[Translation] Chinese translation of Steve Jobs' speech at Stanford University

乔布斯斯坦福大学演讲英文原文：
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. 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 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. 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 other’s 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.






Steve Jobs说，你得找出你爱的 (You’ve got to find what you love.)。

以下是苹果计算机公司与Pixar动画制作室执行长Steve Jobs在2005年六月12日对全体史丹佛大学毕业生的演讲内容。

Today, it's an honor to be here with all of you graduating from one of the best schools in the world. I never graduated from college. To be honest, this is the closest I've come to graduating from college. Today, I only tell three stories, not the big truth, just three stories.

The first story is about how the little things in life are connected together.

I took a sabbatical after six months at Reed college. Before I dropped out, I took a total of eighteen months of school leave. So why am I taking a break?

This has to start before I was born. My biological mother was a graduate student at the time, a young unwed mother, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt strongly that I should be adopted by someone with a college degree, so when I was born, she prepared me to be adopted by a couple of lawyers. But the couple backtracked at the last minute and wanted to adopt the girl. So a couple on the waiting list, my adoptive parents, got a call in the middle of the night asking them, "There's an unexpectedly born boy, do you want to adopt him?" and their response was, "Of course. ". Later, my biological mother found out that my current mother never graduated from college, and my current father never even graduated from high school. She refused to make the final sign on the adoption papers. It wasn't until a few months later, when my adoptive parents agreed that I would definitely go to college in the future, that she softened her stance.

Seventeen years later, I went to college. But at the time I ignorantly chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all my working-class parents' savings were spent on my tuition. Six months later, I don't see the value in reading this book. At that time, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and I didn’t know how going to college would help me, and I spent all my parents’ life savings for this book, so I decided to drop out of school, believing that the boat would reach the bridge. Naturally straight. At the time it seemed a terrible decision, but now it looks like one of the best decisions I've ever made in my life. When I leave school, I no longer have to take required courses that I am not interested in, and spend time listening to those that interest me.

It's not romantic at all. I don't have a dormitory, so I slept on the floor of my friend's house, bought food with a five-shilling rebate from recycled Coke cans, and walked seven miles every Sunday night around half the town to the Hindu god Hare Krishna The temple has a good meal. I love the good stuff at Hare Krishna Temple. Pursuing my curiosity and intuition, most of the things I stopped at turned out to be invaluable later on. Case in point:

Reed College had probably the best calligraphy instruction in the country at the time. On every poster across campus, on every drawer label, is beautiful handwriting. Because I was suspended from school, I could not follow the normal course selection procedure, so I went to learn calligraphy. I learned serif and san serif fonts, I learned to change the word spacing between different letter combinations, I learned how typography is great. The beauty, history and art of calligraphy cannot be captured by science, and I find it fascinating.

I didn't expect what I was learning to have any practical effect in my life, but ten years later, when I was designing my first Macintosh, I remembered what I was learning, so I put it all together Designed into the Macintosh, it was the first computer that could print something beautiful. If I hadn't indulged in a class like that, the Macintosh probably wouldn't have multiple fonts and variable spacing. And because Windows copied the way the Macintosh was used, if I hadn't done that back then, probably all the personal computers in the world wouldn't have these things, and it wouldn't be able to print the beautiful words we see. Of course, when I was still in college, it was impossible to pre-string the bits and pieces together, but looking back ten years later, it is all too clear.

I repeat, you can't string the dots together in advance; it's only in retrospect that you'll understand how the dots came together. So you have to believe that what you are experiencing now will somehow be connected in the future. You have to trust something, be it intuition, destiny, life, or karma. This approach has never let me down, and it has made a whole difference in my life.

My second story, about love and loss.

I'm lucky - I found out what I love to do at a young age. When I was 20, I started Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak in my parents' garage. We worked hard, and Apple grew from two lads in a garage to a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees in ten years, and the year before that came out with our best work, Mac The urn, and I had just entered my thirtieth year and was fired. How do I get my company to fire me? Well, when Apple grew up, I brought in a guy who I thought was very talented in running the company, and he did a really good job for the first few years. But we had different visions for the future, and in the end we parted ways, and the board sided with him, fired me, and publicly invited me out. Something that had been the center of my entire adult life was gone, and I was overwhelmed.

For a few months, I really didn't know what to do. I feel like I've let down my predecessors in the corporate world - I've lost the baton they handed me to me. I met with David Packard, who founded HP, and Bob Noyce, who founded Intel, and told them I was sorry for messing up so badly. I became a very negative example to the public, and I even wanted to leave Silicon Valley. But gradually, I found that I still love what I did, and the events I experienced in my days at Apple did not change what I love to do at all. I was denied, but I still love doing those things, so I decided to start over.

I didn't find out at the time, but now it looks like getting fired from Apple was the best thing I've ever experienced. The heaviness of success was replaced by the ease of starting over, and everything was less certain, freeing me to enter the most creative era of my life.

In the next five years, I started a company called NeXT, another company called Pixar, and I also fell in love with my later wife. Pixar went on to produce the world's first fully computer-animated film, Toy Story, and is now the world's most successful animation production company. Then Apple bought NeXT, I went back to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT became the core of Apple's subsequent revival. I also have a wonderful family.

I'm pretty sure these things wouldn't have happened if Apple hadn't fired me back then. This medicine is bitter, but I think Apple Computer, the patient, needs this medicine. Sometimes life hits you with a brick in the head. Don't lose faith. I'm sure that I love what I do and that's the only thing that keeps me going after all these years. You have to find out what you love, at work, but also with lovers. Your work will fill a large chunk of your life, and the only way to be truly fulfilled 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 these things, keep looking, don't stop. Do your best, and you know you'll find it. And, like any great relationship, things only get better with time. So, until you find it, keep looking, don't stop.

My third story, about death.

When I was seventeen, I read an adage that seemed to be, "Make every day the last day of your life and you'll be at ease." I always look in the mirror and ask myself, "If today was the last day of my life, what would I do today?" Whenever I get a "nothing to do" answer for too many days in a row, I know I have to change. .

Reminding myself that I'm dying is the most important tool I've ever used when making big decisions in my life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all reputation, all fear of embarrassment or failure—disappears in the face of death, and only the most important remains. Reminding myself that I'm dying is the best way I know to avoid falling into the trap of having something to lose. Life does not bring it, and death does not bring it with it, there is no reason to do it according to one's wishes.

A year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a tomography scan at 7:30 in the morning, and there was a tumor in the pancreas. I didn't even know what the pancreas was. The doctor told me that it was almost certainly an incurable disease, and that I probably wouldn't have three to six months to live. The doctor advised me to go home and have a good time with my relatives, which is the standard doctor's advice for dying patients. That means you have to try to finish in a few months what you want to tell your kids for the next ten years. That means you have to get everything done so that the family will be as relaxed as possible. That means you have to say goodbye to people.

I thought about that diagnosis all day, had a biopsy that night, stuck an endoscope through the throat, inserted a needle into the pancreas, and got some tumor cells out. I was sedated and unconscious, but my wife was there. She told me later that when the doctors looked at those cells with a microscope, they all cried because it was a very rare type of pancreatic cancer that could be cured with surgery. So I had surgery and recovered.

This was the closest I came to dying, and I hope that will continue to be the closest for decades to come. After going through this, I can tell you this with more certainty than before when death was an abstraction:

No one wants to die. Even those who want to go to heaven want to live to go to heaven. But death is our shared destination, and no one can escape it. This is doomed, because death is simply the best invention in life, the medium of life change, sending away the old and leaving room for the new generation. Now you are the new generation, but in the near future, you will gradually grow old and be sent off the stage of life. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be fooled by creeds - blindly following creeds is living in the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the opinions of others drown out your inner voice. Most importantly, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. Your heart and intuition already know more or less who you really want to be. Anything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was this amazing magazine called Whole Earth Catalog, and we were obsessed with it back then. It was issued by Stewart Brand, who lives in Menlo Park not far from here, and he made the magazine very poetic. It was the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing were invented, and everything was done with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. Magazine content is a bit like Google on paper, 35 years before Google: idealized, full of fancy tools and magical notation.

Stewart and his publishing team put out several issues of the Whole Earth Catalog, and then a cease-and-desist issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of the closed issue, there is a picture of a country road in the morning, the kind of country road you pass by when you go hiking. Under the photo, there is a line of small characters:

If you are hungry for knowledge, you are humble in heart.

It was their handwritten farewell message, which I always promise. When you graduate and start a new life, I also look forward to you.

Seeking knowledge is like a hunger, and an open mind is like a fool.

Thank you very much everyone.

Reprinted from
http://brand.hjenglish.com/86/content/10912/[size=x-large][/size]