史蒂夫·乔布斯2005年在斯坦福大学毕业典礼上的演讲

‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says ¹

“你得找到热爱的事情”，乔布斯说

本文整理自史蒂夫·乔布斯（Steve Jobs）2005 年在斯坦福大学毕业典礼上的演讲²，经过逐句精听、校对和翻译，是现场版对应的文字稿。

在斯坦福大学官网上可以找到演讲的准备稿，个别地方与现场版略有出入。¹

演讲文稿（中文翻译版）

我很荣幸，今天能和大家一起参加这个世界上最好的大学之一的毕业典礼。

说实话，我从未大学毕业。这是我离大学毕业最近的一次了。

今天我想向你们讲述我人生中的三个故事。就这样，没什么大不了的事情，就是三个故事而已。

一、连点成线

第一个故事，是关于如何把生命中的点滴连起来。

我在里德学院（Reed College ³）读了 6 个月后就退学了。不过，在真正退学之前，我作为一名旁听生继续在学校待了大约 18 个月。那么，我为什么要退学呢？

这要从我出生的时候讲起。我的生母是一个年轻的、没有结婚的大学生，她决定让别人收养我。

她特别想让我被大学毕业生收养，所以她为我被一个律师家庭收养做好了一切准备。

意外的是，当我出生之后，律师夫妇突然很想要一个女孩。

于是，我的养父母（在候选名单上）半夜接到电话问道：“我们这儿有一个意外出生的男婴，你们想要他吗？”他们回答：“当然！”

我生母随后发现，我养母大学没毕业，而我养父甚至没有高中毕业。

她拒绝在最终的收养文书上签字。几个月后，当我养父母答应让我上大学时，她最终答应了。

这就是我生命的开始。

17 年后，我的确上了大学。但是我很天真地选了一个几乎和斯坦福大学（Stanford University）⁴ 一样贵的学校。我工薪阶层父母的所有积蓄都花在了我的学费上。

6 个月后，我看不到其中的价值所在。我也不知道要做什么，不知道大学能不能帮我找到答案。

而在这里，我几乎花光了我父母这辈子的全部积蓄。所以我决定退学，并相信这是正确的选择。

当时挺害怕的，但回过头来看，那是我人生中做得最正确的选择。

在我退学的那一刻起，我就不用去上不感兴趣的课程了，而开始上那些更有趣的课程。

这也并不都是那么浪漫。我没有宿舍，就只能睡在朋友家的地板上。我拿可乐瓶子换回 5 分钱来买食物，每周日晚上，我会走 7 英里的路，穿过小镇去 Hare Krishna 神庙去吃顿好的。

我爱上了它。

很多这段跟随自己的好奇心和直觉的误打误撞的的结果，成了我无价的宝藏。

我来举个例子。

当时，里德学院的书法课大概是美国国内最好的了。校园里每一幅海报，抽屉上的每一个标签，都是用漂亮的字体手写而成的。

我退学了，就不用上那些常规的课程，于是决定参加书法课来学习怎么做到的。

我学习了 Serif 字体和 San Serif 字体，关于不同字母组合间隔的变化，关于如何让版面设计更好看。

它很美，历史悠久，有着精妙的艺术感，为科学所无法企及，我对此很着迷。

这些对于我的生活而言，毫无任何实际的用途。

但 10 年后，当我们在设计第一台 Macintosh 电脑的时候，这些又都回到了我的脑海。

我们把这些都设计到 Mac 中，那是第一台有着漂亮排版的电脑。

假如当年我没有旁听这门课程，Mac 也许就不会有那么多种不同的字体。

要不是 Windows 照抄了 Mac 的设计，也许今天的个人电脑就不会拥有这些了。

假如我当年没有退学，我就不会旁听这门书法课，也许个人电脑就不会有那么好看的字体了。

当然，在学校的时候，是无法想到这些事件在后面会发生联系的。但是十年之后再看，这种联系非常清楚。

重申一下，你没法预知你人生中的点滴之间会有怎样的联系，你只能在事后把他们串联起来。

因此，你必须相信这些点点滴滴会在未来产生联系。你必须相信点什么，勇气、命运、生活、因缘，什么都行。

因为相信那些点滴会在之后的人生之路上给你发自内心的自信，甚至会引导你不再走老路，那将改变一切。

二、爱和失去

我的第二个故事是关于爱和失去。

我很幸运，在人生早期就找到了我所喜爱的东西。20 岁时，我和 Woz 在父母的车库里建立了苹果公司。我们非常努力地工作，10 年时间，苹果由最初车库里的两个人变成一家拥有 4000 多员工，价值 20 亿美元的公司。

那个时候我们最棒的产品 Macintosh 刚刚推出一年，而我刚刚30岁，然后我就被解雇了。

你怎么可能被你自己创立的公司解雇呢？随着苹果的壮大，我们请了一位在我看来非常有才能的人和我一起管理公司，第一年一切都非常顺利。

但后来我们对于未来的看法出现了分歧，最终我们起了争执。此后，我们的董事会站在他那一边。在 30 岁那年，我被炒鱿鱼了，非常惹人注目。

一直以来，作为我成年生活核心的东西忽然不复存在了，那感觉相当可怕。

有几个月的时间，我完全不知道该干什么。我感觉自己辜负了前辈企业家的期望，接力棒交到我手里，而我却把它弄掉了。

我和 David Packard 与 Bob Noyce 见面，为自己把事情弄得如此糟糕而道歉。我成了一名众所周知的失败者，也曾想过离开硅谷。

然而有一种感觉愈发强烈：我依然爱着我所爱的东西。

发生在苹果公司的事儿并没能改变这一点。我被拒绝了，但我的爱仍然还在。于是我决定重新开始。

当时的我并不知道，后来证明被苹果解雇是发生在我身上的最好的事儿了。

事业成功伴随的沉重不见了，取而代之的是重回起跑线的那种轻盈。

对于一切都不再确信无疑，我获得了解放，并开启了我人生中最具创造力的时期。

在接下来的五年里，我建立了一家名叫 NeXT 的公司，另一家公司是 Pixar，并和一位神奇的女子坠入爱河，她后来成为了我的太太。

Pixar 创作出了世界上第一部电脑动画电影——《玩具总动员》，现在它是世界上最成功的动画工作室。

一次转机之下，苹果公司买下了 NeXT，我重返苹果，而我们在 NeXT 开发的技术就成了苹果复兴事业的核心。Lorene 跟我也组建了一个美好的家庭。

我很确信，如果苹果没有开除我，所有这些都不会发生。

我想，这就是良药苦口利于病吧。有时候生活会给你当头一棒，但不要失去信心。

我确信唯一支撑我前进的就是：我爱着我所做的事。

你必须找到你的所爱，这不仅适用于你的工作，也同样适用于你的爱情。

你的工作构成了你生活的大部分，而唯一能让你真正感到满足的就是去做你认为伟大的工作，而做伟大工作的唯一途径就是爱你所做的工作。

假如你还没有找到它，请继续寻找，不要停下脚步。

和所有与心灵相关的东西一样，当你找到它时，你就会明白。而且它就会像是那些美好的关系一样，会随着年月增长而愈加醇美。

所以保持前行，永不止步。

三、关于死亡

我的第三个故事是关于死亡。

我 17 岁那年读到过一句话：

假如你把每一天都当成你的最后一天，总有一天你会发现你是对的。

这使我印象深刻，在那之后的 33 年里，每天早上我都对着镜子自问：

假如今天是我人生的最后一天，我还想做今天我要做的这些事儿吗？

每当连续很多天答案都是“不”的时候，我就知道需要做些改变了。

清楚自己将不久于人世，这是我做出人生重大选择时最重要的一个工具。

因为所有一切——一切外界对你的期待，一切荣耀，一切对尴尬和失败的恐惧，这些东西在面对死亡时都黯然失色，剩下的只有真正重要的东西。

在我看来，时刻谨记你将离开人世，是绕开“我有失去的资本”这种思维陷阱最好的方式。

你已经赤身裸体了，一无所有，没有理由不追随自己的内心。

大约一年前，我被查出患有癌症。早上7:30，我做了扫描，结果很清楚地显示在我的胰腺里有一个肿瘤。我甚至连什么是胰腺都不知道。

医生告诉我，这几乎是一种无法治愈的癌症，我大概还可以活 3 到 6 个月。

医生建议我回家去把一切都打点好，这是医生的行话，意思是料理后事。

这意味着你要把未来十年要对孩子们说的话，在几个月内提前说完。

这也意味着要确保一切都圆满安排好，以便家人后面的日子好过。

这意味着你对这个世界说再见。

一整天我的脑子里只有这个诊断。当天晚上，我做了一次活检，他们把内窥镜伸进我的喉咙，穿过我的胃，一直到肠子里，用探针伸进胰脏，取了一些组织细胞。

我被麻醉了，但当时在场的妻子告诉我，医生们把这些细胞放在显微镜下观察之后都惊叫起来了，因为他们发现这是一种非常罕见的、通过手术可以治愈的胰腺癌。

我做了手术，非常幸运，现在我已经痊愈了。

这是我距离死亡最近的一次，希望这也是未来几十年里我离死亡最近的一次。

经历过这件事，死亡对我而言已经不再是一个有用但完全是抽象的概念。因此我可以更加确信地跟你们讨论我对死亡的看法。

没有人想要死，即使那些想进天堂的人，也不想为此而死去。

然而，死亡是我们共同的终点，没有人可以幸免。

就应该是这样，因为死亡很可能是生命最好的发明。

它是生命的代谢催化剂，去除老旧、迎来新生。而现在，新生的是你们。

但用不了太久，某一天你们会发现自己也变成了老旧，也将被取代。抱歉，说得这么夸张，但事实确实是这样。

你的生命是有限的，所以不要浪费时间去过别人的生活。

不要被教条所羁绊，它会让你按照他人的思维方式去生活。

不要让别人的观点淹没你自己内心的声音。

最重要的是，要有勇气追随你的内心和直觉。

它们已经知道你真正想成为一个什么样的人。其他的一切都是次要的。

我年轻的时候，有一本刊物叫做《环球百科目录》，是我那一代人必读的经典之一。

它是由 Stewart Brand 在距此不远的 Menlo Park 创作的，他用诗意的笔触使这本刊物充满活力。

那是在 60 年代末，在个人电脑和桌面出版发明之前，因此这本刊物完全是由打字机、剪刀和拍立的相机做出来的。

它就像平装版的 Google，不过是在 Google 诞生的 35 年前。这是理想主义的刊物，充满着简洁的工具和伟大的想法。

Stewart Brand 和他的团队出版了数期《环球百科目录》，随后刊物的生命走到了尽头，他们出版了最后一期。那是在 1970 年代中期，我正是你们这个年纪。

最后一期的封底是一副清晨乡村公路的照片，如果你喜欢探险去搭车的话，就会看到这种景色。

照片下面写着这样一句话：

求知若饥，虚心若愚

这是他们停止发刊的告别语。求知若饥，虚心若愚。我一直希望自己能做到这样。

现在你们即将毕业、踏上新的旅程，我用这句话来祝福你们。

求知若饥，虚心若愚。

非常感谢大家。

Speech (English Version)

I am honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world.

Truth be told, I never graduated from college. And 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.

1. Connecting the dots

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 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 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 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’ve 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 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 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 10 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 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 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.

2. Love and loss

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 4,000 employees.

We’d 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 in 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 world’s 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, and 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’s gonna hit 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 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, and 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. Don’t settle.

3. About Death

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 and 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 1960s, 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.