毕业典礼英文致词
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 dropin 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 workingclass 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 C 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 C 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 retuned 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
文档香网(httpswwwxiangdangnet)户传
《香当网》用户分享的内容，不代表《香当网》观点或立场，请自行判断内容的真实性和可靠性！
该内容是文档的文本内容，更好的格式请下载文档
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 dropin 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 workingclass 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 C 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 C 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 retuned 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
文档香网(httpswwwxiangdangnet)户传
《香当网》用户分享的内容，不代表《香当网》观点或立场，请自行判断内容的真实性和可靠性！
该内容是文档的文本内容，更好的格式请下载文档