스티브 잡스 스탠포드 연설

 

 

 

스티브 잡스가 스탠포드 대학 졸업 축사에서 얘기한 3가지 포인트

 

 

1. 어려운 상황 속에서도 꿋꿋하게 자신감을 가지세요.

   양부모님들이 모은 재산이 전부 학비로 들어가게 되자 모든것이 잘되리라 믿고 자퇴를 했습니다.

   그리곤 관심있는 강의만 골라들었습니다. (이부분에 감탄!! 공부는 계속 했던 것!!!)

   여유가 생기니 근처 리드 칼리지에서 배웠던 세리프와 산 세리프체 수업을 들었고,

   이는 고스란히 매킨토시를 구상할 때 고스란히 스며들었습니다.

  

   이로 인해 서체 선택 기능이나 자동 자간 맞춤이 생겨났고, 윈도우도 이를 모방했죠.

  

   10년이 지난 지금 전 모든게 분명하지만, 지금 여러분은 미래를 알 수 없습니다.

   그러나 현재의 순간들이 미래에 어떻게든 연결된다는 것을 알아야 합니다. (현재를 소중히 살라는 말 같았음)

   그리고 자신의 배짱, 운명 등 무엇이든지간에 대한 믿음을 가져야 합니다.

   이런 믿음이 저를 실망시킨 적은 없었습니다. (즉, 도움이 된다는 말)

   그리고 이것이 제 인생에서 남들과 다른 모든 차이점을 만들어냈습니다.

  

 

2. 실패를 두려워 말고 당신이 하고 싶은 것을 하세요~

   정말로 하고 싶은 일이라면, 공공의 실패자로 찍히던 해고당하던 그런 것은 전혀 상관이 없어집답니다.

   애플에서 쫓겨나서 넥스트, 픽사를 창업해 3D 애니메이션으로 재 성공을 이루어 냈고,

   넥스트 기술이 현재 애플의 르네상스의 중추적 역할을 하고 있습니다.

   그렇게도 독하고 쓰던 약이 있었기에 다양한 경험을 할 수 있었습니다.

 

   때로 인생이 당신의 뒷통수를 치더라고 결코 믿음만은 잃지 마십시오.

   전 반드시 인생에서 해야할 제가 사랑하는 일이 있었기에 반드시 이겨냈다고 믿습니다.

 

   당신이 사랑하는 것을 찾으세요~

   사랑하는 사람이 내게 먼저 다가오지 않듯 일도 그런법이죠~

   절대 포기하지 마세요. 현실에 주저앉지 마세요~

 

 

3. 오늘이 내 인생의 마지막 날이라면 지금 하려고 하는 일을 할 것인가? (처음부터 끝까지 일관된 포인트)

   아니오! 라는 답이 계속 나온다면 다른 것을 해야함을 깨닳았습니다.

   외부의 기대, 자부심, 수치스러움 등등은 죽으면 모두 떨어져 나가지만, 정말 중요한 것은 남습니다.

 

   죽음은 인생을 변화시킵니다. 죽음은 새로운 것이 헌것을 대체하게 합니다.

   바로 여러분들은 그 새로움이란 자리에 서 있습니다.

   그러니 언젠가 여러분들도 그 자리를 물려줘야할 것입니다. 그러니 시간을 낭비하지 마십시오.

   도그마~ 다른 사람들의 생각에 얽매이지 마십시오!

 

   타인의 소리들이 여러분들 내면의 진정한 목소리를 방해하지 못하게 하세요~

   그리고 가장 중요한 것은 마음과 영감을 따르는 용기를 가지는 것입니다.

 

   1960년대 후반, 스튜어트 브랜드란 사람은 자신의 모든 걸 불어넣어 지구백과(The Whole Earth Catalog)를

   만들었습니다. 위대한 의지와 아주 간단한 도구만으로 만들어진 역작이었습니다.

   그 당시 전 여러분 나이 때였죠. 최종판 뒤쪽 표지에는 아침 시골실 사진이 있었는데,

   아마 모험을 좋아하는 사람이라면 히치하이킹을 하고 싶다는 생각이 들 정도였어요.

   그 사진 아래 이런 말이 씌여있었습니다.

   "배고픔과 함께, 미련함과 함께"

 

   저는 이제 새로운 시작을 앞둔 여러분들이 각자 분야에서 이런 방법으로 가길 원합니다.

   배고픔과 함께, 미련함과 함께

 

   감사합니다.

 

---

 

 

영어 연설문

 

 

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 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 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 other's 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.