TED | 乔布斯在斯坦福毕业典礼上的演讲：谈“死”前人生

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谈“死”前人生

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Steve Jobs

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社会 心理 经历 TED 演讲

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在斯坦福大学的毕业典礼上，苹果公司和皮克斯动画公司的联合创始人兼首席执行官史蒂夫·乔布斯敦促我们追求梦想，在人生的挫折中发现机遇——包括死亡本身。

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 谢谢。 我很荣幸今天能和各位在此，参加这场全世界最优学府之一的毕业典礼。 （欢呼声＋掌声）

我大学从没读到毕业，事实上，这是我最接近大学毕业的一刻，今天我要分享三个亲身经历的故事，没什麼了不起的事，只是三个故事罢了。

第一个故事是关於串连生命中的点滴。我在奥勒岗州Reed College 只待6个月就休学了，但之后又复学待了18个月，最后终於还是无疾而终，但我为何要休学？故事始自我出生前，我的生母是一位年轻、未婚的研究生，她决定让我被领养，而且必需让有大学毕业的父母领养，所以，一切按照计划就是，我一出生便给一对律师夫妻领养，只是当我出了娘胎，他们才临时决定要的是一名女婴，所以，我那正在等候领养的父母当晚深夜接到一通电话，问说：「我们有一名意外诞生的新生男婴，你们想领养吗」？他们回说：「当然」。 

我的生母稍后发现我养母从未从大学毕业，而我养父更连高中都没毕业，於是，她拒绝签署最终的领养文件，但态度几个月后就软化了，因为我养父母承诺有天会让我去读大学，这就是我生命的起始，17年后，我果真上了大学，而且还天真地选了一间几乎和史丹佛一样贵的大学，属於劳动阶级养父母的毕生积蓄都将用以支付我的学费，六个月之后，我却看不到其中的价值，我不晓得我人生要干嘛！也不清楚大学能如何帮我理出个头绪，可是我却正在花光父母一辈子所存下的血汗钱。 

所以，我当下决定休学，而且相信一切都会有个圆满的结果，这个决定在当时看起来很可怕，但现在回头发现，那是我做过最好的决定之一，我一休学就可以不用去上我没兴趣的必修课，并开始重寻看起来有趣的事物，不是一切都那麼罗曼蒂克，我没有宿舍可住，所以睡在朋友房间的地板上，我会捡每个 5￠的回收可乐罐，以换取我的食物，每个星期天晚上，我还会走7哩的路，穿过小镇到 Hare Krishna 印度教寺庙领取我一周的恩典美餐，我爱死圣餐了。 

大部份因为我的好奇心与直觉，而让我人生失足的地方，稍后都成为无价的资产，我来为各位举个例子，Reed College 在当时也许是全美提供字型学教育最好的大学，整个校园里每一幅海报、抽屉上的标签都是精心手誊的文字，因为我已休学，所以不需要去上正规的课程，所以我决定选修字型学这门课，我学到了衬线和无衬线字体，分辨不同字母组合间所需的空间，还有活版印刷术的伟大之处，它在美学、历史与艺术上的精湛之处是科学所无法精确捕捉的，我当时很为之著迷，但之前我从没冀望这会在我的生命有任何的实用，但十年后，当我们正在设计第一台麦金塔电脑时，全派上用场了，我们将字型学整个运用到 Mac 电脑上，让它成为第一台具有漂亮活版印刷术字体的电脑。 

可如果我在大学时没有单选了这门课，Mac 电脑就永远不会有多种字体或组合匀称的字体可用，而因为 Windows 只是模仿 Mac 电脑，结果将可能是个人电脑根本就不会有不同的字体（笑声）（掌声）。而如果我当初没有休学，我也不会去选修那堂字型课，结果个人电脑可能就不会有我们现在所熟悉的完美字体，当然，我不可能在求学时就看出这些未来的点滴，但十年后回头一看，就点滴在心头了，重申一次，你无法预知未来，仅能回顾，所以你必需相信，生命中的点点滴滴有天都将连结一起，你必需要有信心，无论是你的直觉、命运、生命、业力等，因为相信这些点滴终究会连结在一起，可以给你信心朝自己的理想迈进，就算是引领你远离传统的路子，那都会很不同凡响。

我的第二个故事是有关爱与失落。我很幸运，很早就发现我的挚爱，Woz和我 20 岁时，在养父母家的车库内创立了苹果，我们很努力，仅仅 10 年的光阴，苹果电脑公司从只有两名员工的小企业，摇身成为价值 20 亿，员工超过 4000 人的大公司，而那前一年，我们才刚发表我们最优的创造 — 麦金塔电脑，我才刚迈入三十大关，紧接著，我遭到解雇，你如何被自己创立的公司解雇？ （笑声） 

因为当苹果成长之后，我们雇用了一位我认为能和我一起经营的有才之士，第一年，万事顺畅，但之后，我们对未来的愿景开始分歧，最后我们吵翻了，而董事会站在他那一边，所以，我的三十岁大礼是失业，而且是众人皆知，曾是我整个成人生命重心的一切都没了，而且结局凄惨，之后几个月我真的不知道要干嘛！我觉得我让前代的创业家们失望，因为我把交到我手上的棒子接丢了，我和 David Packard 及 Bob Noyce见面，试著为自己搞砸的事件道歉，我是个公认的失败者，甚至想要逃离矽谷，但有个东西慢慢地开始让我顿悟，那就是我仍爱著我做过的事，发生在苹果的事件并没有改变这个初衷，我被拒绝过，但我仍怀著爱，所以，我决定重新来过。 

当时我看不清，但后来我才明了遭到苹果解雇是我人生中最棒的事，成功者的沉重负担，由菜鸟的无忧无虑所取代，不再绝对肯定所有的事，解雇也是解放，我进入了人生其中一个创造黄金期，接下来五年，我创立了 NeXT、另一间是皮克斯，并和我未来的妻子坠入情网，皮克斯后来创造出全世界第一部电脑动画电影《玩具总动员》，现在它是全世界最成功的动画制片厂（欢呼声＋掌声）。在一个特别的机缘下，苹果买下 NeXT，我於是重返苹果，我们在 NeXT 发展出的科技，便是现在苹果复兴的核心。 

Laurene 和我也共组了一个美满的家庭，我敢肯定以上没有一件事会成真，如果当初我没有被苹果解雇的话，良药苦口，但正是病人所需，有时，生命会像是在拿砖块砸你的头，但你不能失去信心，我深信当初能让我继续下去的原因，就是因为我爱我做的事，你一定要找出自己所爱为何，无论是工作还是你的爱人，你的工作将会占去你生命的一大部份，而唯一能真正获得满足的方法是，做你相信那是了不起的工作，而唯一能做了不起工作的方法，就是你必需深爱自己所做的事，如果你还未找到，不要放弃、不要停，尽你全付心力，当找到时，你会知道的，就像所有了不起的关系，情况只会随著年岁渐入佳境，所以持续寻找，不要停！ （掌声）

我的第三个故事是关於死亡，17 岁时，我读过一段引言，内容大致是，「如果你能将每天都当作是生命的最后一天来活，有天你一定能做出对的决定」。 （掌声） 

我紧紧地记住这句话，从那之后的 33 年间，我每天早晨照镜子时便自问：「如果今天是生命终结前的最后一天，我还会想做原本即将要做的事吗」？而如果答案接连几天都是「不」，我便自知必需做些改变，记得我将死这件事，是我所用过，帮我下人生重大决定最重要的工具，因为几乎所有的事，所有外界的期望、所有的自尊、所有对难堪或失败的恐惧，这些全都将在面对死亡时烟消云散，仅有最重要的会留下来，记得自己将死是我所知，对抗自陷失落感迷宫最有效的方法，因为你已经赤裸裸地面对著生命，所以没有理由不顺应内心的声音。 

约莫一年前，我被诊断出罹患癌症，我在早上 7:30 接受扫描，结果清楚显示我的胰脏有颗肿瘤，当时我连胰脏是啥都还不晓得，但医师告诉我，这几乎可以确定是无法根治的癌症类型，且活不过三到六个月，医师建议我回家准备后事，这就是医生宣布待死的术语，也就是说，你要试著将往后 10 年想对孩子讲的话都在这几个月内说完，也意谓著一切都要确定交待完毕，这样对你家人的冲击可能会减轻些，更意谓著永别。 

当天，我一直挂念著那次的诊断结果，同一晚，我再做组织切片检查，他们将内视镜塞进我的喉咙，穿过我的胃，进入我的肠子，再将针插入我的胰脏，然后从那颗肿瘤上取走一些细胞，我打了镇静剂，但陪著我的太太告诉我说，医师在看过显微镜下的细胞后哭了，因为我的胰脏癌是很少见的可开刀医治类型，於是，我动了手术，谢天谢地，现在已痊愈了。 

这是我和死亡最近距离的接触，而我希望这也是往后几十年最近的距离，死里逃生之后，我可以比之前当死亡激励只是好用，而单纯的学术概念时，更确定的告诉你们没有人想死，就算是想上天堂的人也不希望透过死亡达阵，但死亡却是大家共享的目的地，没有人躲得过，这是注定的，因为死亡极可能是生命单一最优的创造，是生命的转化媒介，清掉老旧、让道新进，现在的新进是你们，但不久后的某天，你们将逐渐成为老旧，并遭清除，抱歉，这听起来很戏剧化，但却是千真万确，光阴有限，所以不应浪费在过别人的生活，不要陷於教条之中，即依著别人的思想结果过活，莫让别人的意见杂音，淹没了你的内在声音，最重要的是要提起勇气、倾听内心、跟著感觉走，因为这些本质多少早就清楚你想要达致的成就，其他都是次要的。 （掌声）

我年轻时，市面上有本神奇的读物叫作「全球目录」，当时被崇为一代宝典，由 Stewart Brand 创立，公司位於离这儿不远的 Menlo Park，他将其诗觉触感为这本杂志注入生命，在 1960 年代后期，个人电脑与桌面排版都还没诞生，所以一切都靠打字机、剪刀和即可拍照机，就像是纸本 Google，在 Google 出现前35 年，这本杂志满怀理想，内容尽载精巧工具与优异新知，Stewart 与其团队出版了几期「全球目录」之后，公司在停刊号出版后走到了尽头，那是 1970 年代中期，我正是你们这个岁数，在停刊号的封底，有一幅清晨乡间小路的相片，就是那种你去冒险搭便车时会看到的景象，图下有行字，「保持好奇，虚心接纳」，那是他们的谢幕词，保持好奇，虚心接纳，我一直如此自我期许。

现在，你们毕业开展新程，我也要如此祝福你们，保持好奇，虚心接纳，感谢聆听。 （掌声） 

The End

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Thank you, I am honored to be with you today at 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 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 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 someday go to college.

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 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 five-cent 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, its 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.

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.

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 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.

It 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 a new, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

Thank you all, very much.

The End

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我是@墨安

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