Stanford Report, June 14, 2005 ‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says

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, 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, 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.
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 its 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.

今天，我很荣幸来到世界一流的大学毕业典礼。我没有从大学毕业，老实说，这是我离大学毕业最近的一刻。今天我只说三个故事，不谈大道理，就这三个故事。
第一个故事，是人生的点点滴滴如何串在一块 (Connecting the dots)

我在里德学院(Reed College)念了六个月就办休学了。退学前，一共休学十八个月。我为什么要休学呢?
故事要从我出生前谈起。我的亲生母亲是大学研究生，年轻的未婚妈妈，她打算让别人收养我，更相信应该让拥有大学学历的夫妇收养我，我出生时，她就准备由一对律师夫妇来抚养我长大。但这对夫妻最后一刻反悔了，他们想要女孩。所以在等待收养名单中的一对夫妻，在半夜接到一通电话，问他们：“有一个意外出生的男孩，你们要认养他吗?”他们说：“当然。”
后来我的生母发现，我现在的妈妈从来没有大学毕业，我现在的爸爸则连高中毕业也没有，她拒绝在认养文件上签名同意。直到几个月后，我的养父母同意将来一定让我上大学，她才勉强答应。
十七年后，我真的上了大学。但我无知的选择一所学费几乎跟史丹佛（Stanford）一样贵的学校。
我的蓝领阶级父母，把所有的存款都花在我的学费。六个月后，我看不出念大学的价值到底在哪里。那时候，我不知道这这辈子要干什么，也不知道念大学对我有什么帮助，而且我为了读书，花光父母毕生的积蓄，我决定休学，相信船道桥头自然直。
在那个时候，这是让人害怕的决定；但我现在看来，却是我这辈子下过最好的决定之一。休学后，再也不用上无趣的课，直接听我爱的课。只是这一点也不浪漫。我没有宿舍，我睡在朋友家的地板上，靠回收可乐瓶罐的五毛钱填饱肚子，到了星期天晚上走七哩远的陆，绕去印度教神庙吃顿大餐。但那时我追寻的兴趣，现在看来都成为无价之宝。
比如说，里德学院拥有几乎是全国最好的英文书法(Caligraphy)课程。校园里的海报，教室抽屉的标签，都是美丽的手写字。我休学去学书法了，学了serif与san serif字体，学会在不同字母的组合间变更字间距，学到活版印刷伟大的地方。书法的历史与艺术，是科学文明无法取代的，令我深深着迷。
我从来没想过这些字，会在将来影响我的人生。但十年之后，当我们设计第一台Macintosh计算机，我的所学派上了用场。我们把这些字体都放进了Macintosh里，这是第一台能显示出漂亮字体的计算机。如果我没爱上书法课，Macintosh就不会有这么多变化的字体。
后来WINDOWS抄袭了Macintosh，如果当年我没这样做，大概世界上的计算机都不会有这种东西，不会显示出我们现在看到的美丽字体了。当然，当年还在学写字时，是不可能把这些点滴先串在一起，但是十年后回顾，一切就自然清楚的发生了。
我得强调，你不能先把这些人生点滴兜在一起，唯有将来回顾时，你才会明白这些点点滴滴是怎么串联的。你得相信现在体会的一切，未来多少会连接在一起。你得信任某个东西，直觉，命运，或是因果都好。这种做法从来没让我失望，更丰富了我的生命。
第二个故事，是爱与失去( Love and loss )
我很幸运，年轻时就知道自己爱做什么。二十岁时，我跟沃兹一起在我家的车库开创了苹果计算机。拼了老命工作，苹果十年内从一间车库，两个年轻小伙子，扩展为一家员工超过四千人，二十亿美元营业额的公司。在此前一年，我们推出了最棒的作品—-Macintosh，而就在我正要踏入人生的第三十个年头，我被开除了。
自己创办的公司，怎么会开除自己?好吧，当苹果计算机日益扩大，我聘请了一位在经营上颇有才华的家伙，他在头几年确实也干的不错。但我们对愿景有很不同的想法，闹到分道扬镳。董事会站在他那边，炒了我鱿鱼，还公开把我请出公司。我整个生活重心顿时消失，完全不知所措。
在这几个月里，我实在不知道如何是好，更觉得令企业界前辈失望了：他们传给我的接力棒，掉了。我找了惠普的创始人David Packard，英特尔的Bob Noyce，跟他们说我把事情搞砸了，甚至想离开硅谷。但我的想法逐渐变了，我发现我仍然爱着我 曾做过的事业，在苹果的日子一点也没有改变我爱的事。即使人们否决我，可是我还是爱做那些事，所以我决定从头来过。
那时我不知道，但现在回头来看，苹果开除我却是我人生最好的经历。从头来过的轻松替代了成功的沉重，这释放了我，让我自由自在进入我这辈子最有创意的年代。
接着的五年，我创办了NeXT，又开了Pixar，也坠入了情网。Pixar制作出世界上第一部全计算机动画电影(玩具总动员)，现在已是全球最成功的动画公司。接着我的人生大转弯，苹果购并NeXT，我重回了苹果，而NeXT发展的技术更成为反败为胜的关键。同时，我也有了幸福的家庭。
我敢打包票，苹果要是没开除我的话，这些事绝对不会发生。这是帖苦药，可是我需要这个苦。人生有时就像掉了块砖头砸到你，但不要失去信心。你找的到你的最爱，工作是如此，爱情也是如此。
第三个故事是死亡 (Death)
十七岁时读到的一则格言影响了我：“把每一天登当作生命中的最后一天，你终会找到人生的方向。”过去三十三年，每天我都会扪心自问：“如果今天是我人生的最后一天，那我要做些什么?”当我多天都得到“没事做”的答案，该改变了。
提醒自己快死了，是我在判断重大决定时，最重要的工具。因为几乎每件事，所有外界期望，所有名誉，所有对窘困或失败的恐惧，在面对死亡时，全都消失了，只有最重要的东西才会留下来。用死亡提醒自己，是避免陷入害怕失去的欲望陷阱，最好的方法。生不带来，死不带去，为什么不就顺心而为。
一年前，我被诊断得了癌症。早上七点半做扫描时，发现胰脏里出现肿瘤，我甚至不知道胰脏是用来做什么的。医生告诉我，这几乎确定是不治之症，大概活不到三到六个月了。医生要我回家，好好跟家人聚聚，医生面对临终的病人总是这样说。这代表你得在几个月内，把将来十年想跟小孩说的话讲完，你真的得说再见了。
我满脑子都是这个判我死刑的诊断。到了晚上做了一次切片，内视镜从喉咙伸进胃再到肠子，还插了跟针到胰脏取出肿瘤细胞。打了镇定剂之后我不醒人事，但是我太太陪着我，看着医生检查。她跟我说，当医生查看癌细胞后喜极而泣，因为那是非常少见的胰脏癌，可以用外科手术切除。我现在完全康复了。
那是我离死神最近的一刻，希望也是未来几十年最接近的一次。在生死关卡徘徊过之后，我更要告诉大家：没有人想死，即使那些想上天堂的，也想活着上天堂。但死玩是我们共同的终点，没人逃得过。死，更是生命最伟大的发明，是送旧迎新，传承生命的媒介。现在新生代是你们，但不久的将来，你们也会年华老去，离开人生的舞台。抱歉形容的这么戏剧化，但这是真的。
人生短暂，不要浪费时间活在别人的阴影里。不要被教条所惑，盲从教条等于活在别人的思考。不要让他人的噪音压过自己的声音。最重要的，有勇气跟着自己的内心与直觉。
求知若渴，虚心若愚(STAY HUNGRY, STAY FOOLISH)。我总是以此期许自己。现在你们毕业了，我也以此期许你们：求知若渴，虚心若愚。
非常谢谢大家。
原文地址：‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says
翻译地址：Steve Jobs 2005年在Stanford毕业典礼上的演讲