昨晚Eric给我发了一份邮件，内容是乔布斯2005年在斯坦福大学的演讲。他说他看了三遍，单从演讲的内容，他就决定要买一部iphone 4s手机（他之前不太了解苹果，还经常取笑我的iphone和其他苹果的产品）。是什么让他有如此大的转变呢？
接下来，我也把整个演讲看了整整三遍，一边听一边思考，想着我的童年，我的大学，我八年工作的经历，以及我未来要如何发展。
乔布斯在演讲中讲了三个故事，故事中讲到的三件事在当时的环境下看来都是“不好”或者是“倒霉”的事：大学退学，被苹果公司开除和患上癌症，然而，在若干年以后，当乔布斯回首这些事情时，却是对他一生最有帮助，甚至推动人类文明进步的大事，用他自己的话说，getting fired from Apple was the
best thing that could have ever happened to me。
我一直感觉，我们绝大部分人都是过多地相信前人或是现有的认识、科技和成果，而忽视了自身的能量，换句话说，就是高估了现今的技术和发明，低估了自身的创造力。Follow your heart 是我对乔布斯演讲的总结，也是他要表达的主题。只要保持纯净的内心，就能感知大脑深处的想法，再坚持跟着这个想法走，不要太多地受到环境的束缚，伟人就这么诞生了！
我在学习中医时看过一本吴清忠的《人体使用手册》，这本书的主要观念与乔布斯讲到的不谋而合----尽管一个是中医领域，一个是it产品领域。吴清忠对人体的多年研究发现，人体的自愈能力远远超过我们的想象，而大部分药品（尤其是西药）只是强制性地改变身体的某个指标，表面上看治了病，实际上往往是治标不治本。只是现今忙碌的社会中，我们已经很少能听到“身体的声音”了：很多人晚上11,12点还精神抖擞，一点都不觉得困，就是一个明显的例子。
从人性上讲，我不太喜欢乔布斯的偏执，但是，从创造伟大成就的方面，我感受到了（甚至从他演讲本身就能感觉到）他的努力，他甚至把每天都当成生命中的最后一天来度过，让每天都精彩绝伦（他的精彩绝伦就是要“改变世界”），他真的做到了！！
我听这个演讲还是有点吃力，附上演讲原文，供跟我一样英文不好的朋友参考：
"Thank you. I'm honored to be with you today for
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.
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. The first story is about connecting
the dots.
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 naïvely 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.
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.
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 twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from
just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000
employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year
earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, 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, and so at thirty, 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'd 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 in 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 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 and
I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of
Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene 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's going to hit 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
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, and 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. 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 thing 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 doctors' code for "prepare to die." It
means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten
years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that 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 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 doctor 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, thankfully, I am 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's 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's 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, 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 Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation.
It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park,
and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties,
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 thirty-five years before Google came along. I was idealistic,
overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out
several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its
course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies 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 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.”
