follow your heart——Steve jobs

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附上演讲原文

"Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today foryour commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth betold, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gottento 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 connectingthe dots.  

I dropped out of Reed College after the first sixmonths but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or sobefore I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. Mybiological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to putme up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by collegegraduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyerand his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minutethat they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, gota call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected babyboy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biologicalmother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and thatmy father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the finaladoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promisedthat I would go to college.  

This was the start in my life. And seventeen yearslater, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost asexpensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were beingspent 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 of how college wasgoing to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money myparents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that itwould all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, itwas one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I couldstop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping inon the ones that looked far more interesting.  

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, soI slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for thefive-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles acrosstown 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 andintuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you oneexample.  

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the bestcalligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster,every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I haddropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take acalligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-seriftypefaces, about varying the amount of space between different lettercombinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful,historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and Ifound it fascinating.  

None of this had even a hope of any practicalapplication in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the firstMacintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into theMac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had neverdropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never hadmultiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows justcopied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would havethem.  

If I had never dropped out, I would have never droppedin on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have thewonderful typography that they do.  

Of course it was impossible to connect the dotslooking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear lookingbackwards 10 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 dotswill somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut,destiny, life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots will connectdown the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when itleads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.  

My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. Ifound what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents'garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown fromjust the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a yearearlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you getfired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who Ithought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year orso, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, andeventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided withhim, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been thefocus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn'tknow what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generationof entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed tome. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwingup so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running awayfrom the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what Idid. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd beenrejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.  

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that gettingfired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. Theheaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginneragain, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the mostcreative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a companynamed NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing womanwho would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's firstcomputer-animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the mostsuccessful animation studio in the world.  

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT andI returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart ofApple's current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful familytogether.  

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if Ihadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess thepatient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick.Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was thatI loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true forwork as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of yourlife, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is greatwork, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven'tfound it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart,you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just getsbetter and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.  

My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read aquote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was yourlast, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression onme, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror everymorning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would Iwant 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 thing I've everencountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almosteverything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment orfailure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what istruly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I knowto avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are alreadynaked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.  

About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had ascan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. Ididn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almostcertainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to liveno longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get myaffairs in order, which is doctors' code for "prepare to die." Itmeans to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next tenyears to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everythingis buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It meansto say your goodbyes.  

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsywhere they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into myintestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. Iwas sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cellsunder a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be avery rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had thesurgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.  

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and Ihope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, Ican now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a usefulbut purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want togo to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destinationwe all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, becausedeath is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's changeagent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new isyou. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old andbe cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time islimited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped bydogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't letthe noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart andintuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everythingelse is secondary.  

When I was young, there was an amazing publicationcalled The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation.It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park,and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties,before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made withtypewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google inpaperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic,overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put outseveral issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run itscourse, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was yourage. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an earlymorning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if youwere so adventurous. Beneath were the words, "Stay hungry, stayfoolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. "Stayhungry, 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, stayfoolish.  

Thank you all, very much.”