考研阅读精选：乔布斯斯坦福大学演讲（一）
乔布斯斯坦福大学演讲（一）http://images.koolearn.com/casupload/upload/fckeditorUpload/2011-11-08/image/a3dad4bcdbed4ed7934ca057622b08fb.jpg
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO ofApple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12,2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencementfrom one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated fromcollege. Truth be told, I never graduated from college. This is theclosest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tellyou three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just threestories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayedaround as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit.So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. Mybiological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and shedecided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I shouldbe adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to beadopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped outthey decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So myparents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of thenight asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" Theysaid: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my motherhad never graduated from college and that my father had never graduatedfrom high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. Sheonly relented a few months later when my parents promised that I wouldsomeday go to college.
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 mycollege tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I hadno idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college wasgoing to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the moneymy parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out andtrust 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. Theminute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes thatdidn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that lookedinteresting.
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 forthe 5 cent; deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 milesacross town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the HareKrishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into byfollowing my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless lateron. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that timeoffered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, wasbeautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't haveto take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class tolearn 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 itfascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practicalapplication in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing thefirst Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it allinto the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If Ihad never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac wouldhave never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. Andsince Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computerwould have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never droppedin on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have thewonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible toconnect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very,very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can'tconnect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them lookingbackwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect inyour future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life,karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has madeall the difference in my life.
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