The famous Steve Jobs commencement speech: ‘Stay hungry. Stay foolish.’
The speech:
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, 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¢
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, it’s 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.
My second story is about love and loss.
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.
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.
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.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I
hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the
patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose
faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved
what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work
as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life,
and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.
And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found
it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll
know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better
and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t
settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something
like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most
certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past
33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today
were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”
And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need
to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most
important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.
Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of
embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death,
leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is
the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a
scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I
didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost
certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live
no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my
affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to
tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them
in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that
it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that
evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through
my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few
cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that
when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying
because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is
curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I
hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I
can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful
but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to
heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all
share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death
is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It
clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but
someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared
away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone
else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of
other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your
own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and
intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything
else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication
called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation.
It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park,
and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s,
before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with
typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in
paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and
overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The
Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final
issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their
final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you
might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were
the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they
signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for
myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/05/18/the-famous-steve-jobs-commencement-speech-stay-hungry-stay-foolish/
Structure of the lead:
WHO- Steve Jobs
WHEN-
June 12, 2005
WHAT-commencement speech
WHY-not given
WHERE-at Stanford University
HOW- Steve Jobs told them three stories from his
life
Keywords:
1.
commencement
畢業典禮
2.
intuition
直覺
3.
calligraphy
書法
4.
karma
命運
5.
diverge
偏離
6.
devastating
毀滅性的
7.
entrepreneur
企業家
8.
diagnose
診斷
9.
dogma
教條
10.
farewell
告別
