喬布斯向你講述人生的三個故事之一:我輟學了

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.
謝謝大家。很榮幸能和你們，來自世界最好大學之一的畢業生們，一塊兒參加畢業典禮。老實說，我大學沒有畢業，今天恐怕是我一生中離大學畢業最近的一次了。

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
今天我想告訴大家來自我生活的三個故事。沒什麼大不了的，只是三個故事而已。

The first story is about connecting the dots.
第一個故事，如何串連生命中的點滴。

I dropped out of Reed College after the first six 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 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.
我在裏得大學讀了六個月就退學了，但是在18個月之後--我真正退學之前，我還常去學校。爲何我要選擇退學呢？這還得從我出生之前說起。我的生母是一個年輕、未婚的大學畢業生，她決定讓別人收養我。她有一個很強烈的信仰，認爲我應該被一個大學畢業生家庭收養。於是，一對律師夫婦說好了要領養我，然而最後一秒鐘，他們改變了主意，決定要個女孩兒。然後我排在收養人名單中的養父母在一個深夜接到電話，“很意外，我們多了一個男嬰，你們要嗎？”“當然要！”但是我的生母后來又發現我的養母沒有大學畢業，養父連高中都沒有畢業。她拒絕在領養書上簽字。幾個月後，我的養父母保證會讓我上大學，她妥協了。

This was the start in my life. 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 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.
這是我生命的開端。十七年後，我上大學了，但是我很無知地選了一所差不多和斯坦福一樣貴的學校，幾乎花掉我那藍領階層養父母一生的積蓄。六個月後，我覺得不值得。我看不出自己以後要做什麼，也不曉得大學會怎樣幫我指點迷津，而我卻在花銷父母一生的積蓄。所以我決定退學，並且相信沒有做錯。一開始非常嚇人，但回憶起來，這卻是我一生中作的最好的決定之一。從我退學的那一刻起，我可以停止一切不感興趣的必修課，開始旁聽那些有意思得多的課。

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.
事情並不那麼美好。我沒有宿舍可住，睡在朋友房間的地上。爲了吃飯，我收集五分一個的舊可樂瓶，每個星期天晚上步行七英里到哈爾-克里什納廟裏改善一下一週的伙食。我喜歡這種生活方式。能夠遵循自己的好奇和直覺前行後來被證明是多麼的珍貴。讓我來給你們舉個例子吧。

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 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.
當時的裏德大學提供可能是全國最好的書法指導。校園中每一張海報，抽屜上的每一張標籤，都是漂亮的手寫體。由於我已退學，不用修那些必修課，我決定選一門書法課上上。在這門課上，我學會了“serif”和"sans-serif"兩種字體、學會了怎樣在不同的字母組合中改變字間距、學會了怎樣寫出好的字來。這是一種科學無法捕捉的微妙，楚楚動人、充滿歷史底蘊和藝術性，我覺得自己被完全吸引了。

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.
當時我並不指望書法在以後的生活中能有什麼實用價值。但是，十年之後，我們在設計第一臺 Macintosh計算機時，它一下子浮現在我眼前。於是，我們把這些東西全都設計進了計算機中。這是第一臺有這麼漂亮的文字版式的計算機。要不是我當初在大學裏偶然選了這麼一門課，Macintosh計算機絕不會有那麼多種印刷字體或間距安排合理的字號。要不是Windows照搬了 Macintosh，個人電腦可能不會有這些字體和字號。

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.
要不是退了學，我決不會碰巧選了這門書法課，個人電腦也可能不會有現在這些漂亮的版式了。

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--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.
當然，我在大學裏不可能從這一點上看到它與將來的關係。十年之後再回頭看，兩者之間關係就非常、非常清楚了。你們同樣不可能從現在這個點上看到將來；只有回頭看時，纔會發現它們之間的關係。所以你必須相信，那些點點滴滴，會在你未來的生命裏，以某種方式串聯起來。你必須相信一些東西——你的勇氣、宿命、生活、因緣，隨便什麼——因爲相信這些點滴能夠一路連接會給你帶來循從本覺的自信，它使你遠離平凡，變得與衆不同。