| 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. 中文版
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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 D 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 D 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 D 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.
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