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. 今天，我很荣幸能和你们一起参加世界上最好的大学之一的毕业典礼。我从来没有从大学毕业过。说实话，这是我离大学毕业最近的一次。今天我想给你们讲我人生中的三个故事。就是这样。没什么大不了的。就是三个故事。
The first story is about connecting the dots. 第一个故事，是关于如何串联起生命中的点滴。
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? 我在里德学院只上了六个月就退学了，但之后作为旁听生又待了大约十八个月才真正离开。那么我为什么要退学呢？
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. 这要从我出生之前说起。我的生母是一位年轻的未婚大学毕业生，她决定把我送给别人收养。她非常坚持我应该被大学毕业生收养，所以在我出生时一切都已安排好了，我将被一对律师夫妇收养。但是当我出生的那一刻，他们在最后一刻决定他们其实想要一个女孩。所以排在等候名单上的我的养父母，在半夜接到了一个电话："我们有一个意外出生的男婴，你们想要他吗？"他们说："当然。"我的生母亲后来发现我养母从来没有大学毕业，而我养父连高中都没有毕业。她拒绝在最终的收养文件上签字。直到几个月后，我的养父母承诺将来一定会让我上大学，她才勉强同意。
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. 十七年后，我确实上了大学。但我天真地选择了一所学费几乎和斯坦福一样昂贵的学校，而我那工薪阶层的父母一生的积蓄都花在了我的学费上。六个月后，我看不出上学的价值。我不知道自己想用一生做什么，也不知道大学如何能帮我找到答案。而我正在花掉我父母一辈子攒下的全部积蓄。所以我决定退学，相信一切都会好起来的。当时这确实挺可怕的，但回想起来，这是我做过的最好的决定之一。从我退学的那一刻起，我就可以不再上那些我不感兴趣的必修课，开始旁听那些看起来有趣的课程。
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: 这一切并不都是浪漫的。我没有宿舍，所以睡在朋友房间的地板上，我回收可乐瓶换取五美分的押金来买食物，每个星期天晚上我要走七英里穿过小镇，去黑天神庙吃一周里唯一一顿好饭。但我很享受那种生活。而我凭着好奇心和直觉所遇到的许多事情，后来都被证明是无价的。让我给你们举一个例子：
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. 里德学院当时提供也许是全国最好的书法教育。整个校园里的每张海报、每个抽屉上的每个标签，都是美丽的手写书法。因为我退学了，不需要上正常的课程，所以我决定去上书法课学习如何做到这一点。我学会了衬线字体和无衬线字体，学会了改变不同字母组合之间的间距，学会了什么是伟大的排版。它是美丽的、历史的、艺术上微妙的，是科学无法捕捉的，我深深地被它迷住了。
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 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 backward 10 years later. 这些在当时看来没有任何实用价值。但十年后，当我们在设计第一台麦金塔电脑时，这一切都回到了我的脑海中。我们把它们全都设计进了麦金塔。这是第一台拥有漂亮排版的电脑。如果我当年没有旁听那一门课，麦金塔就不会有多种字体和比例间距的字体。既然 Windows 只是抄袭了麦金塔，那么很可能没有哪台个人电脑会有这些特性。如果我从来没有退学，我就不会去旁听那门书法课，个人电脑可能就不会有如今这样美好的排版了。当然，在大学的时候，你是不可能向前看把点滴串联起来的。但十年后回头来看，就非常非常清楚了。
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. 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. 所以，你不可能向前看把点滴串联起来；你只能在回头看的时候才能把它们串联起来。因此，你必须相信这些点滴会在你的未来以某种方式串联起来。你必须相信一些东西——你的直觉、命运、生命、因果，诸如此类。这种信念从来没有让我失望过，它让我的人生变得与众不同。
My second story is about love and loss. 我的第二个故事，是关于爱与失去。
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 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. 我很幸运——我在人生很早的时候就找到了自己热爱的事情。沃兹和我在我二十岁的时候，在我父母的车库里创办了苹果公司。我们努力工作，十年间苹果从车库里的两个人，发展成了一家拥有超过四千名员工、价值二十亿美元的公司。我们刚刚在一年前发布了我们最伟大的作品——麦金塔电脑——而我也刚满三十岁。然后我被解雇了。你怎么可能被自己创办的公司解雇呢？事情是这样的，随着苹果的发展，我们雇佣了一个我认为非常有才华的人来和我一起管理公司，第一年左右一切都很顺利。但后来我们对未来的看法开始产生分歧，最终我们闹翻了。事情发生后，我们的董事会站在了他那边。所以在三十岁那年，我出局了。而且是公开地出局。那曾是我整个成年生活的重心，一下子全没了，这简直是毁灭性的打击。
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. 接下来的几个月我真的不知道该怎么办。我觉得自己辜负了上一代企业家——我在接力棒传到我手中时把它掉在了地上。我去见了戴维·帕卡德和鲍勃·诺伊斯，试图为他们造成的糟糕局面道歉。我是一个非常公开的失败者，我甚至想过逃离硅谷。但后来我慢慢明白了一件事——我依然热爱我所做的事情。苹果的变故丝毫没有改变这一点。我被拒绝了，但我依然热爱着它。所以我决定重新开始。
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. 当时我并没有意识到，但后来证明，被苹果解雇是我身上发生过的最好的事情。成功带来的沉重感被重新做回初学者的轻盈感所取代，对一切都不再那么确信。这让我进入了生命中最具创造力的阶段之一。
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, 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. 在接下来的五年里，我创办了一家名为 NeXT 的公司，又创办了一家名为皮克斯的公司，并爱上了一位将成为我妻子的了不起的女人。皮克斯后来制作了世界上第一部电脑动画长片《玩具总动员》，如今是世界上最成功的动画工作室。在一个戏剧性的转折中，苹果收购了 NeXT，我回到了苹果，而我们在 NeXT 开发的技术成为了苹果当前复兴的核心。劳伦和我有了一个美好的家庭。
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. 我很确定，如果我没有被苹果解雇，这一切都不会发生。这是一剂苦涩的良药，但我想病人确实需要它。有时候生活会用砖头砸你的头。不要失去信念。我确信让我继续走下去的唯一原因，就是我热爱我所做的事情。你必须找到你所热爱的。这对你的工作如此，对你的爱情也是如此。你的工作将占据你人生的大部分时间，唯一能让你真正感到满足的方式，就是去做你认为伟大的工作。而做伟大工作的唯一方式，就是热爱你所做的事。如果你还没有找到，继续寻找。不要将就。就像所有关乎内心的事情一样，当你找到的时候，你会知道的。而且，就像任何伟大的关系一样，随着岁月的流逝，它只会越来越好。所以继续寻找，直到你找到它。不要将就。
My third story is about death. 我的第三个故事，是关于死亡。
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. 当我十七岁的时候，我读到过一句话，大意是："如果你把每一天都当作生命中的最后一天来过，总有一天你会是对的。"这句话给我留下了深刻的印象，从那以后的三十多年里，我每天早上都会对着镜子问自己："如果今天是我生命中的最后一天，我会不会去做今天即将做的事情？"每当答案连续很多天都是"不会"的时候，我就知道我需要改变什么。
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. 记住自己终将死去，是我所遇到的最重要的帮助我做人生重大选择的工具。因为几乎所有的事情——所有的外在期望、所有的骄傲、所有对尴尬或失败的恐惧——这些在死亡面前统统都会消散，留下的只有真正重要的东西。记住你终将死去，是我所知道的避免陷入"你会有所损失"这个陷阱的最好方法。你已经一无所有了。没有理由不跟随你的内心。
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. 大约一年前，我被诊断出患有癌症。我在早上七点半做了扫描，结果显示我的胰腺上有一个肿瘤。我甚至都不知道胰腺是什么。医生告诉我这几乎肯定是一种无法治愈的癌症，我应该预期活不超过三到六个月。我的医生建议我回家安排好后事，这是医生的委婉说法，意思是准备去死。意思是尽量在这几个月里告诉你孩子你本打算在未来十年告诉他们的一切。意思是确保一切事情都安排妥当，让你的家人尽可能轻松地处理。意思是说再见。
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. 我带着这个诊断结果度过了一整天。那天傍晚我做了活检，他们从我的喉咙插入内窥镜，穿过我的胃进入肠道，用一根针扎进我的胰腺，从肿瘤中取了一些细胞。我当时打了镇静剂，但我妻子告诉我，当医生们在显微镜下观察这些细胞时，他们哭了——因为结果发现这是一种非常罕见的、可以通过手术治愈的胰腺癌。我做了手术，现在好了。
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: 这是我离死亡最近的一次，我希望这也是未来几十年里离死亡最近的一次。经历过这一切之后，我现在可以比当死亡还只是一个有用但纯粹理性概念时，更加确定地对你们说：
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. 没有人想死。即使是那些想上天堂的人也不想通过死亡到达那里。然而死亡是我们所有人共同的终点。没有人逃脱过它。而且事情本该如此，因为死亡很可能是生命最好的发明。它是生命的变化推动者。它清除旧的，为新的腾出空间。现在你们是新的，但不久之后你们会逐渐变老，然后被清除掉。很抱歉说得这么戏剧化，但这是事实。
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. 你们的时间是有限的，所以不要浪费时间过别人的生活。不要被教条所束缚——那意味着活在别人思考的结果中。不要让他人意见的噪音淹没了你内心的声音。最重要的是，要有勇气跟随你的内心和直觉。它们在某种程度上已经知道你真正想成为什么样的人。其他一切都是次要的。
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. 当我年轻的时候，有一本了不起的出版物叫《全球概览》，它是我们这一代人的圣经之一。它是由一个叫斯图尔特·布兰德的人在离这里不远的门洛帕克创办的，他用充满诗意的触感赋予它生命。那是在上世纪六十年代末，在个人电脑和桌面出版出现之前，所以它完全是用打字机、剪刀和宝丽来相机制作的。它就像 Google 的纸质版，比 Google 早了三十五年：它充满了理想主义，洋溢着精巧的工具和伟大的理念。
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. 斯图尔特和他的团队出版了好几期《全球概览》，然后当它完成了自己的使命后，他们出版了最后一期。那是七十年代中期，而我和你们一样大。在他们最后一期的封底上，是一张清晨乡间公路的照片，就是那种如果你足够冒险，可能会在路上搭便车的那种。照片下面写着："求知若饥，虚心若愚。"那是他们停刊时的告别语。求知若饥，虚心若愚。我一直希望自己能始终如此。现在在你们即将毕业、重新开始之际，我也如此祝愿你们。
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. 求知若饥，虚心若愚。
Thank you all very much. 非常感谢大家。