“你必须找到你所热爱的事情”史蒂夫乔布斯说。
这是史蒂夫乔布斯在斯坦佛大学毕业典礼上的讲话。发表于 2005 年 6 月 12 日。（史蒂夫乔布斯是 Apple 公司和 Pixar 动画工作室的 CEO ）
我很荣幸和你们一起参加这个世界上最好的大学的毕业典礼。我没有从大学毕业。实话说，这是我最接近大学毕业典礼的一次。今天我想告诉你们我生活中的三个故事。仅此而已，没什么大不了的，只是三个故事。
第一个故事是关于 connecting the dots
我在 Reed 大学读了 6 个月就放弃了，但是我又在那里停留了 18 个月才真正离开。那么我为什么放弃呢。
那要从我出生说起。我的生母是一个年轻的未婚大学毕业生。她决定找人收养我。条件是对方的学历必须达到大学毕业。所以我出生的时候就要被一个律师和他的妻子收养。但是他们最后又觉得真正需要的是一个女儿。接着我现在的养父母，他们也想领养一个孩子，在半夜接到一个电话：“我们有一个男婴，你们想要他吗？”他们说：“当然了”。我的生母后来发现我的养母没有大学学历，我的养父连高中都没毕业。她拒绝在领养的文件上签名。当我的养父母保证会送我上大学以后，她的态度才发生了转变。
在 17 年以后我的确上了大学。但是我天真的选择了一个和斯坦福一样贵的大学。我父母的积蓄都花在我的学费上了。 6 个月以后我没看到上大学的价值。我不知道我这一生要做什么也没发现学校能帮助我回答这个问题。而且我花光了父母所有的钱。所以我决定退学，而且相信自己能把问题都处理好。这在当时还是一个比较惊人的决定，但是回过头来看一看，这是我做出的最正确的决定之一。我放弃以后就可以根据自己的兴趣选择上什么课了。
这可不是温馨的事情，我没有寝室，只好借宿在朋友那里的地板上。我为买吃的去捡 5 分钱一个的可乐瓶子。每个星期天走 7 英里去教堂吃顿饱饭。但我还是喜欢这个。事后证明我顺着好奇心和直觉走的这条道路是正确的。让我举个例子。
Reed 大学提供了当时国内最好的书法教育。在校园里，每一张海报，每一个抽屉的标签上都是漂亮的手写体。因为我已经退学了，不需要上规定的课程。所以我决定去上书法课看看这是怎么做到的。我学习了一些字体 知道了不同字母组合之间需要不同的间隙。这可以大大改进排版印刷技术。把技术和艺术巧妙的结合在一起。这不是单纯的科技所能做到的。我发现了其中的魅力。
我那个时候并没有指望这些能实际应到我的生活中。但是 10 年后，当我设计第一台 Macintosh 计算机时。它发挥了作用。接着我又把它用到了 MAC 上。这是第一台有着漂亮字体的计算机。如果我那时没有退学。 MAC 不会有这么好的字体。如果 windows 没有抄袭 MAC 个人电脑也不会有这些。（此处省略少量句子的翻译）当然我在大学的时候还无法预见到这些。但是 10 年后回顾这些却显得无比清晰。
你不能预见未来。只能回顾过去。（此处省略少量句子的翻译）所以你必须信任自己天生的直觉。这种直觉从来没有让我走错路。它给我的生活带来了很大的变化。
我的第二个故事是关于爱和挫折：
我幸运吗？我很早就找到自己钟爱的事情， Woz 和我在我父母的车库里创立了苹果公司。那时我只有 20 岁。我们努力的工作， 10 年后苹果公司从 2 个人的小作坊变成了价值 20 亿 拥有 4000 名员工的大公司。我们在这前一年刚发布了最好的作品 Macintosh 。当我 30 岁的时候我被辞退了。一个人怎么可能被自己创办的公司辞退呢？苹果公司发展的时候我雇佣了一些非常优秀的人和我一起参与管理。一开始事情都进展的很好。但是后来我们的观点出现了分歧，这时董事会站在了他们那边，所以 30 岁的时候我失业了。很明显这是一个巨大的打击。
我迷茫了几个月。我觉得让上一代的企业家失望了 好像我丢掉了他们传给我的接力棒。我向 David Packard 和 Bob Noyce 道歉我把事情搞砸了。因为解职的事情是公开的 所以我都想找个地方躲起来。但是慢慢的我发觉我依然对我所从事的事业充满热爱。在苹果公司发生的事情一点也没有改变它。所以我决定从头再来。
我那个时候还没发现 但是后来我知道被苹果公司开除是件好事。成功者的包袱变成了创业者的轻松。减少一些自负。我进入了一段最具创造性地时期。
在接下来的 5 年我创立了 NeXT 公司和 Pixar 公司，并且和我后来的妻子相识相爱了。 Pixar 公司出品了世界上第一部电脑动画电影 玩具总动员。成为了世界上最成功的动画工作室。在一个值得纪念的时候苹果公司收购了 NeXT 。我回到了苹果公司。我在 NeXT 开发的技术成了苹果公司复兴的主要动力。而且这时候我和我的妻子组建一个美好的家庭。
我非常确定如果我没有被苹果公司开除 这一切都不会发生。良药苦口。生活中会遇到一些挫折。但是不要失去信念。我能走到现在的就是依靠我对事业的热爱。你也应该找到你所热爱的事情。如果你还没有找到，继续努力 不要放弃。当你找到时你会知道的。而且象任何一种美好的关系 它会随着时间的推移，变的越来越好。所以继续寻找，直到你找到它，不要放弃。
我的第三个故事是关于死亡的：
当我 17 岁的时候我读到过一篇文章。内容是：“如果你把每一天都当成生命中的最后一天，某一天你会有所成就的”。这句话给我留下了很深的印象。在过去的 33 年里，我每天早上都对这镜子问自己：“如果今天是我生命中的最后一点，我是否要做那些我计划今天要做的事情呢？”如果我在一段时间里经常回答“不”。那我就需要一些改变了。
提醒自己面临死亡（此处省略少量句子的翻译）因为所有的事情，比如外界的期望，荣誉，对失败的恐惧。这些东西在死亡面前都会消失。留下来的是真正重要的东西。提醒自己将要死去是避免患得患失的最好方法。因为你已经什么都没有了，没有理由不去顺应你的内心感受。
大约一年前，我被诊断出得了癌症。我在早上 7 ： 30 做了扫描，结果清楚地显示在我的胰腺有一个瘤。我都不知道胰腺是什么。医生告诉我这是一种几乎不能治愈的癌症。我最多只能活 3 到 6 个月。我的医生建议我回家把事情处理一下，实际就是暗示我回家等死。这意味着我要在几个月里把以后 10 年要说的话都说给我的孩子听，这意味着要把事情都安排好让我的家庭生活的容易些，这意味着要说再见了。
我整天活在诊断书的阴影下。一段时间后我做了一次活体组织检查。他们把一个内窥镜伸进我的喉咙里面，穿过我的胃，到达肠。从肿瘤上抓取一小块细胞组织。我很平静，但是我的妻子告诉我当医生检查那些细胞组织的时候尖叫了起来。因为他们发现那是一种非常罕见的可以治愈的胰腺方面的癌症。然后我动了手术，现在已经康复了。
那时我最接近死亡的一次。我也希望这是以后几十年里最接近的一次。经历了这个事情我可以更确定的说死亡是一个有用但完全抽象的概念。
没有人想死，就算他想上天堂，他也不想通过死亡的途径。死亡是每个人的终点。我们都无法回避它。理所当然的有生就有死。它为新生的事物清除旧事物。现在新事物就是你们。不过有一天你们也会逐渐衰老，被清除出去。很抱歉说的这么直白，不过事实如此。
你们的时间是有限的，所以不要把它浪费在别人的生活里。不要被教条束缚。教条的东西是别人思考的产物。不要让别人的观点淹没你自己的观点。最重要的是跟着你的直觉走，它们已经知道你要变成什么样子。其他的都是次要的了。
当我年轻的时候，有一本优秀的刊物“ The Whole Earth Catalog ”。它是我们那一代人的圣经。是由 Stewart 创立的，当时是 60 年代末，还没有个人电脑和桌面出版系统。所以它是用打字机，剪刀和照相机做出来的。它充满了各种伟大的观念。
Stewart 和他的团队出版了几期 The Whole Earth Catalog 当它完成了自己使命的时候，他们做出了最后一期的目录。那是在 70 年代的中期，我和你们现在的年纪差不多。在最后一期的封底上是清晨乡村公路的照片（如果你有冒险精神的话，你可以自己找到这条路的）在照片下面是一行字“ Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. ”这是他们的告别语。 Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. 我经常这样勉励自己。现在，你们毕业的时候我也这样勉励你们。
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
非常感谢大家。
原文：
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
'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 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 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.