又是一年毕业季,让毕业生心潮澎湃的不仅是穿上学士服、抛起学士帽,还有在毕业典礼上聆听长着的毕业演讲。就如何乔布斯在斯坦福的英文演讲,字里行间都给人激励和信心。下面截取的是英文演讲稿中的一个片段。
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 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 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, and 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'd been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
第二个故事是关于爱与失的。我很幸运,很早就发现自己喜欢做的事情。我二十岁的时候就和沃茨在父母的车库里开创了苹果公司。我们工作得很努力,十年后,苹果公司成长为拥有四千名员工,价值二十亿的大公司。我们刚刚推出了最好的创意,Macintosh操作系统,在这之前的一年,也就是我刚过三十岁,我被解雇了。你怎么可能被一个亲手创立的公司解雇?事情是这样的,在公司成长期间,我雇佣了一个我们认为非常聪明,可以和我一起经营公司的人。一年后,我们对公司未来的看法产生分歧,董事会站在了他的一边。于是,在我三十岁的时候,我出局了,很公开地出局了。我整个成年生活的焦点没了,这很要命。一开始的几个月我真的不知道该干什么。我觉得我让公司的前一代创建者们失望了,我把传给我的权杖给弄丢了。我与戴维德•帕珂德和鲍勃•诺埃斯见面,试图为这彻头彻尾的失败道歉。我败得如此之惨以至于我想要逃离硅谷。但有个东西在慢慢地叫醒我:我还爱着我从事的行业。这次失败一点儿都没有改变这一点。我被逐了,但我仍爱着我的事业。我决定重新开始。
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.
当时我没有看出来,但事实证明“被苹果开除”是发生在我身上最好的事。成功的重担被重新起步的轻松替代,对任何事情都不再特别看重,这让我感觉如此自由,进入一生中最有创造力的阶段。接下来的五年,我创立了一个叫NeXT的公司,接着又建立了Pixar,然后与后来成为我妻子的女人相爱。Pixar出品了世界第一个电脑动画电影:“玩具总动员”,现在它已经是世界最成功的动画制作工作室了。
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.
在一系列的成功运转后,苹果收购了NeXT,我又回到了苹果。我们在NeXT开发的技术在苹果的复兴中起了核心作用,另外劳琳和我组建了一个幸福的家庭。
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