谢谢。很荣幸今天能和诸位来自世界最好大学之一的毕业生们一起参加毕业典礼。老实说，我从来没从大学毕业过。今天是我离大学毕业最近的一次了。 （笑声）。今天我想告诉大家我生活中的三个故事。没什么大不了的，只是三个故事。

Thank you. I'm 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 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 deal. Just three stories.

第一个故事：如何连点成线。 我在里德学院读了六个月就退学了，但在正式退学之前，作为一个退学生我在里德学院继续呆了大约18个月。为何要退学呢？这还得从我出生之前说起。我的生母是一个未婚的年轻大学生，她决定把我送给别人领养，但她执着认为我应该被一个父母是大学毕业的家庭所收养。好像一切都已注定我一出生就会被一对律师夫妇领养，然而就在我出生之时，他们在最后一分钟改变了主意，他们真正想要的是一个女孩。

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 eighteen 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 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.

那时我的父母排在收养我的候补名单中，在深夜他们接到一个电话问道，“我们有一个意外多出来的男婴，你们要他吗？“ 我父母说，”当然要！” 当后来我的生母发现我母亲没有大学毕业，父亲连高中都没毕业时，她拒绝在领养书上最后签字。几个月后，我的父母保证将来会让我上大学，她才妥协了。 我的人生就是这么开始的。

So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night, asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy, do you want him?" They 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. This was the start in my life.

十七年后，我真的上大学了，但我很天真地选了一所差不多和斯坦福一样贵的学校，那几乎要花掉我那蓝领父母所有的积蓄。六个月后，我觉得这么做没什么价值。我不知道自己的人生将要做什么，也看不出读大学会怎么帮我做出选择，而我却正在花掉父母一生的积蓄。所以我决定退学，我相信事情会好的。在那时这是一个惊人的决定，但现在看来，这是我一生中作出的最正确的决定之一。从我退学的那一刻起，我可以不再上那些我毫无兴趣的必修课，开始旁听那些看起来有意思多了的课。

And seventeen 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 of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved for 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 far more interesting. 

事情并不都那么浪漫。我没有宿舍可住了，只能睡在朋友宿舍的地上。为了买吃的，我去捡拾五分钱一个的旧可乐瓶，每个星期天晚上我都步行七英里，穿过这个城市去到Hare Krishna神庙，只是为了每周一次能吃上一顿饱饭。我喜欢那里的食物。后来证明，能够按自己的好奇心和直觉蹒跚前行，这是多么珍贵。让我给你们举个例子吧。 

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 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 one example. 

里德学院当时的书法指导可能是全国最好的。校园中每一张海报，抽屉上的每一张标签，都是漂亮的手写体。由于我已退学，不用再修那些正式课程，我决定去上一门书法课，看看这些手写体是怎么写出来的。在这门课上，我学会了“衬线serif”和"无衬线sans-serif"字体、知道了怎样在不同的字母组合中改变间距，明白了那些美丽的印刷体为什么那么美丽。这太漂亮了，充满了历史底蕴，艺术的微妙是科学所无法捕捉的，我觉得这太神奇了。 

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 sans-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. 

当时我根本没指望书法课在我以后的生活中能有什么实用价值。但是十年之后，我们在设计第一台麦金塔电脑Macintosh 时，它一下子又浮现在我眼前。于是我们把这些字体全都装进了Mac电脑里。这是第一台拥有漂亮字体的计算机。要不是我当初在大学里选了这么一门课，Macintosh 计算机里绝不会有那么多种字体，也不会有可变的字母间距，因为Windows只是照抄Macintosh，很可能所有的个人电脑都不会拥有这些。 （笑声加掌声）。我要不是退了学，决不会有机会选修这门书法课，个人电脑也可能不会有今天这些美丽的字体了。 

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 that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. 

当然，我当时在大学里不可能看到这一点与它未来的联系。十年后回头看，两者之间联系就非常非常清楚了。同样地，你们也不可能看到现在的某点和未来是怎么联系起来的，只有将来才知道。所以你必须相信，现在的点点滴滴会在你的将来以某种方式串联起来。不管是什么，你必须相信一些东西 - 你的勇气、命运、人生、因缘，相信现在的点将来一定会连成线，这会让你有信心跟着你的心前行，哪怕它现在看起来离经叛道，但将来它一定会与众不同。 

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 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-worn path, and that will make all the difference. 

第二个故事是关于爱和失去。我很幸运，很早就发现了自己喜欢做的事情。我二十岁的时候就和沃茨在父母的车库里创建了苹果公司。我们努力工作，十年后苹果从一个车库里的两人公司成长为拥有四千名员工，价值二十亿美元的大公司。我们刚推出了最好的作品Macintosh操作系统，在这之前的一年，我刚满三十岁，然后我就被解雇了。你怎么可能被一个自己创立的公司解雇？（笑声）

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 twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started?

是这样的，在苹果公司成长时，我们雇佣了一个我认为非常有天分，可以和我一起经营公司的人。在第一年确实如此。但后来我们对公司的未来方向产生分歧，最后我们不得不摊牌。公司董事会站在了他的一边。于是，在我三十岁的时候，我被炒了，公开被炒了。我失去了我成年之后的人生焦点，这是一个毁灭性打击。

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, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

一开始的几个月我真不知道该干什么。我觉得自己让公司的前辈创业者们失望了，我把接力棒弄丢了。我面见了戴维-帕珂德（David Packard，HP的创始人之一）和鲍勃-诺埃斯（Bob Noyce，Intel的创始人之一），试图为这搞砸了的事情道歉。我是一个众所周知的失败者，我甚至想要逃离硅谷。但是有个东西在慢慢唤醒我。我依然爱着我从事的行业。我在苹果的失败一点也没改变这点。我被驱逐了，但我仍爱着它。我决定重新开始。 

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'd been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over. 

当时我没有看出来，但事实证明被苹果开除对我来说是一件最好的事。成功者的重担被新入行者的轻松所替代，对任何事情都不再那么确信。我感觉到了自由，进入了我一生中最有创造力的阶段。接下来的五年，我创立了一个叫NeXT的公司，接着又建立了Pixar，与一个魅力女子相爱，她后来成为了我的妻子。Pixar出品了世界第一个电脑动画电影《玩具总动员》，现在它已经是世界最成功的动画制作工作室了。 

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 in 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-animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. 

在一系列不平常的转折事件里，苹果收购了NeXT，我又回到了苹果。我们在NeXT开发的技术在苹果的复兴中起了核心作用，另外，劳琳还和我一起建立了一个幸福的家庭。 我非常肯定，如果没有被苹果炒掉，这些事一件也不会发生。这个药的味道很可怕，但是我想病人需要它。有时候生活会给你当头一棒。不要丧失信心。我确信，让我继续前行的唯一信念就是：热爱自己所做的事情。

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene 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'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 that I loved what I did.

你必须去寻找你的真爱，对事业是如此，对爱情也是一样。你的工作将会占据你生命的大部，唯一能让自己真正满意的就是去从事一个自己确信的伟大事业，唯一能让你做出伟业的就是热爱自己的工作。如果你还没有找到，那就继续找追寻，不要停止。心心相惜，当你找到的时候，你会知道的。就像任何真诚的关系，随着时间的流逝，它只会越来越紧密。所以，继续追寻，不要停止。

You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for 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, 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 gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.

我的第三个故事是关于死亡。我十七岁的时候读到过一句引言：“如果你把每一天都当作生命的最后一天，终有一天你会发现你是正确的”。这句话给我留下了深刻的印象。从那之后，在过去的三十三年，每天早上我都会对着镜子问自己：“如果今天是最后一天，我今天要做的这些事是不是我想做的？”当答案为否连续多天之后，我就知道我需要改变了。 

My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that was 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.

时刻提醒自己离死不远是最重要的一件事，它帮我作出了生命中一系列重大选择。因为几乎任何事 - 所有外界的期望、所有的骄傲、所有对失败难堪的恐惧 - 在死亡面前都会彻底消散，只留下真正重要的东西。避开患得患失之陷阱的最好方法就是提醒自己将要面对死亡。你已经赤裸裸了，没有理由不跟随自己的心 。

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing 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. 

大约一年前，我被诊断出患了癌症。我早上七点半作了扫描，清楚地显示我的胰腺有一个肿瘤。我当时都不知道胰腺是什么东西。医生们告诉我这几乎是无法治愈的，我还能最多存活三到六个月。我的医生建议我回家去整理好一切。医生的行话这就是“准备后事”的意思。它意味着把接下来十年要对孩子们说的话在几个月里说完；意味着把所有东西搞定，尽量让你的家庭能轻松面对；意味着你就要说“永别”了。 

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 doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes. 

我整日都想着那诊断的事情。后来有天晚上我做了一个活体检查，他们将一个内窥镜伸进我的喉咙，穿过胃到达肠道，用一根针在胰腺肿瘤上取了一些活体细胞。我当时是被麻醉的，但是当时在场的我妻子后来告诉我，当他们在显微镜下看到细胞的时候，医生开始哭泣，因为发现了这竟然是一种非常罕见的 能手术治愈的胰腺肿瘤。我做了手术，现在，我痊愈了。 

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 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 doctor 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, I am fine now. 

这是我最接近死亡的时候，我也希望是我未来几十年里最接近死亡的一次。这次死里逃生让我现在能更确信的告诉你们：死亡并不只是一个书面概念。没有人愿意死，即使那些想上天堂的人也不愿通过死亡来达到 那儿。但是死亡是每个人共同的终点，从来没有人能逃脱。

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.

也应该如此，因为死亡很可能是生命最好的发明。它是生命永恒的载体。没有死亡怎么会有新生？现在你们是新生的，但用不了很久，总有一天，你们也会慢慢变老然后死去。抱歉说这么戏剧性的话，但这是真的。你们的时间有限，不要浪费去重复别人的生活。不要被教条束缚，因为那意味着别人在代替你思考。不要让他人喧嚣的观点掩盖你心中的声音、你的心和你的直觉。它们也许已经知道你的真心所愿。所有其他东西都是次要的。 

And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's 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's 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, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. 

我年轻的时候，有一份非常好的出版物叫做“全球目录”，那是我这一代人的圣经之一。它是一个叫斯徒华特-布兰德的家伙主创的，他就住在离这不远的曼罗公园。他用诗一般的触觉将这份杂志带到世界。那是六十年代后期，个人电脑和电子桌面出版系统出现之前，所以这个出版物是用打字机、剪刀和一次成像照相机做出来的，有点像纸张印刷的谷歌google，类似谷歌不过却早了三十五年。它是理想主义的代表，充满着灵巧的工具和伟大的想法。

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called 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 with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

保持饥饿，保持愚蠢。

Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies 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 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. 

非常感谢大家。

Thank you all, very much.