stay hungry stay foolish.docx

1、stay hungry stay foolish斯蒂夫保罗乔布斯（Steve Paul Jobs，1955年2月24日出生）是蘋果電腦的現任首席執行長(首席执行官)兼創辦人之一。同時也是Pixar動畫公司的董事長及首席執行長。这是他2005在斯坦福大学做的毕业演讲。很鼓舞人。也许精彩就在平实之间。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

2、 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 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 stayed around as

3、 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 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 wa

4、s 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, Weve got an unexpected baby boy; do you want him? T

5、hey said, Of course. My biological mother found out later 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 go to college.

6、This was the start in my life.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 couldnt see the value in it. I had no idea what I want

7、ed 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 okay. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the be

8、st decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didnt interest me, and begin dropping 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 fo

9、r 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 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

10、 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 didnt have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligr

11、aphy 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 cant capture, and I found it fa

12、scinating.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 tha

13、t 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 that calligraphy class, and personal c

14、omputers 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 10 years later.Again, you cant connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backw

15、ards. 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 - 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-

16、worn path, and that will make all the difference.My second story is about love and loss.I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz1 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 two

17、billion dollar company with over 4000 employees. Wed 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 co

18、mpany 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. And so at 30, I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life w

19、as gone, and it was devastating.I really didnt 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

20、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 didnt see it

21、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

22、 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 r

23、emarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, and I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apples current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.Im pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadnt been fired from Apple. It was awf

24、ul tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometime life - Sometimes life going to hit you in the head with a brick. Dont lose faith. Im convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. Youve got to find what you love.And that is as true for your work as it

25、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 havent found it yet, keep looking - and dont settle. As with all matters of the h

26、eart, youll know when you find it. And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking - dont 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 youll most

27、 certainly be right. It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, Ive 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 k

28、now I need to change something.Remembering that Ill be dead soon is the most important tool Ive 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 o

29、f 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

30、in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didnt 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 affai

31、rs in order, which is doctors code for prepare to die. It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought youd 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

32、 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 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, thankfully, Im fine now.This was the closest Ive been to facing death, and I hope its the