自強之路

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd_ptbiPoXM&feature=related

2005 年，蘋果總裁賈伯斯於史丹佛大學畢業典禮致詞時，說了三個意味深長的故事，值得記錄下來，順便考考聽力測驗。以下為該演講全部內容，擬分三次刊出：
I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement of one of the finest universities in the world. Truth to be told, I've never graduated from college, and this is the closest I've gotten to the college graduation. Today, I wanna tell you three stories of my life. That's it, no big deal, just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out Reed College after the first 6 months but stayed around and dropped in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I quit? It's started before I was born: my biological mother was a young unwed college graduate, and she decided to put me into adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted by birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except when I popped out, they decided the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who're on the 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 will go to college. This was the start in my life.

And 17 years later I did go to the college, but I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings will be spent on my college tuition. After 6 months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea of what I wanted to do in my life and no idea of how my college would help me figure it out. And here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved in their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trusted it'll all work out ok. It was pretty scary at that time. But looking back, it was one of the best decisions I've 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 5-cent deposit to buy food with. I would walk 7 miles across the 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 that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instructions in the country. Throughout the campus, every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I dropped out, I didn't have to take normal classes. I decided to take calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about ‘serif’ and ‘sans serif’ type faces, about varies in the amount of varying combinations of faces, and about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, and artistically subtle in the way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of these had even a hope or practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first McIntosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed all into the Mac. It was the first computer with the beautiful typography.

If I had never dropped in on the single course in college, the Mac would’ve never had multiple type faces or proportionally-spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. And if I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on the calligraphy class and personal computers might not have had the wonderful typography as 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: you gut, destiny, life, or karma, whatever. Because believing the dots will connect down the road would give you the confidence to follow your heart and even will lead you off the well-worn path that will make all the difference.

To Be Continued...