2013/04/15




被視為一代天才的蘋果公司創辦人喬布斯(Steve Jobs)在其短短56年的人生中,為世界寫下精彩的一頁。人離去但精神不死,他2005年於史丹福大學一篇勉勵畢業生的精彩演說,值得活在當下的回味一番。





演說全文(中譯版)如下:

第一個故事是關於「生命中每個點的關連」。

我讀了六個月,就從Reed College休學,但是到我真正離開學校前,我仍在那裡旁聽了18個月。我為何要休學呢?這得從我出生講起。

我的親生母親是一位年輕未婚的研究所學生,她決定讓我被別人收養,她強烈地希望我能夠有大學學歷,所以她安排好了一切,我出生時給一對律師夫妻收養,不料他們反悔,他們在最後一刻,決定他們想要一個女孩。

所以我的父母(養父母)在半夜接到一通電話。電話那頭問他們,「我們有一個沒人要的男嬰,你們想要他嗎?」他們回答說「當然。」但是我的親生母親 稍後發現,我的媽媽(養母)沒有大學學歷,而我的父親(養父)沒有高中學歷,她(生母)拒絕簽署收養文件;幾個月後,她妥協了,因為我的養父母保證,將來 一定會讓我上大學,這就是我人生的開端。

17年後,我真的考上大學,但我天真地選了一間和史丹佛一樣貴的大學,我工人階級的父母,將他們所有的積蓄,都花費在我的學費上。6個月後,我看不出它的價值,我不知道我想要做什麼,我也不知道大學如何能夠幫助我找到這個答案。

但在這裡,我幾乎花光我父母一輩子節省下來的所有積蓄,所以我決定休學,我相信船到橋頭自然直。當時這段時間非常可怕,但回頭去看,那是我這輩子做過最好的決定之一。

我休學之後,再也不用上那些我不感興趣的必修課,並開始投入那些我有興趣的課程。但這一點也不浪漫,我沒有宿舍住,所以我睡在朋友房間的地板上,我利用回收可樂瓶的5美分來買吃的,每個周日晚上,我會走7英哩的路,穿越市區到廟裡去飽餐一頓,我喜歡這樣。
那段跟隨好奇心和直覺跌跌狀撞的時期,最後變成無價之寶。讓我為你們舉一個例子來說,Reed College那時的書寫課程,是全美國最好的,校園裡的每一張海報,每一個抽屜的標籤,都是漂亮的手寫字。

因為我休學了,可以不用上正式的課程,所以我決定去上書寫課,學習如何做到這一點,我學到了serif和san serif字體,不同金額不同字母組合時的空間,什麼是活版印刷的偉大之處,這真美好,藝術精妙是科學永遠不能捕捉到的。我發現它很迷人,這是我在實際生 活中完全用不到的。

但十年後,當我們在設計第一台麥金塔電腦時,它又浮現到我心中,我們把這一切放進了Mac,這是第一台有漂亮字體的電腦。如果我當時沒有休學,沒有去上這門課,Mac就不會有各種間距與字體;而且因為Windows只是抄襲Mac,所以所有的個人電腦都不會有。如果我沒有休學,我絕對不會選這門書寫課,其他人做的個人電腦也不太可能有出色的字型。

當然在我上大學時,不可能預知需要這些人生重點串聯起來,但十年後的今天回顧起來,這是非常非常清楚的,我再說一次,你不能預先串連起這些人生的重點,你只有在回顧時才會明白,所以你必須相信,這些片段,會在你未來的人生派上用場。

你必須相信某些東西,直覺、命運、生命、緣份等,因為這些點點滴滴終將串連在一起,讓你有信心去追求你想要的,帶來不同凡響的人生。

我的第二個故事是關於「愛與失去」。

我 很幸運很早就發現自己愛做的事,Woz和我開始在我爸媽的車庫裡稿蘋果時,我才20歲。我們很努力地工作,十年後,蘋果已從我們兩個人在我爸媽車庫創立的公司,變成一家有4千多名員工、20億美元的公司。我們剛剛推出我們最棒的作品、麥金塔,那一年我才剛滿30歲,然後,我被開除了, 你怎麼會被自己創立的公司開除呢?嗯,為了公司的成長,我僱用了一位我認為非常有才華的人,和我一起經營公司。

在剛開始的第一年,一切都很順利,但後來我們對於未來的願景開始出現分歧,最後我們發生爭執,而董事會站在他那一邊,所以我30歲時被開除了,而且是非常公開地被開除。

我整個成年後的生活重心因此遠離,這對我是毀滅性的打擊,我有好幾個月真的不知道該怎麼辦。我覺得我令上一代的企業家失望,我覺得我把他們傳給我的接力棒搞丟了。我去見了David Packard和Bob Noyce,試著向他們道歉說我搞砸了。

我是一個公開的失敗者,我甚至想過逃離矽谷;但是我漸漸發現了曙光,我仍然愛我所做的,蘋果董事會的投票結果並沒有改變這件事,我雖然被拒絕、否定,但我還是愛,所以我決定重新出發。

我當時不知道,但事實證明,被蘋果公司開除,可能是我人生中曾經發生過最棒的事情。成功的沉重,被創業的光明所取代了,對每件事不再自滿,解放了我,讓我進入一個最有創造力的時期。

隨後的5年,我創立了Next公司與Pixar公司,還愛上了一位另我驚豔的女子,最後成為我的妻子。Pixar製作了世界上第一個用電腦製作的動畫電影、《玩具總動員》,現在是世界上最成功的動畫公司。

風水輪流轉。後來蘋果與NeXT合併,我重回蘋果公司,我們在NeXT發展的核心,成為蘋果的復興;我和羅倫也擁有美滿的家庭。

我敢肯定,這些事情都不會發生,如果我沒有被蘋果開除,這是個苦口良藥,但我認為病人是需要它的。有時候人生的打擊,就像是被磚頭敲到頭一樣,不要因此失去信心。

我確信唯一支持我往下走的原因是,我熱愛我所做的事情,你必須去找出你所愛的,工作上應該如此,愛人也該如此。

你的工作將填滿你大半的人生,唯一能真正獲得滿足的方法,就是做你相信這是件很好的工作;而讓工作表現很好的唯一方法,就是愛你所做的。如果你還 沒有發現,繼續努力尋找,不要停下來,你知道你終將會找到所有事情的核心,就如何任何一個良好的關係,只會隨著光陰的流逝越變越好,所以請繼續尋找,不要停下來。

我的第三個故事是「有關死亡」。

我 17歲時聽到一句嘉言:「如果你把每一天都當成是你人生的最後一天,總有一天你會做對。」這句話給我很深的印象,從那時候開始,在過去的33年裡,我每天 早晨對著鏡子問我自己:如果今天是我人生的最後一天,我會想要做今天即將去做的事嗎?如果很多天的答案都是「不」時,我就知道我必須改變些什麼。

提醒自己死期將近,是很重要的方法幫助做出生命中重大的抉擇。因為幾乎所有的事情,所有外界的期望,所有的驕傲,所有對困窘或失敗的恐懼,面對死 亡時,都會消失,只有真正重要的東西會留下。提醒自己死期將近,是我所知最好的方法,可以避免掉入自己會錯失什麼東西這類的陷阱。因為你已經是赤身裸體, 所有就沒有理由不跟隨自己的心。

大約一年前,我被診斷出罹患癌症。有一天早上7:30做掃描檢查時,清楚地顯示我的胰臟的腫瘤,但我甚至不知道胰臟是什麼,醫師告訴我,幾乎可以 肯定這一類的癌症是無法治癒的,而且大概活不過3到6個月,我的醫師建議我回家去安排身後事,這是醫師叫我「等死」的代號。這意味你要試著將所有的事情告 訴孩子,你已經沒有十幾年的時間去講,只剩短短的幾個月,也意味著你要把每件事處理好,讓家人輕鬆一點,這也意味你要說再見了。

這個診斷讓我想了一整天。後來有一天,我作了一個切片檢查,從喉嚨伸入一個內視鏡,從胃進腸子,插了根針進胰臟,取了一些腫瘤細胞出來。我打了鎮 靜劑,不醒人事,但是我太太在場。她後來跟我說,當醫生們用顯微鏡看過那些細胞後,他們都哭了,因為那是非常少見的一種胰臟癌,可以用手術治好。所以我接 受了手術,康復了。

這是我最接近死亡的時候,我希望那會繼續是未來幾十年內最接近的一次。經歷此事後,我可以比之前死亡只是抽象概念時,要更肯定告訴你們:沒有人想死,即使那些想上天堂的人,也想活著上天堂。

但是死亡是我們共有的目的地,沒有人逃得過。這是註定的,因為死亡簡直就是生命中最棒的發明,是生命變化的媒介,送走老人們,給新生代留下空間。現在你們是新生代,但是不久的將來,你們也會逐漸變老,被送出人生的舞臺。抱歉講得這麼戲劇化,但是這是真的。
你們的時間有限,所以不要浪費時間活在別人的生活裏。不要被信條所惑,盲從信條,就是活在別人思考結果裏。不要讓別人的意見淹沒了你內在的心聲。最重要的,擁有跟隨內心與直覺的勇氣,你的內心與直覺多少已經知道你真正想要成為什麼樣的人。任何其他事物都是次要的。

當我年輕時,有本令人激賞的雜誌《The Whole Earth Catalog》,是我這個世代的聖經之一。它是由住在離這不遠的Stewart Brand先生創立的,他營造出如詩一般的令人感觸。
這是在60年代末,個人電腦與桌面排版系統尚未出現,它全部是用打字機、剪刀和拍立得相機製造出來的,它有點像紙本版的Google,但比Google早了35年。

它充滿了理想主義,洋溢著新奇的觀念和偉大的想法,Stewart和他的團隊發行了一段時間的《The Whole Earth Catalog》,當完成使命時,他們發行了最後一期,在70年代中期,我正是你們現在的年紀,在最後的封底,有一張照片,清晨的鄉間小路、那種當你想冒險時可以搭便車的小路,照片下有行小字,「求知若渴、虛懷若愚」這是他們的告別語。

「求知若渴、虛懷若愚」,我總是這樣自我期許。而現在,你們畢業即將開始新生活,我與各位共勉,「求知若渴、虛懷若愚」


 演說全文(英文版)如下:

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
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 go to college. 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 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, it's 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 returned 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 it's 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.

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