跳至主要内容

Commencement Address at Stanford University--“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

I am 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. 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 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 go to college. This was my start in 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 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 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 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 four thousand employees. We had just released our finest creation—the Macintosh—a year earlier, and I had 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. 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 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 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 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, and 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. Sometime life’s gonna 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 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. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death. When I was seventeen, 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 thirty-three 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 doctor’s code for “prepare to die.” It means to try to 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 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, and 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 doctors 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’m 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 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 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 Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand, not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, 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.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then, when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, 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 it 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.

Popular posts from 产品随想的博客

BIM江湖演义——ArchiCAD vs Revit

原文 地址 江湖中历来不缺乏传奇。在建筑软件的这片江湖中,风云变幻,豪杰辈出,有两大世家始终屹立不倒——一个来自欧罗巴,名字低调:“图形软件”(Graphisoft),却继承了一身的艺术家气质,手握长剑白衣胜雪;一个来自美利坚,人称“自动桌子”(Autodesk),性格豪放不羁,七种武器样样精通。本文所说的,就是这两大世家的代表人物:ArchiCAD与Revit之间的较量。 这个论题本是老生常谈了,谈到BIM绕不过的就是Revit与ArchiCAD。两者的对比许多帖子都讨论过,但往往大而化之,原则性的东西多,细节的东西少,因此我想再作一次比较,希望能深入一点,具体一点,力争较为全面地反映两者的真实面貌。但这种对比往往两面都不讨好,你懂的,因此本文也多用戏说的语气,我姑妄说之,列位看官也就姑妄听之吧,有不当之处还请多多包涵! 先介绍一下本人对这两个软件的熟悉程度。我用ArchiCAD有4年了,出过几套施工图,都已竣工,编过一系列向日葵图库,颇受好评,对ArchiCAD的认识偏重于施工图;用Revit一年半,出过四个工程的土建及MEP模型,也用其API编了若干插件,对Revit的认识偏重于建模(包括结构及MEP建模)。应该说对ArchiCAD与Revit的认识都算深入了。 当然两者的深度比较是一个庞大的工程,而且个人看法难免有偏见,技术上也多有误解之处,因此希望各位能指正与补充。 1 软件的思想、架构对比 从软件的历史来说,无疑是ArchiCAD悠久得多,Revit是Autodesk在2002年才收购回来的,但Revit有一个强有力的东家,马上推出“BIM”这个很炫的口号,一下把ArchiCAD沿用多年的“虚拟建筑”这个老老实实的口号给打败了,于是ArchiCAD也只好宣称自己是个BIM软件,搞得在外人看来,倒像是Revit占了先机。 从软件设计的角度来看,两者也是差别巨大的。ArchiCAD从20多年前就致力于三维建筑设计,在这方面积累了足够多的经验,多年来也是沿用其架构做一些小更新、小完善、小整合。从我接触的7.0到最新的14.0,感觉比较大的变动就是10.0版整合PlotMaker、12版支持多核计算提升速度、12版新增幕墙工具、13版团队工作大幅改进。在界面上、使用习惯上一直差别不大,这也在一个侧面反映了ArchiCAD软件设计的一个“精英思路”——我本来就...

产品随想 | 周刊 第128期:将时间转化为知识和体验

自行车棚效应:我们为什么在小事上纠结,却对大事视而不见?   https://limboy.me/posts/bike-shedding Benz-Patent   https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/innovation/milestones/benz-patent-motor-car/ 豐田博物館   https://toyota-automobile-museum.jp/tw/ 值得一去的汽车博物馆 一人公司   https://github.com/cyfyifanchen/one-person-company one-person-company, 一人公司 AI 工具系列 wujiaxian   https://wujiaxian.com/ 可能吧创始人的个人Blog,介绍自己的方式,很值得学习 日本京都10大設計熱點!「建築大師貝聿銘操刀美術館,皆川明設計旅館、選物店,還有全球最美的藍瓶咖啡店舖!」   https://www.elle.com/tw/life/style/g33846398/2020-kyoto-10-hotspots/ 京都真是非常美 Henry L. Stimson   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_L._Stimson?useskin=vector While Kyoto may have satisfied the military criteria for a useful target, Stimson objected, declaring in a meeting if the Interim Committee on June 1, 1945, "...there was one city that they must not bomb without my permission and that was Kyoto." 人性的努力保护了京都 Brooke Astor, 105, Aristocrat of the People, Dies   https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/obituaries/14astor.html 值得尊敬...

产品随想 | 周刊 第52期:HP家的Linux笔记本

Products 腾讯柠檬清理   https://github.com/Tencent/lemon-cleaner 腾讯开源,那基本意味着不再维护了...... (据专业人士看,代码写的烂) Teclis   https://teclis.com/ 一个比较窄,但质量非常高的搜索引擎 Ina La Revue Des Médias   https://larevuedesmedias.ina.fr/ 挺小众的法语网站,对于媒体,对于新闻热点的解读,还挺好 Dashy   https://github.com/Lissy93/dashy A self-hostable personal dashboard built for you. Includes status-checking, widgets, themes, icon packs, a UI editor and tons more! 全定制化的看板,非常酷 OpenSnitch   https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch OpenSnitch is a GNU/Linux port of the Little Snitch application firewall 好用的Linux网络状态监控软件,帮助盯住不老实的App 这个工具的创作者,Simone Margaritelli,evilsocket,非常高产 emoji-supply   https://github.com/alcor/emoji-supply 把 Emoji 组合成漂亮的壁纸、封面图 Vue Color Avatar   https://github.com/Codennnn/vue-color-avatar 一个纯前端实现的头像生成网站 itty.bitty   https://github.com/alcor/itty-bitty Itty.bitty is a tool to create links that contain small sites Administrative-divisions-of-China   https://github.com/modood/Administrativ...

内网域名访问内网服务器

部门ftp服务器和远程服务器内网域名无法访问问题困扰我好久,钻研了几天,终于明白了一些,和大家做一个分享, 原帖子在这里 ,表示感谢

路由器与交换机区别

交换机和路由器的区别: 1.路由器可以给局域网自动分配IP,虚拟拨号,交换机只是用来分配网络数据的。 2.路由器在网络层,根据IP地址寻址,可以处理TCP/IP协议,交换机不可以。

分布式系统领域的经典论文【转载】

作者:严林  编辑于 2015-05-08 链接:https://www.zhihu.com/question/30026369/answer/46476717 来源:知乎 著作权归作者所有。商业转载请联系作者获得授权,非商业转载请注明出处。 分布式系统在互联网时代,尤其是大数据时代到来之后,成为了每个程序员的必备技能之一。分布式系统从上个世纪80年代就开始有了不少出色的研究和论文,我在这里只列举最近15年范围以内我觉得有重大影响意义的15篇论文(15 within 15)。 1. The Google File System: 这是分布式文件系统领域划时代意义的论文,文中的多副本机制、控制流与数据流隔离和追加写模式等概念几乎成为了分布式文件系统领域的标准,其影响之深远通过其5000+的引用就可见一斑了,Apache Hadoop鼎鼎大名的HDFS就是GFS的模仿之作; 2. MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters: 这篇也是Google的大作,通过Map和Reduce两个操作,大大简化了分布式计算的复杂度,使得任何需要的程序员都可以编写分布式计算程序,其中使用到的技术值得我们好好学习:简约而不简单!Hadoop也根据这篇论文做了一个开源的MapReduce; 3. Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data: Google在NoSQL领域的分布式表格系统,LSM树的最好使用范例,广泛使用到了网页索引存储、YouTube数据管理等业务,Hadoop对应的开源系统叫HBase(我在前公司任职时也开发过一个相应的系统叫BladeCube,性能较HBase有数倍提升); 4. The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems: Google的分布式锁服务,基于Paxos协议,这篇文章相比于前三篇可能知道的人就少了,但是其对应的开源系统zookeeper几乎是每个后端同学都接触过,其影响力其实不亚于前三篇; 5. Finding a Needle in Haystack: Facebook's Photo Storage: ...

李录推荐阅读书单

李录推荐阅读书单 李录在《文明、现代化、价值投资和中国》的最后,列出了他推荐阅读的一些书目。这个书目的含金量非常之高,是培养一个多层次有深度思维很好的参考,特整理如下。 一. 科学、哲学、进化、人类文明史、人类历史 1. 《枪炮、病菌与钢铁:人类社会的命运》,贾雷德·戴蒙德 2. 《西方将主宰多久》,伊恩·莫里斯 3. 《文明的度量:社会发展如何决定国家命运》,伊恩·莫里斯 4. 《群的征服》,爱德华·奥斯本·威尔森 5. 《无穷的开始:世界进步的本源》,戴维·多伊奇 6. 《真实世界的脉络:平行宇宙及其寓意》,戴维·多伊奇 7. 《理性乐观派:一部人类经济进步史》,马特·里德利 8. 《科学发现的逻辑》,卡尔·波普尔 9. 《开放社会及其敌人》,卡尔·波普尔 10. 《自私的基因》,理查德·道金斯 11. 《人类简史:从动物到上帝》,尤瓦尔·赫拉利 12. 《文明》,尼尔·弗格森 13. 《当下的启蒙》,史蒂芬·平克 14. 《心智探奇:人类心智的起源与进化》,史蒂芬·平克 15. A history of knowledge, Charles Van Doren 16. 《神的历史》,凯伦·阿姆斯特朗 17. 《为什么佛学是真实的》,罗伯特·赖特 18. 《思考,快与慢》,丹尼尔·卡尼曼 19. Creating the Twentieth Century, Vaclav Smil 20. Transforming the Twentieth Century, Vaclav Smil 二. 中国文明、历史、文化 1. 《先秦诸子系年》,钱穆 2. 《中华文化十二讲》,钱穆 3. 《史记(白话本)》,司马迁 4. 《白话二十五史精选》,李解民等 5. 《四书章句集注》,朱熹 6. Waiting for the Dawn, William Theodore de Bary 7. 《中国的自由传统》,狄百瑞 8. 《万古江河——中国历史文化的转折和开展》,许倬云 9. 《黄宗羲全集》 10. 《余英时文集》 11. 《思想和人物》,林毓生 12. 《曾国藩全集》 13. 《万历十五年》,黄仁宇 14. 《天安门:知识分子与中国革命》,史景迁 15. The Search for Modern China, 史景迁 16. 《中国官僚政治研究》,王亚南 17. 《中...

产品随想 | 周刊 第130期:集结信徒,而非官僚

On Dyson, techno-centric design and social consumption   https://2earth.github.io/website/20250707.html 如何創造偉大的事物   https://ryolu.notion.site/1610a94b9c108079a95be4362afd4a26 集結信徒,而非官僚 Reflections on OpenAI   https://calv.info/openai-reflections 创业架构 Shui   https://github.com/rock-zhang/Shui 好好喝水 https://www.ghibli.jp/works/ 吉卜力作品的高清图 From Skeuomorphic to Liquid Glass: Apple's Strategic Bet on the Post-Touch Future   https://omc345.substack.com/p/from-skeuomorphic-to-liquid-glass 迄今为止关于苹果Liquid Glass变革的解读,最好的一篇 The Nueva School   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nueva_School?useskin=vector 看起来是很酷的一个学校 The Barbican   https://arslan.io/2025/05/12/barbican-estate/ 史蒂夫·乔布斯希望你阅读的 9 本书   https://www.douban.com/doulist/147158849/ 《禅者的初心》里有句话:“做任何事,其实都是在展示内心的天性,这是我们存在的唯一理由。” Chuck Feeney was one of the greatest philanthropists ever   https://www.gatesnotes.com/Remembering-Chuck-Feeney 慈善家 My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealt...

《Becoming Steve Jobs》Chapter 13 Stanford

Steve was a natural performer who elevated business presentations to something close to high art. But what made him fidgety this day was the prospect of addressing the Stanford University graduating class of 2005. University president John Hennessy had broached the idea several months earlier, and after taking just a little time to think it over, Steve had said yes. He was offered speaking engagements constantly, and he always said no. In fact, he was asked to do so many commencement addresses that it became a running joke with Laurene and other friends who had college or graduate degrees: Steve said he’d accept one just to make an end run around them and get his PhD in a day, versus the years and years it had taken them. But in the end, saying no was simply a question of return on investment—conferences and public speaking seemed to offer a meager payoff compared to other things, like a dazzling MacWorld presentation, working on a great product, or being around his family. “If you loo...

写给大家看的中文排版指南

作者:Hindy 原文地址: http:// zhuanlan.zhihu.com/uici rcle/20506092 前言:很遗憾,我们的周围充斥着大量排版丑陋的文章。我国的字体排印与日本、美国等设计强国差距实在太大。我希望能够做些力所能及的小事,让更多人意识到“设计”的价值和其必要性,创造更美好的视觉环境。本文旨在帮助普及、提升大家对文字排版的认识,让大家在平时的学习工作中能有更专业的文字排版素养。 必看人群: 设计师、编辑、作家、撰稿人、教师、学生 目录: 1. 中文排版 1.1 引号 1.2 省略号与破折号 1.3 行首行尾禁则 2. 西文排版基础 2.1 西文撰写基础 2.2 西文标点相关 2.3 斜体的用法 2.4 大小写的区别 3. 中西文混排 3.1 基础原则 3.2 标点相关 1. 中文排版 1.1 引号 我国国家标准要求弯引号,个人建议使用直角引号。 示例:你竟然喜欢“苹果表”? 引号中再用引号使用双直角引号。 示例:我问他,“你竟然喜欢‘苹果表’?” 当引号表示讽刺、反语暗示时,使用弯引号(用法参考“西文排版”部分)。 示例:说真的,我也很 “喜欢”“苹果表”哦。 1.2 省略号(删节号)与破折号 省略号占两个汉字空间,包含六个点。 正确示例:中国设计还有太长路要走…… 错误示例:中国设计还有太长路要走… 破折号占两个汉字空间。 示例:中国设计还有太长路要走──加油罢。 1.3 行首行尾禁则 点号(顿号、逗号、句号等)、结束引号、结束括号等,不能出现在一行的开头。 错误示例: 排版时注意某些 符号不能在行首 ,别弄错了。 正确示例: 排版时注意某些 符号不能在行首, 别弄错了。 开始引号、开始括号、开始双书名号等,不能出现在一行的结尾。 错误示例: 她对我们说:“ 这书太赞了。” 正确示例: 她对我们说: “这书太赞了。” 2. 西文排版基础 2.1 西文撰写基础 句首字母大写。 单词间留空格。 示例:Have a question? 2.2 西文标点相关 点号后加一个空格(如逗号、句号等)。 示例:Hello everyone! Welcome to my blog....