乔布斯在斯坦福大学毕业典礼上的英文演讲稿(附翻译)

乔布斯在斯坦福大学毕业典礼上的英文

演讲稿（附翻译）

this is the text of the commencement address by steve jobs, ceo of apple computer and of pixar animation studios, delivered on june 12, XX.

i am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. i never graduated from college. 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.

斯坦福是世界上最好的大学之一，今天能参加各位的毕业典礼，我备感荣幸。(尖叫声)我从来没有从大学毕业，说句实话，此时算是我离大学毕业最近的一刻。(笑声)今天，我想告诉你们我生命中的三个故事，并非什么了不得的大事件，只是三个小故事而已。

the first story is about connecting the dots. 第一个故事 关于串起生命中的点点滴滴

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?

退学是我这一生所做出的最正确的决定之一。我在里德大学待了6个月就退学了，但之后仍作为旁听生混了18个月后才最终离开。我为什么要退学呢?

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: %unexpected baby boy; do you want him?\course.\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.

故事要从我出生之前开始说起。我的生母是一名年轻的未婚妈妈，当时她还是一所大学的在读研究生，于是决定把

我送给其他人收养。她坚持我应该被一对念过大学的夫妇收养，所以在我出生的时候，她已经为我被一个律师和他的太太收养做好了所有的准备。但在最后一刻，这对夫妇改了主意，决定收养一个女孩。候选名单上的另外一对夫妇，也就是我的养父母，在一天午夜接到了一通电话：“ 有一个不请自来的男婴，你们想收养吗?” 他们回答：“ 当然想。” 事后，我的生母才发现我的养母根本就没有从大学毕业，而我的养父甚至连高中都没有毕业，所以她拒绝签署最后的收养文件，直到几个月后，我的养父母保证会把我送到大学，她的态度才有所转变。

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.

17 年之后，我真上了大学。但因为年幼无知，我选择了一所和斯坦福一样昂贵的大学，(笑声)我的父母都是工人阶级，他们倾其所有资助我的学业。在6个月之后，我发现自己完全不知道这样念下去究竟有什么用。当时，我的人生漫无目标，也不知道大学对我能起到什么帮助，为了念书，还花光了父母毕生的积蓄，所以我决定退学。我相信车到山前必有路。当时作这个决定的时候非常害怕，但现在回头去看，这是我这一生所做出的最正确的决定之一。(笑声)从我退学那一刻起，我就再也不用去上那些我毫无兴趣的必修课了，我开始旁听那些看来比较有意思的科目。

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 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.

这件事情做起来一点都不浪漫。因为没有自己的宿舍，我只能睡在朋友房间的地板上;可乐瓶的押金是5 分钱，我把瓶子还回去好用押金买吃的;在每个周日的晚上，我都会步行7英里穿越市区，到harekrishna教堂吃一顿大餐，我喜欢那儿的食物。我跟随好奇心和直觉所做的事情，事后证明大多数都是极其珍贵的经验。我举一个例子：那个时候，里德大学提供了全美国最好的书法教育。整个校园的每一张海报，每一个抽屉上的标签，都是漂亮的手写体。由于已经退学，不用再去上那些常规的课程，于是我选择了一个书法班，想学学怎么写出一手漂亮字。在这个班上，我学习了各种字体，如何改变不同字体组合之间的字间距，以及如何做出漂亮的版式。那是一种科学永远无法捕捉的充满美感、历