写在前面

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.
这是苹果公司和Pixar动画工作室的CEO Steve Jobs于2005年6月12号在斯坦福大学的毕业典礼上面的演讲稿。

I am honored to be with you today at 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.
我今天很荣幸能和你们一起参加毕业典礼，而且是在这样一所顶尖的大学。事实上，我大学还没有毕业。所以这该是我和大学最接近的一次了。今天我只想和大家分享我人生中的三个故事。不讲大道理，只讲三个小故事。

The first story is about connecting the dots.
第一个故事是关于因果相联。

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Reed大学读了六个月就退学了,不过我在学校旁听课，又留了一年半，然后彻底离开。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 got 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 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 a start in my life.
故事就要从我的出生说起了。我的生母读研期间未婚先育有了我，随后她决定让别人收养我。她坚持我未来的养父母是要读过大学的，于是按照她的规划，我将被一对律师夫妇收养。不过当我出生的时候那对律师夫妇最后改变了主意想要个女孩。因此原本在候补名单上的我的养父母在半夜接到一个电话，电话说我们这儿意外有了个男孩，你们要吗？他们说当然要。但我的亲身父母后来发现我的养父母没有大学文凭，我的养父甚至连高中都没毕业。起初她拒绝签订收养协议，几个月后才退让，因为我的父母承诺一定会让我上大学的。我就这样开始了我的人生。

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 far more interesting.
十七岁那年，我真的上了大学。但是我很天真地选择了一个几乎和斯坦福一样昂贵的大学，我那属于工薪阶层的父母剩下的积蓄全都用来支付我的大学学费了。六个月来我始终发现不了读大学的价值。我对自己这辈子到底想要做什么一无所知，也不觉得大学能帮我发现这个问题的答案。而为了让我读大学，我的父母几乎是倾家荡产。所以我决定退学并相信船到桥头自然直。其实当时还是挺吓人的，可回头想想那的确是我做过的最明智的选择之一。自我退学开始。我就可以不在去上那些无趣的选修课，而去旁听那些更有意思的课程了。

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:
当然也真是那么浪漫。当时我连宿舍都没，所以只能在朋友寝室打地铺，我靠收集可乐瓶子每个5美分来养活自己，每周日晚上我都步行七公里到神庙去蹭一顿像样的饭。我乐此不疲。我那些听从自己直觉和好奇心而遇到的事，后来令我所获颇丰。举个栗子吧：

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.
那个时候里德学院开设了或许全美最好的书法课。大学里的每张海报上，每个抽屉的标签上全都是美术字。因为我退学了不必去上正规的课程，所以我决定去练练书法。我学到了有衬线体和无衬线体，懂得了如何把握词间距以及如何做出漂亮的版式。优雅、沧桑和科学无法描述的那种气息，真是妙不可言。

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in mylife. 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.
这些东西无论怎么看都算不上对未来有实际用处。但是十年之后，当我们设计第一台苹果电脑的时候却全都用上了。全都融入了苹果电脑的设计当中去了。那是第一台使用艺术字的电脑。如果我当时在大学没有学习这门课，苹果电脑就不会有这么丰富的字体和比例匀称的字体。因为微软只知道山寨苹果，那很可能世上所有电脑都不会有那些漂亮的字体了。要是我没有退学，我就不会选修书法，那么各种pc就不会有如今的精美字体了，当然我当时不可能预知这一件件事之间的“因”和“果”。只有回过头来看，才一目了然。

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 these dots would connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart .even when it lead you off the well-worn path and that will make all the difference .
再次强调，没人可以未卜先知，事事间的因和果往往只有在回首时显现。你得相信因和果会在未来的生活中联系起来，人总要有些信仰才行--直觉也好，命运也罢，因果轮回不管什么。去相信因和果的联系会给你信心去相信去跟从自己的意愿。哪怕离经叛道，也绝不止步，只有那样，才能有所成。