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¢ 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:
但事情也并非全是美好的。輟學后我就沒有寢室了，因此，我睡在朋友房間的地板上。為了有錢吃飯，我把可樂瓶子退回商店，只為了那5美分的押金，每周星期天晚上，為了吃一頓好的大餐，我還要走7英里的路，到城鎮(zhèn)另一頭的印度哈而克利須那寺。但我熱愛這種生活。而且，許多我出于好奇和直覺而偶然去做的事，后來也變證明是非常值得的。我來為你們舉一個例子：

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.
當時，里德學院提供的恐怕是全國最棒的書法教育。走在校園里，每一幅貼在墻上的海報，每一張抽屜上的標簽，都是漂漂亮亮的手寫體。由于我輟了學，不用再去上常規(guī)課程，我便決定報名參加書法班，學寫一手漂亮的字。在班里，我學到了燈芯體和襯線體，在不同字母組合間的間隙的變化，以及如何才能讓印刷字體美觀。那種美妙、古樸、藝術(shù)、微妙，是科學所不能達到的。我對之著了迷。

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.
在當時看來，這些事物仿佛于我的人生沒有任何實際的應用。但十年之后，我在設計第一臺蘋果電腦時，它們都重新浮現(xiàn)在我的腦海里，我們在設計電腦時好好地運用了它們，使我們的蘋果電腦成為了第一臺精致排版的電腦。如果我當時沒有去旁聽書法班，蘋果電腦就不會有多字體選擇，字母間也不會有勻稱的間隙。而且，由于Windows系統(tǒng)是借鑒了Mac系統(tǒng)的產(chǎn)物，如今所有的個人電腦都沒有多字體選擇和美妙的字母間隙，這也是有可能的。這些事情就像一個一個的點。當我還在學校時，是不可能看得出這些未來的來龍去脈的。但十年之后，再回頭來看，一切就很明顯了。

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.
你們也是一樣，現(xiàn)在要將未來看透是不可能的，只有在將來，事物間的聯(lián)系才會顯現(xiàn)出來。因此，你們必須要相信，現(xiàn)在所學的東西總是能與未來聯(lián)系起來的。而且，你們還得堅信一種東西，不管是直覺也好，命運也罷，甚至人生，或是因果循環(huán)，無論什么都好。我的這種信仰從來沒有讓我失望，我的生命中的所有轉(zhuǎn)折都是它造成的。