乔布斯在斯坦福大学的演讲稿英文原稿

乔布斯在斯坦福大学的演讲稿

英文原稿

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,

you want him?

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 na?

vely 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,

Story,

and

is

now

the

most

successful animation studio in the world.