This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

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, 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 later found out 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.

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 5¢ 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, it’s 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. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

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 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 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 worlds 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.

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 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 10 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 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 1960′s, 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, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and 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.

作者：英国《金融时报》专栏作家 蒂姆•哈福德

就是否物有所值而言，管理顾问的口碑一直算不上出色——尽管说实话，投资银行家们的臭名早已让他们相形见绌——因此，今年早些时候，当我听到有传言称，在一项有趣的研究中，一家咨询公司含蓄地同意接受对其咨询建议的随机测试，不由得印象深刻。

坦率地说，这是个胆识过人的决定。会同意让自己的产品接受随机测试的，几乎只有医药企业，而且我相当确定，他们对这种经历没有多少热情。

或许埃森哲(Accenture)——它就是那家公司——没有意识到给自己惹了多大的麻烦。毕竟，从表面看来，由世界银行(World Bank)、加州大学伯克莱分校(Berkeley)以及斯坦福大学(Stanford)的一群经济学家共同开展的这项研究，主题是现代管理技巧能否提高印度大型纺织企业的生产力。（研究报告作者之一、斯坦福大学的尼克•布卢姆(Nick Bloom)的个人网站上刊登了研究报告草稿。）但你如何才能提高管理技巧呢？当然是聘请一家管理咨询公司。

研究者聘用埃森哲为孟买的14家工厂提供管理咨询服务，它们是从20家工厂中随机选取的。另6家工厂作为参照组，能够获得分析性绩效审计，但没有什么正经的建议。世界银行和斯坦福大学以高折扣价格支付埃森哲的咨询费用；工厂主不用支付任何费用。

不可否认，结果给人留下了深刻印象。几个月的咨询建议产生的效应是：工厂利润增长了近五分之一，一年多达数十万美元。（最新研究草稿提供的数据是23万美元；稍早的计算结果更高。）产出有所增长，库存收紧，且残次率下降了一半。

埃森哲为这5个月的咨询服务收取的费用，以市价计算基本上与利润增幅相当——因此到年底，这种安排创造的收益正好支付其费用。如果这些咨询建议能够被继续采用，这将是一项出色的投资。种种迹象表明，这些建议不只是会被继续采用：新的流程产生了有关有效管理的新信息和新想法，并形成了不断改善的良性循环。

但在所有企业都争着去聘用一家管理咨询公司之前，有两点需要注意。首先，由于试验设计的初衷是为了评估管理技巧而非咨询顾问，收集绩效数据的任务是由埃森哲自己完成的。（不过数据需要接受一些独立核查，而且没有证据表明出了任何差错。）

更重要的第二点告诫是，印度纺织企业有着自己独特的问题：工具和机器堆得到处都是，库存控制常常缺位。如果工人需要找某个特定物品，办法就是在货仓里乱翻，直到找出有用的东西为止。在孟买经济的这个特定领域，现代存货管理技巧发挥了极大的作用，但这并不意味着沃达丰(Vodafone)、巴克莱(Barclays)或政府部门也能从聘请顾问中获得同等的收益。

尼克•布卢姆及其同事还研究了世界各地的管理实践，巴西、中国和印度的水平都很低。可想而知，一旦咨询顾问进驻，这些新兴巨人会作何表现。

至于在伦敦或纽约聘用管理咨询顾问是否值得——我也不知道答案。但我认识几个经济学家，他们会非常乐于指导一次随机试验。

Source: http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001035692

即使你是友善的，人们可能还是会说你自私和动机不良
不管怎样，你还是要友善
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.

当你功成名就，你会有一些虚假的朋友
和一些真实的敌人
不管怎样，你还是要取得成功
If you are successful, you will win some false friends
And some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.

即使你是诚实的和率直的，人们可能还是会欺骗你
不管怎样，你还是要诚实和率直
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.

你多年来营造的东西
有人在一夜之间把它摧毁
不管怎样，你还是要去营造
What you spend years building,
Someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.

如果你找到了平静和幸福，他们可能会嫉妒你
不管怎样，你还是要快乐
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.

你今天做的善事，人们往往明天就会忘记
不管怎样，你还是要做善事
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Be good anyway.

即使把你最好的东西给了这个世界
也许这些东西永远都不够
不管怎样，把你最好的东西给这个世界
Give the world the best you have,
And it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you have anyway.

你看，说到底，它是你和上帝之间的事
而决不是你和他人之间的事
You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God;
It is never between you and them anyway.

德兰修女
From Mother Theresa