Steve Jobs 在 2005 年斯坦福毕业典礼上的演讲
感谢neo同学提供的录音。由于原链接已经失效，请移步YouTube观看斯坦福大学于2008年5月发布的视频版本。
「Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.」求知若饥，虚心若愚。
2 June 2005, Palo Alto, CA
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 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 okay. 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 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, 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 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 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. Woz1 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 two billion dollar company with over 4000 employees. We’d 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. 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 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 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 retuned 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. Sometime life – Sometimes life 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 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 – 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’ve 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 and 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 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, thankfully, I’m 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 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 60s, 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.
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’ve 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.
谢谢大家。
今天，我很荣幸能在各位从世界上最好的大学之一毕业之际，与大家相聚。说实话，我从未自大学毕业，而这已是我距离大学毕业最近的一刻了。今天，我想讲三个关于自己人生的故事。不过如此，没什么了不起，只讲三个故事。
第一个故事，是关于人生中的点点滴滴怎么串连在一起。
我在里德学院（Reed College）读了六个月就退学了，但在真正离开前，我又留在那里旁听了大约十八个月。那么，我究竟为何退学？
这得从我出生前讲起。我的亲生母亲当时是个年轻的未婚研究生，她决定把我交给别人收养。她坚信我应该由大学毕业生收养，所以一切都安排好了：我一出生，就会由一名律师和他的妻子收养。可当我呱呱坠地那一刻，这对夫妻却在最后一刻决定，他们真正想要的是个女孩。
所以，排在收养等候名单上的养父母半夜接到一通电话，对方问：「我们意外多了一个男婴，你们要他吗？」他们说：「当然要。」后来，我的生母发现，养母从未大学毕业，而养父甚至连高中都没毕业，于是她拒绝在最终的收养文件上签字。直到几个月后，我的养父母承诺将来一定会供我上大学，她才松口让步。这就是我人生的开端。
十七年后，我的确上了大学。但我少不更事，选了一所学费几乎与斯坦福相差无几的大学，我那工薪阶层的父母把所有积蓄都花在了我的大学学费上。六个月后，我看不出这样读下去有什么价值。我不知道这一生想做什么，也不知道大学如何能帮我找到答案，而我却在挥霍父母攒了一辈子的积蓄。
所以我决定退学，坚信一切终将迎刃而解。当时这个决定看来相当可怕，但如今回首，那是我这辈子做过最好的决定之一。从退学的那一刻起，我就不必再上那些毫无兴趣的必修课，可以开始旁听那些看起来有趣得多的课。
这一点也不浪漫。我没有宿舍，只能睡在朋友房间的地板上；靠退还可乐瓶、取回每瓶5美分的押金来买食物；每个星期天晚上还要步行7英里穿过市区，到Hare Krishna神庙吃上一周唯一一顿好饭。我很喜欢那段生活。许多凭着好奇心与直觉偶然涉足的事物，后来都成了无价之宝。举例来说：
当时里德学院有着大概是全国最好的书法指导。在整个校园内的每一张海报上，每个抽屉的标签上，都是美丽的手写字。因为我已经退学，不必再修常规课程，便决定去旁听书法课。我学到了衬线字体（serif）与无衬线字体（sans-serif），学到了如何调整不同字母组合之间的间距，也明白了优秀的字体排印究竟因何出色。它优美，富有历史底蕴，艺术上的微妙精深远非科学所能捕捉；我觉得这十分迷人。
当时看来，这些东西在我的人生中毫无学以致用的希望。不过，十年后，当我们设计第一台Macintosh计算机时，我学过的一切又浮现在脑海中，于是我们把它们全都融入了Mac。这是第一台拥有漂亮字体排印的计算机。如果我当年在大学里没有旁听那门课，Mac就不会有多种字体，也不会有比例间距字体。而由于Windows只是照搬了Mac，个人计算机很可能也不会拥有这些字体。如果我没有退学，就不会去旁听那门书法课，个人计算机也可能不会拥有今天这样美妙的字体排印。当然，当年身在大学时，我不可能预知未来、将这些点点滴滴串联起来；但十年后再回首，一切便一目了然。再强调一次，你在向前看时无法将这些点串联起来，只有在向后看时才能将它们连成一线。
所以你必须相信，这些点会以某种方式在未来串联起来。你必须相信某种东西——你的直觉、命运、人生、业力，什么都好。因为相信这些点终会在前方相连，会给你追随内心的信心，哪怕它指引你偏离寻常的道路；而这终将造就天壤之别。
我的第二个故事，有关爱与失去。
我很幸运——年轻时就找到了自己爱做的事。我20岁时，跟Steve Wozniak在父母的车库里创办了Apple。我们拼命工作，十年间，Apple从车库里的两个人发展成一家拥有4,000多名员工、价值20亿美元的公司。一年前，我们刚刚推出自己最杰出的作品——Macintosh，而我也刚满30岁。
然后，我就被解雇了。一个人怎么会被自己创办的公司解雇？
Apple发展壮大后，我们请来一个我认为很有才华的人和我共同经营公司，最初一年左右，一切都很顺利。但后来，我们对未来的愿景开始出现分歧，最终分道扬镳。董事会站在了他那边。于是，30岁的我出局了，而且是尽人皆知地被扫地出门。我整个成年生活的重心就此消失，这对我是毁灭性的打击。
有几个月，我实在不知道要干什么好。我觉得自己辜负了上一代创业者——当接力棒交到我手中时，我却失手将它摔落了。我去见David Packard和Bob Noyce，试图为自己把事情搞得一塌糊涂而道歉。我成了尽人皆知的失败者，甚至想过逃离硅谷。但我内心渐渐明白过来：我仍然热爱自己所做的事。Apple的变故丝毫没有改变这一点。我遭到了拒绝，却依然爱着它，所以我决定重新开始。
当时我未曾察觉，但事后证明，被Apple解雇竟是我人生中遇到的最好转机。成功的沉重，被重新成为新手的轻盈取代；我不再对一切都那么笃定。这让我得以自由步入人生中最富创造力的时期之一。
接下来的五年里，我创办了一家名为NeXT的公司，又创办了一家名为Pixar的公司，还爱上了一位了不起的女性，她后来成了我的妻子。Pixar随后制作了世界上第一部计算机动画长片《玩具总动员》，如今已是世界上最成功的动画工作室。后来发生了一个非同寻常的转折：Apple收购了NeXT，我回到了Apple，而我们在NeXT开发的技术，正是Apple当前复兴的核心。Laurene和我也共同拥有了一个美满的家庭。
我很确定，如果当年没有被Apple解雇，这一切都不会发生。这真是一剂苦口良药，但我想，病人的确需要它。有时候，生活会用砖头给你当头一棒。不要丧失信心。我确信，唯有对自己所做之事的热爱，才是支撑我一路前行的动力。你必须找到自己所爱的事物。
对待工作如此，对待伴侣亦然。你的工作将占据人生的一大部分，唯一获得真正满足的方法就是做你相信是伟大的工作，而唯一做伟大工作的方法是爱你所做的事。如果你还没有找到，就继续寻找，切勿将就。和所有关乎内心的事情一样，找到时你自然会知道。而且，如同任何美好的关系，它只会随着岁月流逝而越来越好。所以，继续寻找，切勿将就。
我的第三个故事，关于死亡。
当我17岁时，我读到一句话，大意是：「如果你把每一天都当作生命的最后一天来过，终有一天你会言中。」这对我影响深远，在过去33年里，我每天早上都会照镜子，自问：「如果今天是我生命的最后一天，我还愿意去做今天将要做的事吗？」每当答案连续太多天都是「不愿意」，我就知道自己必须做出改变了。
提醒自己很快就会死去，是我在人生中做重大选择时遇到过的最重要的工具。因为几乎一切——所有外界期待、所有骄傲、所有对难堪或失败的恐惧——在死亡面前，都会烟消云散，唯有真正重要的东西才会留存下来。提醒自己终将死去，是我所知避免掉进「自己还有什么可失去」这一陷阱的最好方法。
你已身无挂碍，没有理由不去追随自己内心的声音。
一年前，我被诊断出癌症。早上7点半，我接受了一次扫描，影像清楚显示胰腺上有一个肿瘤，我当时甚至不知道胰腺是什么。医生告诉我，那几乎可以确定是一种无法治愈的癌症，预计我最多只能再活3到6个月。医生建议我回家把事情安排妥当，这是医生对「准备面对死亡」的委婉说法。这意味着你得试着在短短几个月内，把原本打算在未来十年里对孩子们说的话交代清楚；这意味着你得确保一切都交代得井井有条，让家人尽可能轻松一些；这意味着你得向大家作最后的告别。
我带着那个诊断结果度过了一整天。当天晚上，我接受了活检：医生把内窥镜从喉咙伸进去，穿过胃部进入肠道，再把一根针刺入胰腺，取出了一些肿瘤细胞。我当时处于镇静状态，但我妻子当时在场。她后来告诉我，当医生们在显微镜下看到那些细胞时，他们哭了，因为那是一种非常罕见、可以通过手术治愈的胰腺癌。所以我接受了手术；谢天谢地，我现在已经康复了。
这是我最接近死亡的时候，我希望在未来几十年里，这仍会是我最接近死亡的一次。经历了死里逃生之后，比起死亡还只是一个有用却纯属理性的概念时，我可以更加肯定地对你们说：
没有人想死。即使那些想上天堂的人，也不愿通过死亡抵达那里。然而，死亡是我们所有人共同的宿命，无人能够幸免。而事情本应如此，因为死亡很可能是生命最出色的一项发明。它是生命变革的催化剂，推陈出新，为新生代让路。此刻，新事物就是你们；但在不远的将来，你们也会渐渐成为旧事物，被清除出去。抱歉说得这么戏剧化，但事实确是如此。
你们的时间有限，所以不要浪费时间活在别人的生活里。不要被教条束缚——那意味着按照别人的思考结果生活。不要让外界喧嚣的意见淹没了自己内心的声音。最重要的是，要有追随内心与直觉的勇气。它们其实早已清楚你内心深处真正想成为什么样的人。其他一切都是次要的。
我年轻时，有一本了不起的出版物叫做《全球概览》（The Whole Earth Catalog），它是我们这一代人的「圣经」之一。它由一位名叫Stewart Brand的人在离这里不远的Menlo Park创办，他以诗意的手法赋予了它生命。那是1960年代末，个人计算机和桌面出版尚未出现，所有内容都是靠打字机、剪刀跟拍立得相机制作出来的。它有点像纸质版的Google，但比Google的问世早了35年：充满理想主义，汇集了许多好用的工具和了不起的想法。
Stewart和他的团队出版了几期《全球概览》，在功成身退之际，又推出了最后一期。那是1970年代中期，我和你们现在年纪相仿。最后一期的封底上，是一张清晨乡间公路的照片；如果你有足够的冒险精神，也许会发现自己正在这样的路上搭便车。照片下面写着：「求知若饥，虚心若愚。」这是他们停刊之际留下的告别赠言。「求知若饥，虚心若愚。」我一直这样期许自己。如今，在你们毕业、重新出发之际，我也这样期许你们。
求知若饥，虚心若愚。
非常谢谢大家。
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三张 from delphij’s Chaos on June 29, 2012 1:02 AM
时间过得真是太快了。最近这段时间，乔帮主2005年Stanford毕业典礼演讲里说的那段话一直让我觉得有如芒刺在背：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… Read More