乔布斯在斯坦福大学毕业典礼上的英文演讲稿(附翻译)

乔布斯在斯坦福大学毕业典礼上的英文

演讲稿（附翻译）

this is the text of the commencement address by steve jobs, ceo of apple computer and of pixar animation studios, delivered on june 12, XX.

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, i never graduated from college. 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.

斯坦福是世界上最好的大学之一，今天能参加各位的毕业典礼，我备感荣幸。(尖叫声)我从来没有从大学毕业，说句实话，此时算是我离大学毕业最近的一刻。(笑声)今天，我想告诉你们我生命中的三个故事，并非什么了不得的大事件，只是三个小故事而已。

the first story is about connecting the dots.

第一个故事关于串起生命中的点点滴滴

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?

退学是我这一生所做出的最正确的决定之一。我在里德大学待了6个月就退学了，但之后仍作为旁听生混了18个月后才最终离开。我为什么要退学呢?

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 someday go to college.

故事要从我出生之前开始说起。我的生母是一名年轻的未婚妈妈，当时她还是一所大学的在读研究生，于是决定把

我送给其他人收养。她坚持我应该被一对念过大学的夫妇收养，所以在我出生的时候，她已经为我被一个律师和他的太太收养做好了所有的准备。但在最后一刻，这对夫妇改了主意，决定收养一个女孩。候选名单上的另外一对夫妇，也就是我的养父母，在一天午夜接到了一通电话：“有一个不请自来的男婴，你们想收养吗?”他们回答：“当然想。”事后，我的生母才发现我的养母根本就没有从大学毕业，而我的养父甚至连高中都没有毕业，所以她拒绝签署最后的收养文件，直到几个月后，我的养父母保证会把我送到大学，她的态度才有所转变。

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.

17 年之后，我真上了大学。但因为年幼无知，我选择了一所和斯坦福一样昂贵的大学，(笑声)我的父母都是工人阶级，他们倾其所有资助我的学业。在6个月之后，我发现自己完全不知道这样念下去究竟有什么用。当时，我的人生漫无目标，也不知道大学对我能起到什么帮助，为了念书，还花光了父母毕生的积蓄，所以我决定退学。我相信车到山前必有路。当时作这个决定的时候非常害怕，但现在回头去看，这是我这一生所做出的最正确的决定之一。(笑声)从我退学那一刻起，我就再也不用去上那些我毫无兴趣的必修课了，我开始旁听那些看来比较有意思的科目。

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 cent; 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.

这件事情做起来一点都不浪漫。因为没有自己的宿舍，我只能睡在朋友房间的地板上;可乐瓶的押金是5 分钱，我把瓶子还回去好用押金买吃的;在每个周日的晚上，我都会步行7英里穿越市区，到harekrishna教堂吃一顿大餐，我喜欢那儿的食物。我跟随好奇心和直觉所做的事情，事后证明大多数都是极其珍贵的经验。我举一个例子：那个时候，里德大学提供了全美国最好的书法教育。整个校园的每一张海报，每一个抽屉上的标签，都是漂亮的手写体。由于已经退学，不用再去上那些常规的课程，于是我选择了一个书法班，想学学怎么写出一手漂亮字。在这个班上，我学习了各种字体，如何改变不同字体组合之间的字间距，以及如何做出漂亮的版式。那是一种科学永远无法捕捉的充满美感、历

史感和艺术感的微妙，我发现这太有意思了。

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, its 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.

当时，我压根儿没想到这些知识会在我的生命中有什么实际运用价值;但是10 年之后，当我们设计第一款macintosh 电脑的时候，这些东西全派上了用场。我把它们全部设计进了mac ，这是第一台可以排出好看版式的电脑。如果当时我大学里没有旁听这门课程的话，mac 就不会提供

各种字体和等间距字体。自从windows系统抄袭了mac 以后，(鼓掌大笑)所有的个人电脑都有了这些东西。如果我没有退学，我就不会去书法班旁听，而今天的个人电脑大概也就不会有出色的版式功能。当然我在念大学的那会儿，不可能有先见之明，把那些生命中的点点滴滴都串起来;但10 年之后再回头看，生命的轨迹变得非常清楚。

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.

再强调一次，你不可能充满预见地将生命的点滴串联起来;只有在你回头看的时候，你才会发现这些点点滴滴之间的联系。所以，你要坚信，你现在所经历的将在你未来的生命中串联起来。你不得不相信某些东西，你的直觉、命运、生活、因缘际会……正是这种信仰让我不会失去希望，它让我的人生变得与众不同。

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 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.

被苹果开掉是我这一生所经历过的最棒的事情。

我是幸运的，在年轻的时候就知道了自己爱做什么。在我20 岁的时候，就和沃兹在我父母的车库里开创了苹果电脑公司。我们勤奋工作，只用了10 年的时间，苹果电脑就从车库里的两个小伙子扩展成拥有4000 名员工，价值达到20 亿美元的企业。而在此之前的一年，我们刚推出了我们最好的产品macintosh 电脑，当时我刚过而立之年。然后，

我就被炒了鱿鱼。一个人怎么可以被他所创立的公司解雇呢?(笑声)这么说吧，随着苹果的成长，我们请了一个原本以为很能干的家伙和我一起管理这家公司，在头一年左右，他干得还不错，但后来，我们对公司未来的前景出现了分歧，于是我们之间出现了矛盾。由于公司的董事会站在他那一边，所以在我30 岁的时候，就被踢出了局。我失去了一直贯穿在我整个成年生活的重心，打击是毁灭性的。

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.

在头几个月，我真不知道要做些什么。我觉得我让企业界的前辈们失望了，我失去了传到我手上的指挥棒。我遇到了戴维. 帕卡德(普惠的创办人之一)和鲍勃. 诺伊斯(英特尔的创办人之一)，我向他们道歉，因为我把事情搞砸了。

我成了人人皆知的失败者，我甚至想过逃离硅谷。但曙光渐渐出现，我还是喜欢我做过的事情。在苹果电脑发生的一切丝毫没有改变我，一个比特都没有。虽然被抛弃了，但我的热忱不改。我决定重新开始。

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.

我当时没有看出来，但事实证明，我被苹果开掉是我这一生所经历过的最棒的事情。成功的沉重被凤凰涅槃的轻盈