考研阅读精选：乔布斯斯坦福大学演讲（一）

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乔布斯斯坦福大学演讲（一）

   This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of  Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12,  2005.
　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.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
  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?
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.
　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.
　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.
　
　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.
　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.