乔布斯 2005 斯坦福大学毕业典礼演讲
中文版:我今天很荣幸能和你们一起参加这所世界上最好的大学的毕业典礼。说实话,我从未大学毕业,这该算是我一生中离大学毕业最近的一次了。今天我想向你们讲述我人生中的三个故事,没什么大不了的,只是三个故事而已。第一个故事是关于串联生命中的点点滴滴。我在里德大学制度了六个月就退学了,但之后仍作为旁听生带了一年半后才最终离开, 我什么要退学呢?那要从我出生的时候讲起,我的生母是一个年轻的、未婚大学毕业生,她决定让别人收养我,她坚定地认为应该找一对受过高等教育的夫妇。 在我出生的时候已经安排好,让一个律师家庭收养我,但当我出生的时候,律师夫妇突然决定要一个女孩,所以在候选名单上我的养父母突然在半夜接到了一个电话:我们这里多了一个男孩,你们想要他吗?他们回答:当然!但是我生母随后发现,我的养父母美元大学毕业,我的养父甚至高中就辍学了,她拒绝在最终的收养文件上签字,几个月后,她才勉强同意,因为我的父母承诺一定会送我上大学。这是我人生的开始。十七年后,我真的去了大学,但我很天真的选择了一所几乎和斯坦福一样贵的学校,我的父母都是蓝领阶层,他们倾其所有资助我的学业,在六个月后,我已经看不到上学的价值,我不知道我真正想要什么,也不知道大学如何帮我找到答案,而我在这里上学,几乎花光了父母一辈子的积蓄,所以我决定退学,相信车到山前必有路,我那时候很害怕,但现在看来,那是我人生中做得最正确的决定。我退学的那一刻,就再也不用上毫无兴趣的必修课了,然后我开始旁听那些我喜欢的课。但是事情没有想象的那样容易,我无处可住,只能睡在朋友宿舍的地板上,我去捡五美分的可乐罐,仅仅为了填饱肚子。每周日晚上,我走七英里的路,穿过小镇,只为能在Krishna 教堂吃顿像样的饭菜,我乐此不疲,这些跟随好奇心和直觉所做的事情,后来都被证明是无价之宝。我给你们举个例子。那时候的里德大学拥有也许是全美最美好的书法课,校园里每一幅海报,每一个抽屉的标签,都是漂亮的美术字,因为我退学了,不必去上必修课,所以我决定去学一门书法课,学习怎么写出这样的字体,我学到了衬线和无衬线字体,英文字母组合的间距规则,学到了是什么让这些印刷体变得如此美丽,那种美感,给人历史感和艺术享受,是科学无法捕捉的,我被完全吸引了。当时看来这些东西,好像对我的人生来说没有任何实用价值,但是十年之后,当我们设计第一台苹果电脑的时候,它一下子浮现了出来,我们将这些东西全部设计进了我们的电脑,于是漂亮的印刷体第一次出现在电脑上,如果我当年没有旁听这一门课,苹果就不会有如此丰富的字体, 以及漂亮的字间距。鉴于微软只知道抄袭苹果,估计所有个人电脑都不会有这些。如果我从来没退学,没有旁听这门书法课,也许所有电脑都不会有如此美丽的印刷字体。当然,在大学的时候,我不可能预见到它们之间的联系,但今天回首往事,一切都非常明了。同样的,你们也无法预知未来,只有回头看时才会发现它们的关系。所以,你必须相信,这些点点滴滴终将在未来某一天连成一线。你必须相信某种力量——直觉、命运、生活、因果,无论是什么——因为相信这些点点滴滴终将连成一线,将赋予你勇气,让你敢于追随内心,即使这意味着要走出既定的道路,而这正是决定一切的关键。我的第二个故事是关于爱与失去的。我很幸运。我早年就找到了自己热爱的事业。沃兹和我 20 岁时在父母的车库里创立了苹果公司。我们努力工作,十年间,苹果公司从车库里的两个人发展成为一家拥有 4000 多名员工、价值 20 亿美元的公司。就在一年前,我们刚刚推出了我们的杰作——麦金塔电脑,而我刚满 30 岁,然后我被解雇了。你怎么会从自己创立的公司被解雇呢?嗯,随着苹果公司的发展,我们聘请了一位我认为非常有才华的人来与我共同管理公司,头一两年一切进展顺利。但随后我们对未来的愿景开始出现分歧,最终我们闹翻了。当我们这样做时,我们的董事会站在了他那边,于是,在我 30 岁时,我被解雇了,而且是公开地被解雇了。我整个成年生活中所专注的一切都消失了,这让我感到非常绝望。在接下来的几个月里,我真的不知道该怎么办。我感到自己让上一代企业家失望了,觉得自己在接过接力棒时掉了链子。我与大卫·帕卡德和鲍勃·诺伊斯会面,试图为自己犯下的严重错误道歉。我是一个非常公开的失败者,甚至考虑过逃离硅谷。但渐渐地,我开始明白一件事。我仍然热爱我所做的事。苹果公司发生的一切并没有改变这一点。我被拒绝了,但我仍然深爱着它。于是,我决定从头开始。当时我没有意识到,但后来证明,被苹果公司解雇是我一生中发生过的最好的事情。成功带来的沉重感被重新成为初学者的轻松感所取代,对一切都不再那么确定。这让我得以进入人生中最富有创造力的时期之一。在接下来的五年里,我创立了一家名为 NeXT 的公司,另一家名为 Pixar 的公司,并爱上了一个了不起的女人,她后来成了我的妻子。Pixar 后来制作了世界上第一部电脑动画长片《玩具总动员》,如今已成为全球最成功的动画工作室。在令人惊叹的转折中,苹果公司收购了 NeXT,我重返苹果公司,而我们在 NeXT 开发的科技正是苹果公司当前复兴的核心。此外,Lorene 和我共同组建了一个美满的家庭。我敢肯定,如果我没有被苹果公司解雇,这一切都不会发生。这就像一剂苦药,但我想病人确实需要它。有时候生活会用砖头狠狠地砸在你头上。不要失去信心。我深信,唯一让我坚持下去的原因是我热爱自己所做的事。你必须找到你热爱的事物,这对于工作和爱情同样适用。你的工作将占据你生命中很大一部分,而唯一能真正满足你的方式就是做你认为伟大的工作,而唯一能做伟大的工作的方式就是热爱你所做的事。如果你还没找到,继续寻找,不要妥协。就像所有涉及心灵的事情一样,当你找到它时,你会知道,就像任何伟大的关系一样,它会随着岁月的流逝变得越来越好。所以继续寻找。不要妥协。第三个故事是关于死亡的。当我 17 岁时,我读到过这样一句名言:“如果你每天都像过最后一天那样生活,那么总有一天你会发现自己确实做对了。”这句话给我留下了深刻的印象,从那以后,在过去的 33 年里,我每天早上照镜子时都会问自己:“如果今天是我生命的最后一天,我是否愿意去做今天即将要做的事情?” 如果连续多天答案都是“不”,我就知道需要做出改变。记住自己终将一死,是我在人生重大抉择中遇到的最重要的事,因为几乎所有外在的期待、自尊、对尴尬或失败的恐惧,在死亡面前都会消散,只剩下真正重要的东西。记住自己终将死去,是我所知避免陷入“认为自己有所失去”陷阱的最佳方式。你本就一无所有。没有理由不跟随内心。大约一年前,我被诊断出患有癌症。早上 7 点 30 分,我做了一次扫描,结果明确显示我的胰腺上长了一个肿瘤。我甚至不知道胰腺是什么。医生告诉我,这几乎可以肯定是一种无法治愈的癌症,我预计只能再活三到六个月。我的医生建议我回家处理后事,这是医生们用来暗示“准备死亡”的委婉说法。这意味着要在短短几个月内,把原本计划在未来十年内告诉孩子的一切都告诉他们。这意味着要确保一切都安排妥当,以便家人能尽可能轻松地处理后续事宜。这意味着要向亲人道别。我一整天都活在那个诊断结果的阴影下。当晚,我接受了活检,医生将内窥镜从我的喉咙插入,穿过胃部进入肠道,然后用针头刺入胰腺,取出了肿瘤组织中的几颗细胞。虽然我当时被麻醉了,但我的妻子在场,她告诉我,当医生在显微镜下观察这些细胞时,他开始哭泣,因为结果显示这是一种非常罕见的胰腺癌,可以通过手术治愈。我接受了手术,幸运的是,我现在一切都好。这是我离死亡最近的一次经历,我希望在未来几十年里,这将是离死亡最近的一次。经历过这一切后,我现在可以比以往更加确信地对你说:没有人愿意死亡,即使是那些渴望上天堂的人也不愿通过死亡来实现这一愿望,然而,死亡是我们共同的终点。没有人能逃脱它。而这正是它应有的样子,因为死亡很可能是生命最伟大的发明。它是生命的变革者,清除旧的以腾出空间给新的。现在,新的就是你。但不久的将来,你将逐渐成为旧的,并被清除。抱歉说得这么戏剧化,但这是事实。你的时间有限,所以不要浪费时间去过别人的生活。不要被教条所束缚,教条就是活在别人思想的结果中。不要让别人的意见淹没你内心的声音,最重要的是,要有勇气跟随你的心和直觉。它们以某种方式已经知道你真正想成为什么样的人。其他一切都是次要的。当我年轻时,有一本令人惊叹的刊物名为《整个地球目录》,它是我们那一代人的圣经之一。这本刊物由一位名叫斯图尔特·布兰德的人在离此不远的门洛帕克创立,他以诗意的笔触赋予了它生命。这发生在 20 世纪 60 年代末,那时个人电脑和桌面出版技术尚未出现,因此整本杂志都是用打字机、剪刀和宝丽来相机制作的。它有点像纸质版的谷歌,比谷歌出现早了 35 年。它充满理想主义,充满了新奇的工具和伟大的想法。斯图尔特和他的团队出版了几期《整个地球目录》,当它完成使命后,他们出版了最后一期。那是 20 世纪 70 年代中期,我正值你们这个年纪。在他们最后一期杂志的封底,有一张清晨乡间小路的照片,那种如果你足够冒险,可能会在上面搭便车的路。照片下方写着:“保持饥饿,保持愚蠢。”这是他们告别时的留言。“保持饥饿,保持愚蠢。” 我一直希望自己能做到这一点,而现在,当你们毕业,开始新的生活时,我也希望你们能做到这一点。保持饥饿,保持愚蠢。非常感谢大家。英文版: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 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 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 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 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 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.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 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 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, and 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 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, and most important, have the courage to follow 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 Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, 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 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart 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-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 hitch-hiking 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.