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1、乔布斯斯坦福大学毕业典礼演讲Thank you. Im 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 Ive ever gotten to a college graduation.Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. Thats it
2、. 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 stayedaround as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit.So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother
3、was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up foradoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by collegegraduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by alawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at thelast minute that they
4、 really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, “Weve got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?“ They said, “Of course.“ Mybiological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated fromcollege and that my father had never
5、graduated from high school. Sherefused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few monthslater when my parents promised that I would go to college.This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive
6、as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldnt see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my p
7、arents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trustthat it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but lookingback, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I droppedout, I could stop taking the required classes that didnt interest me andbegin dropp
8、ing in on the ones that looked far more interestingIt wasnt all romantic. I didnt 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 we
9、ek 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 p
10、oster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didnt have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between differen
11、t letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful,historical, artistically subtle in a way that science cant 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 M
12、acintosh 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 copi
13、ed the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them.If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on thatcalligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderfultypography that they do.Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was i
14、n college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.Again, you cant 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,
15、 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 differenceMy second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. W
16、oz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees.Wed just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and Id just turned thirty, 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
