重生之神龙传人阅读:“苹果”电脑创始人乔布斯在斯坦福大...(A:27)

Thank you. I am honored to be with you today at your commencementfrom one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated fromcollege. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to acollege 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 thenstayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I reallyquit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwedcollege graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption.She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, soeverything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer andhis wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minutethat they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waitinglist, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have anunexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." Mybiological mother later found out that my mother had never graduatedfrom college and that my father had never graduated from high school.She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a fewmonths later when my parents promised that I would someday go tocollege.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a collegethat was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-classparents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After sixmonths, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted todo with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure itout. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved theirentire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all workout OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one ofthe best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stoptaking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin droppingin on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on thefloor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5￠ deposits tobuy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sundaynight to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I lovedit. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity andintuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you oneexample:
ReedCollegeat that time offered perhaps the best calligraphyinstruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, everylabel on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I haddropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided totake a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serifand san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space betweendifferent letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that sciencecan'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 Macintoshcomputer, 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 neverdropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have neverhad multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windowsjust copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would havethem. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on thiscalligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderfultypography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dotslooking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clearlooking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can onlyconnect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots willsomehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — yourgut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let medown, and it has made all the difference in my life.