Прочитать эту
замечательную статью, нам посоветовал наш учитель института религии. Сейчас мы
изучаем Ветхий Завет и обсуждали Авраама, и то какой личностью он был, я узнала
интересную вещь, что Авраам был очень любознательным человеком, и он много
размышлял над творениями Небесного Отца, а именно, над тем как все устроено в
этом мире. Наш учитель поощрял нас так же к тому, чтобы мы стремились получить
в этой жизни знания, касающиеся всего на свете. В этой статье, как раз, Стив
Джобс рассказывает о том, как все сложилось у него в жизни и к каким
результатам это привело.
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
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, 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 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 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 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
