徐公子：乔布斯斯坦福演讲解析

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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.

非常荣幸能与你们共享这一刻，参加这个世界上最好的大学之一的毕业典礼，此刻属于你们！我从来没有从大学毕业过。老实说，这次是我距离大学毕业最近的一次。今天，我想告诉你们我生命中的三个故事。不是什么大道理，只是三个小故事。

The first story is about connecting the dots.

第一个故事：串起人生的那些小小机缘

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?

开学6个月以后，我就从Reed大学休学了。但是在彻底退学之前，我在那里继续旁听了18个月。那么我为什么要辍学？

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."

这要从我的出生讲起。我的生母是一个年轻的大学研究生，未婚的她决定把我送给别人收养。她强烈希望我的养父母应该具有大学学历，所以在我出生前为我选择了一个律师和他的妻子做养父母。但是当我出生的时候，那个律师和妻子忽然决定要收养一个女儿。所以在收养候补列表上的我的父母（博主：Jobs一直称自己的养父母为父母），某天午夜接到了一个电话：“我们有了一个计划外的男孩子，你们想要收养他吗？”。父母回答：“当然愿意。”。

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 some day go to college.

但是，当发现我母亲大学没毕业，而我父亲甚至连高中都没有毕业，我的生母拒绝在收养手续上签字。直到几个月以后，当我的父母承诺会让我受到良好教育，送我进大学，我的生母才同意了。

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.

于是，17年后我进了大学。但是我非常幼稚地选择了一所学费几乎和Stanford一样昂贵的大学。我那工薪阶层的父母拿出了所有的积蓄为我支付了大学的学费。6个月的大学生活，让我看不到这些高昂的学费的价值所在。我完全不知道我将如何面对我的人生，也看不到大学将如何帮助我面对人生。更糟糕的是，我还把父母一生的积蓄都花在了这里。所以我决定退学，决定自己面对人生。当时我心里惴惴不安，但是现在回想，我觉得那是我做的最正确的决定之一。从我退学的那一刻开始，我再也不用去上那些毫无兴趣的必修课。我开始去旁听那些看起来很有意思的课程。

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:

退学并随心所欲地上课并不浪漫。我没有住的地方，只能睡在朋友房间的地板上（博主：哪个朋友如此幸运？）。我去退5分钱一个的可乐瓶押金来买东西吃。在每周日晚上我徒步7英里横穿城市只为了去印度教的Hare Krishna temple神庙大吃一顿。但是我喜欢这样的生活。这些听凭直觉和好奇心的指引，而达成的学习成果后来被证明珍贵无比。比如说：

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 totake 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.

那时候Reed大学的书法也许是全国最好的了。校园里的每一张海报、每一个抽屉的标签都用漂亮的手写艺术体写成。反正我已经休学，可以无视那些必修课，我决定去学书法。我学到了serif和sanserif字体，还学会了如何改变不同字母组合的间距，学习如何发扬伟大的印刷术。书法与生育来的精美、历史感和艺术感，是科学所无法展现的，我沉浸其中、流连忘返。

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 tome. 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 nopersonal 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.

对我个人而言，这些经历当时完全看不到什么实用价值。但是十年以后，当我们设计第一台Macintosh电脑的时候，他们统统都跳了出来，被我们一股脑设计到了Mac电脑中去。Mac是第一台内置了漂亮的印刷字体的电脑。如果我当时没有顺便去旁听那门课，苹果电脑可能永远也不会有那么多漂亮字体和变间距字体了。鉴于Windows复制了Mac的部分技术，我在想，如果我当初没有去上书法课，那么世界上的兼容机也不会有这些漂亮的字体，同样也无法打印出我们现在看到的这些美丽的字体。当然，当年在大学的我无法将这些机缘串联在一起。但是十年后，当我驻足回首，之前的一切都变的异常清晰明了。

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.

还是那句话，执著未来时不可能融汇这些微小的机缘，而当你回顾时才会融会贯通。因此，请相信你现在的小努力总会在未来大放异彩。人生总有些东西值得信任：勇气、目标、命运和缘分，等等。信任从未抛弃我，因为它我的生命才与众不同。

My second story is about love and loss.

第二个故事：关于爱与失去。

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 sothings went well. But then our visions of the future began to perge 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.

我很幸运——在很早的时候我就发现了我愿意奋斗的方向。20岁的时候，Woz和我在我父母的车库里创建了苹果公司。我们废寝忘食的工作，仅仅10年时间，苹果就从只有我们两个人的车库公司，成长成为拥有4000多名员工、20亿资产的大公司。此前一年我们刚刚发布了我们最棒的作品——Macintosh电脑。那年，我刚30岁，然后就被赶出了公司。你怎么能被你自己创建的公司赶走呢？嗯，当苹果壮大以后，我们雇佣了一个我认为很聪明的人来和我一起管理公司。第一年确实干得不错，但是然后我们对公司未来的愿景有了很大的分歧，并最终闹翻了。面对我们的争论，公司董事会站在了他的一边。于是，我在30岁的时候，被赶出了自己创建的公司。所有人都见证了我的离开。我觉得一切都失去了意义，因为贯穿我整个成年生活的重心已经随风而去。

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 bat on 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.

有好几个月的时间，我真的不知道应该怎么办。我觉得我对不起上一辈企业家的期望——我搞丢了他们交到我手中的接力棒。我见了创办HP的David Packard，以及创办Intel的Bob Noyce，跟他们说我很抱歉把事情搞砸了。我不再是美国梦的代表，我的失败成为公众的负面教材，我甚至想逃离这个城市。但是生活并非一片黑暗，渐渐的有些思想开始闪烁——我依然热爱我所做的。曾经发生在苹果公司和我之间的那些变故，并没有一丝一毫地改变我。虽然我被扫地出门，但是我依旧热爱它。于是我决定从头再来。

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.

当时我并没有意识到，事后证明被赶出苹果是发生在我身上最好的一件事儿。那被成功所累的沉重转换成了重新开始的轻松，对任何事情都不用那么肯定。彻底解放的我进入了我一生中最有创造力的时期。

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 onto create the world’s 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.

在接下来的5年中，我创造了一个叫做NeXT的公司和一个叫做Pixar的公司。并且与一位妙不可言的女士坠入爱河。她后来成为了我的妻子。Pixar制作了世界上第一部电脑动画电影，Toy Story。现在Pixar是全球最成功的动画工作室。事情发生了转折，后来苹果收购了Next，我也重新回到了苹果。我们在NeXT开发的技术成为了苹果复兴的关键。Laurene和我的家庭生活也幸福无比。

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.

我确信，如果我没有被赶出苹果，这些都不会发生。良药苦口利于病。有时候命运给你当头棒喝，但千万不要放弃信心。我告诉自己，只要你热爱所做的一切，你就能坚持前行。请找到你的真正所爱，对工作对爱情都必须同样真诚。工作会占据你生命中很大的一部分，只有坚信自己正在做一份伟大的工作，才能Hold住心灵的满足。如果你依旧茫然，继续寻找不要停。当全力以赴发现它的时候，你的心会告诉你，如同真爱会随着时间而历久弥坚。继续找别犹豫，直到发现为止。

Mythird story is about death.

第三个故事：关于死亡

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, some day 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.

17岁那年，我看到了一句话，大意是：“如果你像对待最后一天一样对待生命中的每一天，你终将发现不虚此生”。这句话深深刻在我心中。从那以后，这33年里，每天早晨我都会对着镜子问自己：“如果今天是你生命中的最后一天，你还会这么做么？”。当我一连很多天都说“不是”的时候，我知道我必须要做出改变。

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.

“记住死亡近在咫尺”是我生命中做重大决策时最重要的依据。因为几乎任何事情——所有的期望、荣誉和对失败的恐惧与羞愧——这些事面对死亡都显得那么苍白，真正重要的会水落石出。“记住死亡近在咫尺”让我避免陷入患得患失——既然已经一无所有，又何不追随我心？

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.

大约一年以前我被查出癌症。那天早晨7点半时我做了检查，结果清晰地显示出了我的胰脏上有一个肿瘤。我甚至不知道胰脏有何用处。医生说几乎可以肯定这种类型的癌症是不治之症，我大概仅存3到6个月的生命了。医生建议我回家享受生活，这是医生们对临终病人常用的安慰。这意味着你要试图在几个月中把未来10年想说的话对孩子说完。还意味着要妥善安排每件事，让家人更容易接受你的离去。那就是说，该对大家说“再见”了。

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 cellsunder 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.

我整天都想着那份诊断书。那天晚上，我做了一个活体切片检查，医生把内窥镜通过我的食管和胃部送到了我的肠中，把一根针刺到了胰腺中从肿瘤上取下了几个细胞。整个过程，我沉睡着。守候在现场的妻子事后告诉我，当医生在显微镜下观察这些细胞时，他们纵声大叫，因为我得的是一种非常稀少的可以通过手术治愈的癌症。手术以后，我现在感觉很好。

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:

这是我最切近死亡的一次经历，我希望在接下来的几十年中不要再这么近了。经历过以上种种，我我对死亡的理解超出了那种仅仅是时间停止般的理论式概念，我可以更加确信的说：没有人愿意死亡。即使人们想要去天堂，他们也想活着到达那里。

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.

然而死亡是我们共同的终极，没人可以逃脱，确实也应该这样，因为死亡就像是生命中最简单却最有效的发明。作为生命的代言人，他除旧布新。现在你们依然光鲜灿烂，但是不久的将来，你们终将衰老并随风流逝。很抱歉要用这样戏剧化的句子，但这就是生命的真相。

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 other's 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.

你们的时间有限，不要浪费生命为他人而活。不要僵化教条——这无异于生活在其他人的思想中。不要让他人的喧嚣淹没了你自己的心声。最重要的是，有勇气去追随你的心灵和直觉。在某种程度上他们已经知道了你想要什么，一切外界因素都不重要。

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 withhis poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers anddesktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like in paperback form, 35 years before came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools andgreat notions.

当我年轻的时候，有一本叫做The Whole Earth Catalog的神奇杂志，堪称我们这代人的圣经之一。在离此不远的Monlo Park，Steward Brand创建了这本杂志，这本杂志融合了Steward对生命的诗意一般的感触。那是在60年代末期，在计算机和桌面出版系统发明之前，这本杂志完全靠打字机、剪刀和宝丽来相机制作，有点儿像是纸质的Google。于是，在Google面世的35年之前，我们拥有了这本充满了理想梦幻的杂志，拥有层出不穷的精致工具和伟大的思想。

Stewart andhis 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.

Stewart和他的朋友们出版了几期The Whole Earth Catalog后就结束了这本杂志。这个杂志的最后一期是在70年代中期，那时候我就像现在你们这么大。在他的停刊号的封底，是一张清晨的乡村公路的照片，那种可能在你们深入探险搭车旅行时遇见的风光。在照片的下面是这样的一句话：“求知若渴，虚怀若愚”（StayHungry, Stay Foolish）。这是他们停刊的临别寄语。

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.

我总希望我也能做到那样的洒脱睿智。现在，当你们要毕业，展开新的旅程，我把这段话也送给你们。求知若渴，虚怀若愚。非常感谢！

下面徐公子帮大家分析一下这场演讲的结构。

开头分为两个部分，第一部分用共情的方法拉近与斯坦福学生的关系，并取得认同。

第二部分，就是说要分享3个关于自己的故事，这就是主题。

中间部分是结构体，用讲故事的方式呈现。

用三个故事得出三个结论。

结尾讲个一个小故事，同时引用经典金句给同学们送礼物，号召行动。

分享知识是一种美德，所以，如果您喜欢本文的内容，希望您能把它分享到您的朋友圈当中，或者分享给指定的某一个人，您关心谁，就把知识分享给他，谢谢。