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你们的时间都有限，所以不要按照别人的意愿去活。不要让别人思想里盲从的信条困惑你 。不要让别人观点的聒噪声淹没自己的心声。最主要的是，要有跟着自己感觉和直觉走的勇气。无论如何，感觉和直觉早就知道你到底想成为一个什么样的人，其它的都不重要 。
I'm uh...honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, er...I never graduated from college and uh...this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Ha...Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
今天我非常荣幸来参加你们的毕业典礼，斯坦福是世界上最好的大学之一。说实话，我自己从来没有从大学毕业，所以今天应该是我距离毕业典礼最近的一刻。呵……今天我只想给你们讲三个我生活中的真实故事，仅此而已，没有什么长篇大论，就是三个故事。
The first story is about connecting the dots.
第一个故事是关于聚点成线。
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen 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've 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 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 seventeen 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 of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all 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.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 five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.And 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 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 that calligraphy class and personals 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.
我在里德学院待了六个月就办理休学了。后来我又回到学校呆了大概十八个月就彻底退学了。 那么我为什么退学？这得从我出生前讲起。我的生母是一个大学肄业生，也是一个年轻未婚妈妈，她决定让别人收养我 ，她强烈觉得应该让有大学教育背景的人收养我，所以我就能出生在一个律师家庭。但是这对夫妻到最后一刻反悔了，因为他们想收养女孩。在等待收养名单上的一对夫妻，也就是我的养父母，在一天半夜里接到电话问他们要不要认养一个刚出生的男孩，而他们的回答是：“当然要。”后来我的生母发现，我现在的母亲从来都没有从大学毕业过，而父亲则连高中也没毕业。于是她拒绝在最后的供养文件上签字。 直到几个月后我的养父母保证一定会让我上大学，她才软化态度。这就是我一生的起点。十七岁的时候，我进了大学。当时我很天真，选了一所学费几乎和斯坦福大学一样昂贵的学校，当工人的养父母倾其所有的积蓄为我支付了大学学费。读了六个月，我看不出念这个书的价值何在，我既不知道自己这一生想干什么，也不确定大学能帮我弄明白自己想干什么。而我所在做的仅是花光我父母的毕生积蓄。所以我决定退学，我要自立更生。当年做出这个决定的时候还心有余悸，但现在蓦然回首，我觉得这是我有生以来做出的最好的决定之一。从退学那一刻起，我就可以不再选那些我不感兴趣的必修课，而开始去旁听一些在我看来更有意思的课。这一点也不浪漫。我没有寝室，所以我睡在友人家里的地板上。靠每回收一个可乐瓶子得来的5美分为生。每个星期天晚上得走七里的路绕过大半个镇子去“哈瑞.奎师那”印度神庙改善一顿伙食。我真的很喜欢这样的生活。追寻好奇与直觉的我所驻足的大部分事物，这些在我看来都成了无价之宝。举例来说，当时里德学院书法课大概是全国最好的。在整个校园内的每一张海报上，每个抽屉的标签上，都有美丽的手写字。由于我退学了，可以不照正常程序来选课，所以我跑去学书法。我学了衬线与无衬线字体，学到在如何调节多字母组合词的字间距，学到了怎么把很好的活版印刷做得更好。书法的美感、历史感与艺术感是科学所无法捕捉的，我觉得那很迷人。当时我并不指望书法在以后的生活中能有什么实用价值。但是，十年之后，我们在设计第一台Macintosh计算机时，以前学的书法一下子浮现在我眼前。于是，我们把这些东西全都设计进了计算机中。这是第一台有这么漂亮的文字版式的计算机。要不是我当初在大学里偶然选了这么一门课，Mac计算机绝不会有那么多种印刷字体或间距安排合理的字号。要不是Windows抄袭了这个功能，个人电脑也都不会有Mac的这些字体。要不是退了学，我也不会碰巧选了那门书法课，个人电脑上也不可能打出这些美妙的书法字体。当然，我在大学里不可能把当时的点向前延伸，连成一条线；但是现在回过头去看，贯穿在这十年里的那条线却无比清晰。我再说一次，你不能预先把点点滴滴串在一起，唯有未来回顾时，你才会明白过去的那些点点滴滴是如何串在一起的。你得信任某个东西，直觉也好，命运也好，生活也好，因果报应……。因为信仰能给你自信，把你的想法变成现实，让你与众不同。
