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1、乔布斯哈弗大学演讲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. No
2、big deal.Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.I dropped out of Reed College afterthe first six months but then stayed aroundas 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 was a
3、 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
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. My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never gra
5、duated 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 seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive a
6、s 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 mefigure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my par
7、ents 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 didnt interest me and begin dro
8、pping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.It 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
9、 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 eve
10、ry poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligrapher. 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 diff
11、erent 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 fi
12、rst 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 Macwould have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just
13、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 that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I
14、 was in 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
15、, karma, 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 difference.I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my pa
16、rents garage when Iwas twenty. Weworked hard and in ten years, Applehadgrown 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. Howcan you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the companywith me, and for the first
