|[听雨轩]|

今天无意中读到Steve Jobs （苹果公司的创始人）05年在斯坦福的演讲原文，让人非常震撼以及感动。全文是由三个故事组成，很棒的一个讲演，整个讲演围绕着“You've got to find what you love”这个主题，而“ Stay hungry，stay foolish”是这次演讲的结束语，jobs引用60年代风行一时的《Whole Earth Catalog》杂志最后一期的封底文字“Stay hungry，stay foolish”，并把它送给了斯坦福的毕业生们。不过，我读完一直不太肯定jobs这句话所要表达的意思。

 

相关上下文是这样的，

 

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.

 

在网上搜了搜，发现中国人和美国人对这句话的理解差别很大，大部分中国人是这样解读的

Stay hungry，stay foolish

“常保饥渴求知，常存虚怀若愚”；也有人翻译成“物有所不足，智有所不明”

保持空杯心态。强调一个人对自己的知识，所知、所得要有一个清晰的认识。对应于未来和所要学习和了解的知识或人生而言，我们每一个人都显得那么无知和浅薄。对毕业生提出stay hungry 意在希望他们be ambitious 和激励奋进；stay foolish 强调我们人生旅途上的所知所得还在继续，属于励其志、明其行的人生赠言。

 

美国人一般这么理解这句话：

"Stay foolish" is probably another way of expressing the Zen idea that you should keep "beginner's mind", the state of curiosity you have when you are a novice at something and learning. You're open to new things (because everything's new) and aren't afraid to make mistakes.

Simply put, stay open to new ideas and thoughts and never be content to do the same thing day after day. Never worry about doing something you want to do because you are afraid of what others may think. It’s your life. Don’t waste it doing what others want you to do. Find what you love to do and do it!

 

考虑jobs的真实想法，还要找回这句话的原始出处  《Whole Earth Catalog》

 

下面是 Wikipedia 上对这本杂志的注解：

  《Whole Earth Catalog》是美国反主流文化目录，由 Stewart Brand 在1968 ～ 1972   年间出版，此后也偶尔出版过几次。该杂志曾于 1972 年获得美国国家图书奖（National Book Award），是首次获得该奖的目录类杂志。

最后一期的图片是这样的，正是jobs所描述的那样

 

再联系jobs的整个演讲，感觉并没有一点所谓求知和虚心的意思，通篇都是在说勇气，创造和激情。而这句话引用自美国著名的非主流杂志，老外的意识形态应该和求知与谦逊不太搭界，所以我个人更倾向于jobs引用这句话依然围绕着他的主题，'You've got to find what you love,'表达的是要发现你自己的梦想，对what you love保持hungry，不要畏惧世俗的眼光，无论你的梦想你的喜好在人家传统的看法里是多么的蠢，尽管走自己的路，尽其一生去追逐它吧！

 

其实本来是想写点读后感的，但是忽然觉得自己的文字表达是那样的苍白，所以，还是原文全部摘录下来，附在今天这篇日志之后。

 

[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, its 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 its 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.

      吴宇森的中国古装战争巨制《赤壁》终于落下帷幕。158分钟在影院里面，倒是不觉得很长很闷。虽然台词雷，剧情囧，人物性格变形，搞笑勉强，但场面的壮阔和节奏的把握还是有其称道之处。可能已经打过了上部的预防针，所以，整体上来说，不算太失望。

 

 

偶然点击一个久未联系的朋友的QQ头像，在预览QQ空间中看到她所转载的一篇短文摘要，前面是这样写的：

【很久以前，有一个国王想找到一句话，要求：它能让高兴的人听了难过，难过的人听了高兴。 但他找了很长时间都没有找到…… 】

 

看到这里，我一直在想这是句什么话呢？因为是转载的，这个故事相信大部分人都已经知道结果，并觉得是老生常谈了。不过，我的确是没看过，而且，这个朋友的QQ空间进行了限制，后面的我看不到了。

 

所以我想了想，再想了想，觉得应该很多话都符合啊，比如说，中国古语“福祸相倚”、“塞翁失马焉知非福，塞翁得马焉知非祸”、“人无百日好，花无百日红”、“光阴荏苒”、“沧海桑田”……其实，很多同样的一句话，不同心态的人听了感觉都是不一样的。即使是大白话“你不可能永远和现在一样”，也切切实实的能够让难过的人看到希望，让高兴的人忧心未来，所以，这样的话只要去翻翻警示格言，大把去了，有什么难找的？

 

当然，我本着好奇心的满足，还是去网上google了一下原文，看看到底是一句什么话，以下为后面的部分转载：

 

【 直到有一天夜里，他做了一个梦，梦见智者对他说了一句话，梦醒后他意识到这句话正是自己想找的。 这句史上最神奇的话就是：这一切都会过去的！ 

当你失败的时候、痛苦的时候，你要告诉自己：这一切都会过去的！  这句话会给你带来重整旗鼓的信心，让你从消极、低迷的情绪中走出来，迎接新的挑战。 当你成功的时候、得意忘形的时候，你告诉自己：这一切都会过去的！  它能让你清醒起来、理智一些，避免你骄傲自满。 不管是好的还是坏的, 没有一件东西是可以永恒不变的,相信这一切都会过去的……  好的人生，是一个过程，而不是一个状态；它是一个方向，而不是终点。】

 

原来这句话是：“这一切都会过去的”

 

原文对这句话的点评还是值得回味的，精辟，却也有些宿命的伤感，让过去的过去吧，对痛苦的人是一个安慰，因为时间永远是抚平伤痛的良药；但对幸福的人，无疑是一瓢冷水，让你惊觉光阴如水，世事无常。

 

其实，时间就是这么一个客观的存在。我们想抓住时间的尾巴，我们想留住光阴的脚步，辛弃疾不也喊着“惜春长怕花开早，何况落红无数。春且住！”以抒发自己怀才不遇之心，奈何？

 

所以，无谓去怀旧，不如把眼光放在前方，这一切都会过去的，不妨改成，享受这一刻给我们人生的历练和当下的幸福，我们会拥有我们所希望获得的人生，明天会更好！

 

附：辛弃疾《摸鱼儿》：

更能消、几番风雨，匆匆春又归去。惜春长怕花开早，何况落红无数。春且住！见说道、天涯芳草无归路。怨春不语。算只有殷勤，画檐蛛网，尽日惹飞絮。 长门事，准拟佳期又误。蛾眉曾有人妒。千金纵买相如赋，脉脉此情谁诉？君莫舞，君不见、玉环飞燕皆尘土！闲愁最苦。休去倚危栏，斜阳正在，烟柳断肠处。

阔别两年，再回小轩，依旧芳草青青，手也有些发痒了，忍不住在键盘上飞舞。古语说言为心声，字如其人，blog的兴衰变迁，又何尝不是人的心境写照呢？

 

今天，在2008的末尾，偶然让我想起这块许久未入的小屋，进来居然收获一个意外，一年没有联系大学好友也在MSN开了blog，而且已经更了半年了。看到熟悉的文字，一下子又拉近了大家因距离而产生的疏离感，世界瞬间从大洋彼岸的几千公里因由网络而变得那么小，当年的牌友依然是那么的爽朗有趣。 

 

前两天，从email上得知，即使在美国的金融风暴中，好友们的工作也没太大问题，当然，世事依旧艰难，大家也做好了裁员的准备，行事不妨低调些，不过，心中保有一份希望和快乐，总会收获属于你的幸福。

 

再一条好消息，明天是布老虎的婚礼了。祝福她和她的honey永远快乐！

 

所以说，人生，总是充满着惊喜，快乐的享受这个意外吧，别懊恼错过太多的风景，也许，冥冥中自有天意，有缘人就在身边。