藏經閣: 8月 2008

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

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. 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 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.

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, 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. 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. 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 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 the bibles 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 in paperback 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 to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

同學們，

一個朋友寄給我以下的講稿，我看了非常感動。但原來的翻譯我讀起來不順，因此我對照原文，重新翻譯了一次。跟大家分享。......火星爺爺

以下是Apple與Pixar執行長Steve Jobs 在2005年6月12日對全體史丹佛大學畢業生的演講內容。

今天，很榮幸來到世界最好的學校之一，參加各位的畢業典禮。我大學從沒畢業，說實話，這是我離大學畢業最近的一刻。今天我只說三個故事，不談大道理，就三個故事。

第一個故事，是關於人生中的點點滴滴是怎麼串在一起的。

我在里德學院（Reed college）待了六個月就休學了，我休學了18個月，直到我真正離開學校。我為什麼休學？

這得從我出生前講起。當時，我親生母親是個研究生，一位年輕的未婚媽媽，她決定讓別人收養我。她執意認為我應該被大學畢業的人收養，所以我出生時，她就做好一切準備，要讓一對律師夫婦收養我。但我出生之後，這對夫妻後來卻反悔了，因為他們想收養的是女孩。在等待收養的名單上有一對夫妻，也就是我的養父母，有一天半夜他們接到電話，有人問他們：「有一個人家不要的小男嬰剛出生，你們要認養嗎？」

他們回答「當然要」。後來，我親生母親發現，我的養母大學沒畢業，我的養父甚至連高中都沒讀完。她拒絕在最後的認養文件上簽字。直到幾個月後，我的養父母同意將來一定讓我上大學，她態度才軟化。

十七年後，我真的上大學了。但我當時很無知地選了一所學費幾乎跟史丹佛一樣貴的大學，我工人階級的父母為了我的學費，花光了所有積蓄。六個月後，我看不出唸大學有什麼價值。那時候，我不知道這輩子要幹什麼，也不知道念大學對我搞清楚要做什麼有任何幫助。而且，我在這裡花光了父母所有積蓄。所以我決定休學，而且相信船到橋頭自然直。那個決定當時看起來可怕，可是現在看起來，那卻是我這輩子做過最好的決定之一。

休學之後，我可以不必再上那些我沒興趣的必修課，我開始去上那些我有興趣的課。

這一點也不浪漫。我沒有宿舍，所以我睡在朋友家的地板上，靠回收可樂罐的的五先令退費買東西吃。每星期天晚上，我會走七哩路橫過市區去印度教的 Hare Krishna 神廟吃頓好吃的，我愛那些食物。我依循自己的好奇心跟直覺，我所涉獵參與的，後來證明都是無價珍寶。

舉例來說：

當時里德學院提供可能是全國最好的書法指導。校園內的每張海報上，每個抽屜的標籤，都是很美的手寫字。因為我休學，不必上正常的課程，所以我就跑去上書法課，學怎麼寫。我學了serif 與san serif 字體，學到在不同字母組合間變更字間距，學到活版印刷的偉大之處。書法很美、有歷史感與藝術感，是科學難以補捉的，我覺得很迷人。

我沒預期，學這些東西在我生活中有什麼實際的用處。不過十年後，在我設計第一台麥金塔時，當時所學的東西全回來了。我把這些東西都設計進麥金塔裡，這是第一台能印出漂亮字體的電腦。如果我沒有修那門課，麥金塔可能就不會有多種字體，以及能變更間距的字體可以用。也因為Windows剛好抄襲了麥金塔，否則 PC也不會有這些字體。要不是我當年休學，我就不會跑去上書法課，那麼世界上所有個人電腦可能印不出這麼漂亮的字體。當然，在大學的時候往前看，是沒辦法把這些點點滴滴串在一起的。但是十年後回顧，一切就變得非常清楚。

我再說一次，你不能預先把這些點點滴滴串在一起；只有日後回顧時，你才會明白那些點點滴滴怎麼串在一起。所以你得相信，你所經歷的點點滴滴，將來多少會連結在一起。你得相信某個東西，膽識也好，命運也好，生命也好，業力也好，什麼都行。這種方法從來沒讓我失望，它也讓我的生命整個變得不同。

我的第二個故事，是關於愛與失去。

我運氣很好，很年輕就發現自己愛做什麼事。我二十歲的時候，跟Steve Wozniak在我爸媽家的車庫裡，開始蘋果電腦的事業。我們拼命工作，蘋果電腦在十年間，從車庫裡的兩個人擴展成一家員工超過四千人、市價二十億美金的公司。在那之前一年，我們推出最完美的作品－麥金塔，我剛邁入三十歲，然後，我被開除。

你怎麼能被你所創辦的公司開除呢？是這樣的，蘋果電腦成長後，我們找了一個在經營公司上很有才幹的人，頭一兩年，他也的確幹得不錯。可是我們對未來的願景不同，最後只好分道揚鑣。結果，董事會站在他那邊，在我30歲那年，把我開除，而且是公開掃地出門。曾經是我整個成年生活重心的東西消失了，我不知所措。

有幾個月，我不知道幹什麼好。我覺得我讓上一代的企業家失望－我把他們交給我的接力棒弄丟了。我見了創辦HP的David Packard跟創辦Intel的Bob Noyce，跟他們說我很抱歉，我把事情搞砸得這麼慘。那是一個非常明顯的失敗，我甚至想離開矽谷。

但漸漸的我發現，我還是喜歡我做過的事，在蘋果所經歷的轉折，絲毫沒有改變這一點。我被否定了，但我還是愛做那些事，所以我決定從頭來過。

我當時沒發現，但現在回想起來，被蘋果電腦開除，是我所經歷過最好的事情。成功的沉重被從頭來過的輕鬆所取代，每件事情不再是如此確定。因而，我得以無礙地進入這輩子最富創意的時光之一。

接下來五年，我開了一家叫做 NeXT的公司，又開一家叫做Pixar的公司，並愛上一個奇妙的女人，也就是我現在的老婆。Pixar製作了世界第一部電腦動畫電影，玩具總動員，現在是世界上最成功的動畫製作公司。然後，經歷幾個戲劇性的轉折，蘋果電腦買下NeXT，我重回蘋果，我們在NeXT發展的技術成了蘋果電腦後來復興的核心。我也和我太太共組了美妙的家庭。

我很確定，如果當年蘋果電腦沒開除我，就不會發生這些事情。這帖藥很苦，但我猜病人就是需要這帖藥。有時候，生命就是會用磚塊砸你的頭。不要喪失信心。我深信支持我一路走過來唯一的原因是，我愛我所做的事。你得找出你所愛的，工作如此，愛情也是如此。你的工作將填滿你一大塊人生，要真正感到滿足唯一的方式，就是去做你認為是偉大的工作。

做偉大的工作唯一的的方法是，愛你所做的事。如果你還沒找到這些事，繼續找，別停頓。你一找到，你的心就會告訴你。就像各種美好的關係一樣，事情只會隨著時間愈來愈好。所以，在你找到之前，繼續找，不要停下來。

我的第三個故事，關於死亡。

當我十七歲時，我讀到一則格言，好像是「如果你把每一天都當生命的最後一天，你就會輕鬆自在。」這對我影響深遠，在過去33年裡，我每天早上都會照鏡子，自問：「如果今天是生命的最後一天，我還想做原本打算要做的事嗎？」當我連續好擠天都得到的答案都是「不」，我就知道我要做些改變了。

提醒自己快死了，是我面臨人生重大抉擇時，用來幫助自己判斷的最重要工具。因為幾乎所有的事－所有世俗的期待、所有名譽、所有對困窘或失敗的恐懼－在面對死亡時，這些東西都會消失，只有最重要的東西會留下來。

提醒自己快死了，是避免掉入「有什麼東西會失去」的陷阱的最好方法。生不帶來，死不帶去，沒什麼道理不跟隨你的心。

一年前，我被診斷出癌症。我早上七點半斷層掃描，在胰臟清楚出現一個腫瘤。我連胰臟是什麼都不知道。醫生告訴我，那幾乎可以確定是無法治癒的癌症，我大概活不超過三到六個月了。醫生建議我回家，把事情交代好，這是醫生對臨終病人的標準建議。那表示，你得把未來來十年裡想跟小孩講的話，在未來幾個月內講完。那代表你得把所有的事情都打理好，讓家人沒有後顧之憂。那代表你得說再見。

我整天想著那個診斷結果。那天晚上我做了一次切片，喉嚨插入一個內視鏡，從胃進腸子，插了根針進胰臟，取了一些腫瘤細胞出來。我打了鎮靜劑，不醒人事，但是我老婆在場。她後來跟我說，當醫生們用顯微鏡看過那些細胞後，都大叫起來，因為那是非常少見的一種胰臟癌，可以用手術治好。所以我接受手術，現在，我好了。

這是我最接近死亡的一次，我希望那也是未來幾十年最接近的一次。經歷過這件事，我可以比之前認為死亡不過是一個有用的抽象概念，更明確地告訴你們：

沒有人想死，即使是想上天堂的那些人，也想活著上去。但是死亡是我們共同的目的地，沒有人躲得過。這是註定的，因為死亡簡直就是生命中最棒的發明，是轉換生命的媒介，它送走老人，把空間留給新人。現在你們是新人，但不久將來，你們也會變老，最後被送出舞台。抱歉說得這麼戲劇化，但是這是真的。

你們的時間有限，所以不要浪費時間活在別人的生活裡。不要被信條束縛，不要活在別人的思考裡。不要讓別人的意見淹沒你內在的聲音。最重要的，要有勇氣跟隨你的心、你的直覺，它們知道你真正想成為什麼人。其他事物，都是次要的。

我年輕的時候，有本神奇的雜誌叫做 Whole Earth Catalog，是我們這一代的聖經之一。那是一位住在離這不遠的Menlo Park的Stewart Brand發行的，他用他獨特的詩意呈現整本雜誌。那是1960年代末期，個人電腦跟桌上出版還沒出現，所有內容都是用打字機、剪刀跟拍立得相機做出來的。雜誌內容有點像印在紙上的Google，35年前出現的Google：理想化，充滿各種新奇工具與神奇的註記。

Stewart跟他的出版團隊出了好幾期Whole Earth Catalog，然後出了停刊號。當是1970年代中期，我差不多跟你們一樣大。在停刊號的封底，有張照片，是晨間的鄉間小路，就是你搭便車旅行時會碰上的鄉間小路，如果你夠喜歡冒險的話。在照片下有行小字寫著：求知若飢，虛心若愚。

那是他們親筆寫下的告別訊息，我總是以此自許。當你們畢業，展開新生活，我也以此期許你們。

求知若飢，虛心若愚。

非常謝謝大家。
(翻譯：火星爺爺)

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