没想到我落地的霎那
间，那对夫妇却决定收
养一名女孩。
就这样，
< br>我的养父母
—
当时他们还在登记册上排队等著呢
—
半夜三
更接到一个
电话
: ―
我们这儿有一个没人要的男
婴，
你们要么？
‖―
当然要
‖
他们回
答。
但是，
我的生母后来发现我的养母不是大学毕业生，
我的养父甚至连中学都
没有毕业，所以她
拒绝在最后的收养
文件上签字。不过，没过几个月她就心软
了，因为我的养父母许诺日后一定送我上大学。
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:
17
年后，我真的进了大学。当时我很天
真，选了一所学费几乎和斯坦福大学一
样昂贵的学校，
当工人的
养父母倾其所有的积蓄为我支付了大学学费。
读了六个
月后，我
却看不出上学有什么意义。我既不知道自己这一生想干什么，
也不知
道大学是否能够帮我弄明白自己想干什么。
这时，
我就要花光父母一辈子节省下
来的钱了。所
以，我决定退学，并且坚信日后会证明我这样做是对的。当年做
出这个决定时心里直打鼓，
但现在回想起来，
这还真是我有生以
来做出的最好的
决定之一。从退学那
一刻起，我就可以不再选那些我毫无兴趣的必修课，开始
旁听一些看上去有意思的课。<
/p>
那些日子一点儿都不浪漫。我没有宿舍，只能睡
在朋友房间的地板上。
我去退还可乐瓶，
用那五分钱的
押金来买吃的。
每个星期
天晚上我都要走七英里，到城那头的<
/p>
黑尔－科里施纳礼拜堂去，吃每周才能享
用一次的美餐。
我喜欢这样。
我凭著好奇心和直觉所干的这些
事情，
有许多后来
都证明是无价之宝。我给大家举个例子
:
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.
当时，
里德学院的书法课大概是全国最好的。
校园里所有的公告栏和每个抽屉
标
签上的字都写得非常漂亮。
当时我已经退学，
不用正常上课，
所以我决定选一门
书法
课，学学怎么写好字。我学习写带短截线和不带短截线的印刷字体，根据
不同字母组合调整其间距，
以及怎样把版式调整得好上加好。
这门课太棒了，
既
有历史价
< br>
值，又有艺术造诣，这一点科学就做不到，而我觉得它妙不可言。
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.
当时我并不指望书法在以后的生活中
能有什么实用价值。
但是，
十年之后，
我们
在设计第一台
Macintosh
计算机时，它一下子浮现在我眼前。于是
，我们把这
些东西全都设计进了计算机中。
这是第一台有这么漂
亮的文字版式的计算机。
要
不是我当初在大学里偶然选了这么一
门课，
Macintosh
计算机绝不会有那么多种
印刷字体或间距安排合理的字号。要不是
Windows
照搬了
Macintosh
，个人电
脑可能不会有这些字
体和字号。要不是退了学，我决不会碰巧选了这门书法课，
个人电脑也可能不会有现在这
些漂亮的版式了。
当然，
我在大学里不可能从这一
点上看到它与将来的关系。
十年之后再回头看，
两者
之间的关系就非常、
非常清
楚了。
<
/p>
你们同样不可能从现在这个点上看到将来；只有回头看时，才会发现它
们之间的关系。
所以，
要相信这些点迟早会连接到一起。<
/p>
你们必须信赖某些东西
—
直觉、归宿、生
命，还有业力，等等。这样做从来没有让我的希望落空过，而
且还彻底改变了我的生活。
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 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.
我的第二个故事是关于好恶与得失。
幸运的是，
我
在很小的时候就发现自己喜欢
做什么。我在
20
岁时和沃兹（
Woz
，苹果公司创始人之一
Wozon
的昵称
—
译
注）在我父母
的车库里办起了苹果公司。我们干得很卖力，十年后，苹果公司就
从车库里我们两个人发
展成为一个拥有
20
亿元资产、
4,000
名员工的大企
业。
那时，我们刚刚推出了我们最好的产品
—
< br> Macintosh
电脑
—
那是在第
9
年，我
刚满
30
岁。可后来，我被解雇了。你怎么会被自己办的公司解雇
呢？是这样，
随著苹果公司越做越大，
我们聘了一位我认为非常
有才华的人与我一道管理公司。
在开始的一
< br>年多里，一切都很顺利。可是，随后我俩对公司前景的看法开始出
现分歧，最后我
俩反目了。这时，董事会站在了他那一边，所以在
30
岁那年，
我离开了公司，而且这件事闹得满城风雨。我成年后的整个
生活重心都没有了，
这使我心力交瘁。
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.
一
连几个月，
我真的不知道应该怎么办。
我感到自己给老一代的创
业者丢了脸
—
因为我扔掉了交到自己手里的接力棒。我去见了戴
维
?
帕卡德（
David Packa
rd
，
惠普公司创始人之一
—
译注）和鲍勃
?
诺伊斯（
Bob Noyce
，英特尔公司创建者之
一
—
译注），想为把事情搞得这么糟糕说声道歉。这次失败弄得沸沸扬扬的，我<
/p>
甚至想过逃离硅谷。但是，渐渐地，我开始有了一
个想法
—
我仍然热爱我过去
做的一切。
在苹果公司发生的这些风波丝毫没有改变这一点。
我
虽然被拒之门外，
但我仍然深爱我的事业。于是，我决定从头开始。
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 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
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