今天我非常榮幸，來到世界上最好的大學之一。我自己沒有從大學畢業，現在可以說是我最接近大學畢業典禮的時候。我想跟各位分享我人生的3個故事，沒有特別的大道理，就是3個故事。
第1個故事，是關於很多點滴的串連。
我在里德學院（Reed College）只待了6個月就休學了，到我退學前，我整整休學了18個月。為什麼我要休學？
故事得從我出生前開始。因為我的生母是個年輕的研究生未婚媽媽，她決定找人收養我。她很希望收養我的人也是研究所學歷，所以她把每件事安排好，讓我被一對律師夫婦收養。沒想到等我出生，他們在最後一刻反悔了，說他們想要一個女孩。所以我那還在等候名單上的爸媽（指現在的養父母），半夜接到一通電話，問他們：「我們現在有個意外出生的小男嬰，你要收養他嗎？」「當然，」他們毫不猶豫地答應了。但是我生母後來才發現，不但我母親沒有大學畢業，我父親連高中都沒畢業。結果她拒絕簽署收養文件，一直到幾個月後，我的養父母保證讓我上大學，她的態度才軟化。
17年後，我真的上大學了。可是我天真地選了一所幾乎跟史丹福一樣貴的大學，我那不過是工人階級的養父母，把積蓄幾乎都花在我的大學學費上。念了6 個月，我看不出價值所在。我不知道我的人生要做什麼，也不知道學校能幫上什麼忙，我只會把父母畢生的積蓄花光，所以我決定退學，相信事情總會O.K.。當時我是滿驚慌的，但是回想起來，這是我所做過最棒的決定。我退學的那一刻，等於停掉了我沒興趣的那些必修課，把時間投入那些我有興趣的科目。
當然也不是全然那麼浪漫。我沒有宿舍，所以我睡在朋友房間的地板上。我用可樂瓶退瓶拿到的5分錢買食物，每個星期日晚上走7英哩路，穿越整個鎮，只為了到Hare Krishna神廟好好吃頓飯。我愛去那裡吃飯。順著我的好奇心與直覺，那些讓我佇足、蹣跚而行的事物，後來都變成無價珍寶，譬如：里德大學有當時可能是全國最棒的書法指導。校園裡每張海報、每個抽屜的標籤，都有漂亮的手寫書法。因為我退學了，不用上正常的課程，我決定去修書法課。我學會serif與 san serif兩種字體，學會在不同的字母組合間變換間距，學會活版印刷偉大之處。那是一種科學無法捕捉的美、歷史感與細緻的藝術，我覺得它很迷人。
我沒預期這些東西會對實際生活帶來什麼具體的作用。但是10年後，當我們設計第一部麥金塔電腦時，它又浮現在我心中。我們把這些想法都設計進麥金塔裡，它也是第一部有著優美字體的電腦。如果我沒有投入研究這門課，麥金塔電腦就不會有那麼多不同的字體或各種不同的間距。又因為微軟的作業系統抄襲了麥金塔，如果當時我沒做，可能所有個人電腦都不會有。如果我沒有退學，我就不會著迷於書法課，個人電腦就不會有今天各種優美的字體。當然我在念大學時，無法預見如何將這些點滴聯繫在一起，但是10年後再回顧，真的就非常、非常清楚。
再一次：你沒辦法預見這些點滴如何聯繫，唯有透過回顧，可以看出彼此關聯。所以你必須相信，無論如何，這些點滴會在未來互相連結，有些東西你必須相信，像你的直覺、天命、人生、因果，諸如此類種種。這樣的想法讓我永遠不沮喪灰心，也的確塑造了我人生中所有的不同。
我的第2個故事是關於愛與失去。
我很幸運嗎？我很早就發現我喜歡做什麼。20歲時，我跟Steve Wozniak在爸媽的車庫裡成立蘋果電腦。我們非常努力，10年後，蘋果從車庫裡的我們兩個人，變成一家營收20億美元、員工超過4,000人的公司。前一年，我們才剛推出最棒的作品——麥金塔電腦，而我剛過30歲，然後我被公司炒魷魚。怎麼被你自己創辦的公司炒魷魚呢？嗯……隨著蘋果成長，我找了一個很有能力的人跟我一起經營公司，一開始很順遂，但是後來，我們對未來的願景逐漸分歧，最後只好拆夥。董事會決定站在他那邊，所以30歲時，我出局了，而且是公開出局。 曾經是我人生所有重心的一切都沒了，我幾乎被擊倒。
有幾個月，我不知道做什麼好。我覺得我讓企業家的前輩們失望了，我丟掉了交付在我手中的權杖。我跟David Packard（惠普科技創辦人之一）與Bob Noyce（英特爾創辦人之一）碰面，向他們道歉，我把事情搞砸了。我是一個公開的失敗案例，所以我幾乎想逃離矽谷。然而我慢慢領悟，我仍然喜歡我本來做的事，我在蘋果發生的轉折，一點都沒有改變這一點，我被否定了，但我仍然有熱情，我決定從頭開始。
當時我沒有察覺，不過後來被蘋果炒魷魚變成我人生中最棒的遭遇。成功的壓力重新被創業的輕鬆取代，每件事都少一點確定，讓我進入人生中最有創意的階段。
接下來5年，我又成立一家NeXT公司、一家皮克斯（Pixar）公司，還有跟一位很有魅力的女性談戀愛，後來她變成我的太太。皮克斯創作出世界第一部全電腦動畫電影《玩具總動員》，目前仍是世界最成功的動畫公司。值得一提的是，蘋果後來買下了NeXT，我重新回到蘋果，而我在NeXT發展的技術，成為蘋果後來復興的核心，我跟Laurene也有了幸福的家庭。
如果我沒被蘋果開除，我滿確定這一切都不會發生。它像是很苦的試藥，但是我想病人需要它。有時候，老天會拿磚塊打你的頭，但不要失去信心。我很確信，能讓我繼續走下去的唯一理由，就是我愛我所做的事。所以你必須找到你的所愛，不管是對工作、對愛情都一樣。你的工作會填滿你一大塊人生，唯一能真正滿足的方法，就是去做你認為偉大的事情。要做出偉大的事，唯一方法就是做你愛做的事。如果你還沒發現這是什麼，繼續觀察，不要停止。用你全心的力量，找到時，你就會知道。就像所有偉大的關係，隨時間展延，事情只會愈來愈好，所以繼續找，直到找到，不要停頓。
我的第3個故事，是關於死亡。
17歲時，我讀過一句話：「把每天都當成人生中最後一天來過，你就會很自在。」它讓我印象深刻，從那以後的33年中，每天早晨，我都會對著鏡子中的自己問：「如果今天是我人生中的最後一天，我應該做些什麼？」如果太多天的答案都是「沒有」，我知道我就應該做些改變了。
提醒自己，我快死了，是幫助我做人生重大抉擇時最重要的工具。因為每件事，包括別人的期待、榮耀、恐懼、或失敗，在面對死亡時都會消散，只剩下真正重要的東西。提醒自己你快死了，是最好的方法，避免你掉進患得患失的陷阱。你本來就一無所有，沒什麼理由不順心而為。
1年前，我被診斷出得了癌症。早上7點半，我被送去掃描，很清楚的看到胰臟上有腫瘤。那時候我甚至不知道胰臟是什麼器官。醫生告訴我，這幾乎是無藥可救的癌症，我應該活不過3到6個月。醫生建議我回家，安排後事，就是典型醫生對末期病人會說的話。這表示你要在幾個月內， 對孩子說完本來是未來10年要對他們說的話；這也表示你要把每件事安排好，家人才會比較輕鬆，這更表示你要開始說再見。
我想了這個診斷結果一整天。傍晚時，我被帶去做切片，他們把內視鏡從我喉嚨伸進去，穿過我的胃，進入腸子，把針刺進胰臟，取得一些腫瘤細胞。我打了鎮定劑，不知道發生什麼事，但是我太太在場，她後來告訴我，當他們在顯微鏡下看見細胞時，醫生們都脫口而出驚呼，因為這是一種很少見、可以用手術治癒的胰臟癌，後來我接受手術，現在沒事了。
這是我最接近死亡的時刻，我希望這也是未來幾十年中，我最接近的時刻。有了這次經驗，比起從前死亡只是一個有用但抽象的概念，我可以更確定的對你們說：沒有人想死。即使那些想上天堂的人，都希望能活著去。但死亡是我們每個人都要面對的終點，沒有人能逃過。事實上也理當如此，因為死亡可能是生命最棒的發明，它是生命變化的發動機。它帶走舊的，讓新的有空間。現在你們是新的，但沒有多久，你們會慢慢變成舊的，然後被清掉。抱歉我說得這麼戲劇化，但這是真的。
你們的時間有限，所以不要浪費，活在別人的人生裡。不要被教條困住，活在別人思考的結果裡。不要讓別人給的雜音淹沒了你內在的聲音，最重要的是，有勇氣去追隨你的真心與直覺。它們常常最知道你想做什麼。其他的都是其次。
當我還年輕，有一本很棒的刊物叫做《The Whole Earth Catalog》，是我這一代的聖經。創辦人叫史都華（Stewart Brand），住在這附近。他辦這本雜誌很有詩意，在1960年代末，在個人電腦與桌上型出版發明前，所有內容都是用打字機、剪刀、拍立得相機做出來的。它的內容就像把今天的Google印在紙上，在Google出現的35年前，它很理想化、充滿了很棒的工具跟概念。
史都華跟他的團隊出版了幾期後，出了停刊號。那是在1970年代中期，我跟你們現在一樣大的時候。在停刊號的封底，有一張清晨鄉間小路的照片，那種如果你很愛冒險，你會去健行搭便車的小路。照片底下有一行字：常保飢渴求知，常存虛懷若愚（Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish ）。這是他們簽下的告別註腳，這也是我對自己的期許。現在當你們畢業，走上全新的道路，我也以此做為對你們的祝福。
常保飢渴求知，常存虛懷若愚。（Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish ）
謝謝大家。
Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
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. 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. (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 entrepreneursdown - 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, andthe 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. Havinglived 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 thebibles 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 inpaperback 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 tobegin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
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