Quote

统计，是让不同的专家能够从同样的数据中总结出截然相反结论的不二法门。

在这里也发一遍免得哪天 X上发表的原版 没了。

Steven Paul “Steve” Jobs (1955 - 2011) passed away peacefully today. There aren’t enough words to express all he contributed to this world.

Today, a shocking news have shaken the industry. Steve Jobs, a pioneer of our industry, after several years of struggling with cancer, passed away at 56. This marks a loss not only to Apple computer, but the whole industry, even Apple’s business rivals.

I want to quote his 2005 Commencement at Stanford:

“如果我当年去问顾客他们想要什么，他们肯定会告诉我：‘一匹更快的马。’” 这告诉我们：顾客的意见虽然重要，但是只问用户的意见是做不出突破性的新产品的。

他说：

“When I want research, I ask people to do it. That is efficient, and we have not seen any errors in it.”

啥也不说了。

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.