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你們的時間都有限，所以不要按照別人的意愿去活。不要讓別人思想里盲從的信條困惑你 。不要讓別人觀點的聒噪聲淹沒自己的心聲。最主要的是，要有跟著自己感覺和直覺走的勇氣。無論如何，感覺和直覺早就知道你到底想成為一個什么樣的人，其它的都不重要 。
I'm uh...honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, er...I never graduated from college and uh...this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Ha...Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
今天我非常榮幸來參加你們的畢業典禮，斯坦福是世界上最好的大學之一。說實話，我自己從來沒有從大學畢業，所以今天應該是我距離畢業典禮最近的一刻。呵……今天我只想給你們講三個我生活中的真實故事，僅此而已，沒有什么長篇大論，就是三個故事。
The first story is about connecting the dots.
第一個故事是關于聚點成線。
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.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.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 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.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.And 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 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.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.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.
我在里德學院待了六個月就辦理休學了。后來我又回到學校呆了大概十八個月就徹底退學了。 那么我為什么退學？這得從我出生前講起。我的生母是一個大學肄業生，也是一個年輕未婚媽媽，她決定讓別人收養我 ，她強烈覺得應該讓有大學教育背景的人收養我，所以我就能出生在一個律師家庭。但是這對夫妻到最后一刻反悔了，因為他們想收養女孩。在等待收養名單上的一對夫妻，也就是我的養父母，在一天半夜里接到電話問他們要不要認養一個剛出生的男孩，而他們的回答是：“當然要。”后來我的生母發現，我現在的母親從來都沒有從大學畢業過，而父親則連高中也沒畢業。于是她拒絕在最后的供養文件上簽字。 直到幾個月后我的養父母保證一定會讓我上大學，她才軟化態度。這就是我一生的起點。十七歲的時候，我進了大學。當時我很天真，選了一所學費幾乎和斯坦福大學一樣昂貴的學校，當工人的養父母傾其所有的積蓄為我支付了大學學費。讀了六個月，我看不出念這個書的價值何在，我既不知道自己這一生想干什么，也不確定大學能幫我弄明白自己想干什么。而我所在做的僅是花光我父母的畢生積蓄。所以我決定退學，我要自立更生。當年做出這個決定的時候還心有余悸，但現在驀然回首，我覺得這是我有生以來做出的最好的決定之一。從退學那一刻起，我就可以不再選那些我不感興趣的必修課，而開始去旁聽一些在我看來更有意思的課。這一點也不浪漫。我沒有寢室，所以我睡在友人家里的地板上。靠每回收一個可樂瓶子得來的5美分為生。每個星期天晚上得走七里的路繞過大半個鎮子去“哈瑞.奎師那”印度神廟改善一頓伙食。我真的很喜歡這樣的生活。追尋好奇與直覺的我所駐足的大部分事物，這些在我看來都成了無價之寶。舉例來說，當時里德學院書法課大概是全國最好的。在整個校園內的每一張海報上，每個抽屜的標簽上，都有美麗的手寫字。由于我退學了，可以不照正常程序來選課，所以我跑去學書法。我學了襯線與無襯線字體，學到在如何調節多字母組合詞的字間距，學到了怎么把很好的活版印刷做得更好。書法的美感、歷史感與藝術感是科學所無法捕捉的，我覺得那很迷人。當時我并不指望書法在以后的生活中能有什么實用價值。但是，十年之后，我們在設計第一臺Macintosh計算機時，以前學的書法一下子浮現在我眼前。于是，我們把這些東西全都設計進了計算機中。這是第一臺有這么漂亮的文字版式的計算機。要不是我當初在大學里偶然選了這么一門課，Mac計算機絕不會有那么多種印刷字體或間距安排合理的字號。要不是Windows抄襲了這個功能，個人電腦也都不會有Mac的這些字體。要不是退了學，我也不會碰巧選了那門書法課，個人電腦上也不可能打出這些美妙的書法字體。當然，我在大學里不可能把當時的點向前延伸，連成一條線；但是現在回過頭去看，貫穿在這十年里的那條線卻無比清晰。我再說一次，你不能預先把點點滴滴串在一起，唯有未來回顧時，你才會明白過去的那些點點滴滴是如何串在一起的。你得信任某個東西，直覺也好，命運也好，生活也好，因果報應……。因為信仰能給你自信，把你的想法變成現實，讓你與眾不同。
