Thank you. I'm honoredverb.纪念 to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truthnoun.真理 be told, I never graduatedverb.授予…学位 from college. And 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 dealnoun.买卖. 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 a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quitverb.离开.
So why'd I drop out? It started before I was bornverb.承担. My biologicaladj.生物的 mother was a young unwed graduatenoun.研究生 student, and she decided to put me up for adoptionnoun.采用. She felt very strongly that I should be adoptedverb.采用 by college graduatesnoun.研究生, so everything was all set for me to be adoptedverb.采用 at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I poppedverb.发出“砰”的一声 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've got an unexpectedadj.想不到的 baby boy.
Do you want him? They said, of course. My biologicaladj.生物的 mother found out later that my mother had never graduatedverb.授予…学位 from college and that my father had never graduatedverb.授予…学位 from high school. She refused to sign the final adoptionnoun.采用 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' savingsnoun.储蓄 were being spent on my college tuitionnoun.学费. 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 figureverb.认为 it out. And here I was, spending all 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 decisionsnoun.决定 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 far more 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 five cent depositsnoun.存款 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 Hari Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbledverb.绊倒 into by following my curiositynoun.好奇 and intuitionnoun.直觉 turned out to be pricelessadj.无价的 later on. Let me give you one example. Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instructionnoun.命令 in the country. Throughout the campus, every poster, every labelnoun.标签 on every drawer was beautifullyadv.美丽地 hand-caligraphed.
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 sans-serif typefaces, about varyingverb.改变 the amount of space between different letter combinationsnoun.结合, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historicaladj.历史的, artisticallyadv.艺术地 subtleadj.微妙的, in a way that science can't captureverb.捕获. And I found it fascinatingadj.迷人的. None of this had even a hope of any practicaladj.实践的 applicationnoun.请求 in my life.
But 10 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 multipleadj.多重的 typefaces or proportionallyadv.成比例地 spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likelyadj.可能的 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 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 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 dots will somehowadv.由于某种原因 connect in your future. You have to trust in something-- your gutnoun.内脏, destinynoun.命运, life, karma, whatever-- because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidencenoun.信心 to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path.
And that will make all the difference. My second story is about love and lossnoun.遗失. I was lucky. I found what I love 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 4,000 employees. We just releasedverb.释放 our finest creationnoun.创造, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I just turned 30.
And then I got firedverb.开火. How can you get firedverb.开火 from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talentedadj.天才的 to run the company with me. And for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visionsnoun.视 of the future began to divergeverb.(道路等)分叉, and eventuallyadv.终于 we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sidedverb.支持 with him. And so at 30, I was out, and very publiclyadv.公然地 out.
What had been the focusnoun.焦点 of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastatingadj.破坏性的. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previousadj.先的 generation of entrepreneursnoun.<法>企业家 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 screwingverb.拧紧 up so badly. I was a very public failurenoun.失败, 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'd been rejectedverb.拒绝, 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 firedverb.开火 from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightnessnoun.轻盈 of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.
It freedverb.使自由 me to enter one of the most creativeadj.创造性的 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 world's first computer animatedverb.使有生气 featurenoun.特征 film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animationnoun.活泼 studionoun.工作室 in the world. In a remarkableadj.异常的 turn of events, Apple bought Next, and I returned to Apple, and the technology we developedverb.发展 at Next is at the heart of Apple's currentadj.当前的 renaissancenoun.复兴.
And Loreen and I have a wonderful family together. I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been firedverb.开火 from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. My third story is about death. When I was 17, I read a quotenoun.引用 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 impressionnoun.印象 on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I've looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself if today were the last day of my life, what 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 encounteredverb.遭遇 to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything, all externaladj.外部的 expectationsnoun.期待, all pride, all fear of embarrassmentnoun.窘迫 or failurenoun.失败, 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 nakedadj.裸体的. There is no reason not to follow your heart. About a year ago, I was diagnosedverb.诊断 with cancernoun.癌症. I had a scannoun.扫描 at 7.30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumornoun.瘤 on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreasnoun.[解]胰腺 was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancernoun.癌症 that is incurableadj.不能治愈的, 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 and 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 live with that diagnosisnoun.诊断 all day. Later that evening, I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, threw my stomach into my intestinesnoun.肠, put a needle into my pancreas, and got a few cells from the tumornoun.瘤.
I was sedatedverb.给…服镇静剂, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewedverb.看待 the cells under a microscopenoun.显微镜, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rareadj.稀薄的 form of pancreaticadj.胰的 cancernoun.癌症 that is curable with surgerynoun.外科. I had the surgerynoun.外科, and thankfullyadv., 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 certaintynoun.必然 than when death was a useful but purelyadv.纯粹地 intellectualadj.智力的 conceptnoun.概念.
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 likelyadj.可能的 the single best invention of life. It's life's change agentnoun.代理人. 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 dramaticadj.戏剧的, but it's quite true. Your time is limitedadj.有限的, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trappedverb.诱骗 by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drownedverb.淹死 out your own inner voice. And most important, have the couragenoun.勇气 to follow your heart and intuitionnoun.直觉. They somehowadv.由于某种原因 already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondaryadj.第二的. When I was young, there was an amazing publicationnoun.公布 called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the Bibles of my generation.
It was created by a fellownoun.人 named Stuart Brand, not far from here in Menlo Park. And he brought it to life with his poeticadj.诗的 touch. This was in the late '60s, before personal computers and desktopnoun.桌面 publishingnoun.. So it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperbacknoun.简装本 form 35 years before Google came along. It was idealisticadj.理想主义的, overflowingverb.溢出 with neatadj.整洁的 tools, and great notionsnoun.想法. Stuart 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 hitchhikingverb.免费搭乘他人便车 on if you were so adventurousadj.爱冒险的. Beneath it were the words, stay hungry, stay foolishadj.愚蠢的. It was their farewelladj.告别的 message as they signed off. Stay hungry, stay foolishadj.愚蠢的. And I have always wished that for myself.
And now, as you graduateverb.授予…学位 to begin anewadv.重新, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolishadj.愚蠢的. Thank you all very much.