大家好，今天我站在这里，能够与你们分享我的故事，感到非常荣幸。虽然我并不是从斯坦福毕业的，但我相信，我的经历和感悟仍然能给你们带来一些启发。
第一个故事是关于“连接点”的。
当我还是个学生的时候，我选择了去里德学院学习，这是一所非常优秀的文理学院。但是，仅仅半年后，我就退学了。当时我并不知道这样做是对还是错，但后来回头看，这个决定却让我受益匪浅。
在退学之后，我开始参加各种课程，包括书法课。在书法课上，我学习到了排版、衬线和非衬线字体、以及如何让字母倾斜等等。这些知识，在当时看起来似乎毫无用处，但在多年以后，当苹果公司设计Macintosh时，这些看似无用的知识却发挥了巨大的作用。正是这些细节，使得Mac成为了第一台拥有美丽印刷字的电脑。
第二个故事是关于“死亡”的。
我年轻的时候，无法真正理解死亡的意义。直到我被诊断出患有胰腺癌，我才意识到死亡并不是生命的终点，而是生命的一部分。它提醒我们，生命是有限的，我们应该珍惜每一天，去做那些真正重要的事情。
第三个故事是关于“追求梦想”的。
我一直相信，要追随自己的内心和直觉。有时候，你已经拥有了所有外界的成功，但如果你没有追随自己的梦想，那生活又有什么意义呢？不要让别人的意见左右你的内心。最重要的是，你得相信自己，相信你所做的事。
以上就是我想要分享的三个故事。希望它们能够给你们带来一些思考和启示。最后，我想说的是，无论你们选择什么样的道路，都要保持对生活的热爱和对未知的好奇心。谢谢大家！
英文原文：
Good morning. I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world.
This is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. First, 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 graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should go to college, and when I was born, she made arrangements to have me adopted by college graduates, so I would someday get to go to college. But she died in childbirth, along with the baby. So my biological mother found out that my adoptive mother had never gone to college and that my biological father also didn't finish college, and she told her lawyer that if anything happened to her, could she please make sure that I went to college? And they assured her I would.
Well, I turned 17, and I enrolled in Reed College. It was one of the most expensive colleges in the country, 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 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 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 been bland text, without typography and fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its fonts would have been ugly too. 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 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.
The 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 happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure of 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 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, 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.
The 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 were 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 medical shorthand for preparing to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought they might want to hear, and to take care of unfinished business. It sounds dramatic, but it is in fact quite liberating, because you realize that you have nothing to lose.
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 out. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the next day, they 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 experience has made me much more serene about the inevitability of death. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
My conclusion is that 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 true.
Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
Thank you all very much.
