1996-06 Steve Jobs.Speech at Palo Alto High School

“What you follow with your heart will indeed come back to make your life much richer.”

“你用心追随的东西，确实会回到你身边，让你的生活更加丰富。”

Steve spoke at the Palo Alto High School graduation in June 1996.

史蒂夫在 1996 年 6 月的帕洛阿尔托高中毕业典礼上发言。

I have been invited here today to address you as you leave high school, and in most cases your parents, too, to venture out into the world on your own. I am supposed to offer you some wisdom and advice that you may remember along your travels.

我今天受邀在这里与你们交流，作为你们高中毕业之际的寄语，同时也包括你们的父母，鼓励你们独自走向世界。我应该给你们提供一些智慧和建议，希望你们在旅途中能够铭记。

I will address my remarks to you, the students, rather than to your parents. It is proper that I do so, being that the only wisdom I have comes from my advanced age; your parents are as old as I am, and much wiser, I am sure.

我将把我的讲话针对你们，学生，而不是你们的父母。这样做是合适的，因为我所拥有的唯一智慧来自于我的高龄；你们的父母和我一样大，我相信他们更聪明。

However, I am wiser than you, and maybe you will listen to me more than you listen to your parents. Some of your parents may not agree, or agree fully, with what I will say today. This is OK. I will simply be one of the first in your post-high-school life to fill your head with ideas that they disagree with. Wait until you get to college! But, in any event, if there is any discordance between what they have told you and what you hear from me today, rest assured that I am right.

然而，我比你更聪明，也许你会比听你父母的话更听我的话。你的一些父母可能不同意，或者完全同意我今天要说的内容。这没关系。我将只是你高中毕业后生活中第一个让你充满他们不同意的想法的人。等你上大学吧！但是，无论如何，如果他们告诉你的内容和你今天从我这里听到的内容之间有任何不一致，请放心，我是对的。

Be aware of the world’s magical, mystical, and artistic sides. The most important things in life are not the goal-oriented, materialistic things that everyone and everything tries to convince you to strive for. Most of you know that deep inside. Think back on this spring—the last three or four months—when you are winding down high school, know where you are going next year, and begin to really have strong intuitions about the world you will encounter. Maybe you see an image of yourself in Paris, sculpting in an artist’s studio as the setting sun shines in the paned windows. Maybe you’re in India, running a hospital for poor children, and you hear the distant clatter of the outdoor marketplace in the early morning. Maybe you see yourself in a recording studio laying down a track for your album. Maybe you see yourself alone in a rented room at 4:30 in the morning being the only person alive to understand a new law of physics you just figured out.

意识到世界的魔幻、神秘和艺术的一面。生活中最重要的事情并不是那些目标导向、物质主义的东西，这些东西让每个人和每件事都试图说服你去追求。你们大多数人内心深处都知道这一点。回想一下这个春天——过去的三四个月——当你们即将结束高中，知道明年要去哪里，并开始真正对你们将要遇到的世界有强烈的直觉。也许你想象自己在巴黎，在艺术家的工作室里雕刻，夕阳透过窗户洒进来。也许你在印度，经营一家为贫困儿童服务的医院，清晨听到远处市场的喧闹声。也许你想象自己在录音室里为自己的专辑录制一首曲子。也许你想象自己在凌晨四点半的租房里，成为唯一一个理解你刚刚弄明白的新物理定律的人。

Whatever it may be, I bet many of you have had some of these intuitive feelings about what you could do with your lives. These feelings are very real, and if nurtured can blossom into something wonderful and magical. A good way to remember these kinds of intuitive feelings is to walk alone near sunset—and spend a lot of time looking at the sky in general. We are never taught to listen to our intuitions, to develop and nurture our intuitions. But if you do pay attention to these subtle insights, you can make them come true.

无论是什么，我敢打赌你们中的许多人对自己的人生都有一些直觉上的感受。这些感受非常真实，如果得到滋养，可以绽放成美好而神奇的事物。记住这些直觉感受的一个好方法是，在日落时分独自散步——并花很多时间观察天空。我们从未被教导去倾听自己的直觉，去发展和滋养我们的直觉。但如果你关注这些微妙的洞察力，你可以让它们成真。

People will come at you with reasons why you shouldn’t do these things:

人们会给你理由，告诉你为什么不应该做这些事情：

You can’t make a living writing songs. (Right, just ask Bob Dylan.)

你无法通过写歌谋生。（对，问问鲍勃·迪伦就知道了。）

Helping children in India is nice, but you need to prepare for real life. (Just ask Mother Teresa.)

帮助印度的孩子们是件好事，但你需要为现实生活做好准备。（问问特蕾莎修女就知道。）

You could be doing so much more with your life. (You can hear Albert Einstein’s parents encouraging him to get a real job, when he was working a low-level job in the Swiss patent office rather than teaching in a university, so that he could stay up late at night working through his new ideas.)

你可以在生活中做更多的事情。（你可以听到阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦的父母在鼓励他找一份真正的工作，当时他在瑞士专利局做低级工作，而不是在大学教书，这样他才能在晚上熬夜思考他的新的想法。）

If you don’t have any of these feelings, called dreams, then you’re in trouble. Before you “spend” four or more years of your life going in a direction your heart may or may not want you to go, you need to recapture them.

如果你没有这些被称为梦想的感觉，那么你就有麻烦了。在你“花费”四年或更多的时间朝着你内心可能想去或可能不想去的方向前进之前，你需要重新找回它们。

Be a creative person. Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights that others don’t see.

成为一个有创造力的人。创造力等于将以前无关的经历和见解连接起来，而这些是其他人看不到的。

You have to have them to connect them. Creative people feel guilty that they are simply relaying what they “see.” How do you get a more diverse set of experiences? Not by traveling the same path as everyone else …

你必须拥有它们才能连接它们。创造性的人感到内疚，因为他们只是转述他们“看到”的东西。你如何获得更丰富多样的经历？不是通过走与其他人相同的道路……

I’ll give you an example. The college I went to was a small liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, named Reed College. It was, at that time, the center of a calligraphy revival movement in the US. I ended up taking a calligraphy course before I left college, and at the age of eighteen was exposed to a totally new world of typography, graphic layout, font design, and the like. There was no hope of earning any income from this skill or knowledge, and some of my friends derided me for wasting my time and talents on learning how to write with “fancy letters.”

我给你举个例子。我上过的大学是位于俄勒冈州波特兰的一所小型文理学院，名为里德学院。那时，它是美国书法复兴运动的中心。我在离开大学之前选修了一门书法课程，十八岁时接触到了一个全新的排版、图形布局、字体设计等世界。凭借这项技能或知识没有任何收入的希望，我的一些朋友嘲笑我浪费时间和才能去学习如何用“花哨的字母”书写。

However, years later, when we were designing the Macintosh, it was this very same experience and set of insights which drove me to insist that we find a way to use proportionally spaced type and offer a range of fonts—in essence, to bring a much richer world of typography to the computer world than had ever existed before. And this also led to the LaserWriter printer, so that one could print these letterforms with the quality they deserved. And this set the stage for “desktop publishing.” I tell you truly: none of this would have ever happened at Apple if I had sacrificed that calligraphy class for a more “substantive” class of economics or engineering.

然而，几年后，当我们设计 Macintosh 时，正是这段经历和一系列见解促使我坚持要找到一种方法，使用比例间距的字体并提供多种字体——本质上，是为了将一个比以往任何时候都更丰富的排版世界带入计算机世界。这也导致了 LaserWriter 打印机的出现，使得人们能够以应有的质量打印这些字形。这为“桌面出版”奠定了基础。我告诉你，真的：如果我为了更“实质性”的经济学或工程学课程而放弃了那门书法课，这一切在苹果公司都不会发生。

So to be a creative person, you need to “feed” or “invest” in yourself by exploring uncharted paths that are outside the realm of your past experience. Seek out new dimensions of yourself—especially those that carry a romantic scent.

要成为一个有创造力的人，你需要通过探索超出过去经验范围的未知领域来“滋养”或“投资”自己。寻找自己新的维度——尤其是那些带有浪漫气息的维度。

But one has no way of knowing which of these paths will lead anywhere in advance. That’s the wonderful thing about it, in a way. The only thing one can do is to believe that some of what you follow with your heart will indeed come back to make your life much richer. And it will. And you will gain an ever firmer trust in your instincts and intuition.

但人们无法提前知道这些路径中的哪一条会通向某个地方。这在某种程度上是件美妙的事情。人们能做的唯一事情就是相信，跟随内心的一些东西确实会让你的生活变得更加丰富。而且它会。你将对自己的直觉和本能获得越来越坚定的信任。

Don’t be a career. The enemy of most dreams and intuitions, and one of the most dangerous and stifling concepts ever invented by humans, is the “Career.” A career is a concept for how one is supposed to progress through stages during the training for and practicing of your working life.

不要把职业当作人生。职业是阻碍大多数梦想和直觉的敌人，以及人类有史以来发明的最危险和压抑的概念之一，就是“职业”。职业是一个关于人们在工作生活的培训和实践中应该如何逐步发展的概念。

There are some big problems here. First and foremost is the notion that your work is different and separate from the rest of your life. If you are passionate about your life and your work, this can’t be so. They will become more or less one. This is a much better way to live one’s life.

这里有一些大问题。首先，最重要的是你工作的概念与生活的其他部分是不同和分开的。如果你对生活和工作充满热情，这就不可能。他们会或多或少地合为一体。这是一种更好的生活方式。

[The] risk factor quotient goes down as you encounter the real world. Many [people] find what they believe to be safe harbors (lawyers and accountants), only to wake up ten or fifteen years later and discover the price they paid.

[当你进入现实世界时，风险系数就会下降。许多人]找到了他们认为安全的港湾（律师和会计师），但十年或十五年后一觉醒来，才发现自己付出了巨大的代价。

Make your avocation your vocation. Make what you love your work.

将你的爱好变成职业。将你所爱的变成工作。

The journey is the reward. People think that you’ve made it when you’ve gotten to the end of the rainbow and got the pot of gold. But they’re wrong. The reward is in the crossing the rainbow. That’s easy for me to say—I got the pot of gold (literally). But if you get to the pot of gold, you already know that that’s not the reward, and you go looking for another rainbow to cross.

旅程就是回报。人们认为，当你到达彩虹的尽头，得到一桶金时，你就成功了。但他们错了。收获在于跨越彩虹。这对我来说很容易--我得到了金罐（字面意思）。但如果你到达了金罐，你就已经知道那不是奖赏，你就会去寻找另一道彩虹来跨越。

Think of your life as a rainbow arcing across the horizon of this world. You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.

把你的生活想象成一道彩虹，横跨这个世界的地平线。你出现，有机会在天空中闪耀，然后你消失。

The two endpoints of everyone’s rainbow are birth and death. We all experience both completely alone. And yet, most people of your age have not thought about these events very much, much less even seen them in others. How many of you have seen the birth of another human? It is a miracle. And how many of you have witnessed the death of a human? It is a mystery beyond our comprehension. No human alive knows what happens to “us” upon or after our death. Some believe this, others that, but no one really knows at all. Again, most people of your age have not thought about these events very much, and it’s as if we shelter you from them, afraid that the thought of mortality will somehow wound you. For me it’s the opposite: to know my arc will fall makes me want to blaze while I am in the sky. Not for others, but for myself, for the trail I know I am leaving.

每个人的彩虹的两个端点是出生和死亡。我们都完全孤独地经历这两者。然而，你们这个年龄的大多数人并没有太多思考这些事件，更不用说在他人身上看到它们了。你们中有多少人见证过另一个人的出生？这是一种奇迹。又有多少人目睹过一个人的死亡？这是一种超出我们理解的神秘。活着的人没有人知道在我们死亡时或之后会发生什么。“我们”会发生什么。有些人相信这个，有些人相信那个，但没有人真的知道。再说一次，你们这个年龄的大多数人并没有太多思考这些事件，似乎我们在保护你们，害怕死亡的想法会以某种方式伤害你们。对我来说恰恰相反：知道我的弧线将会落下让我想在天空中燃烧。不是为了他人，而是为了我自己，为了我知道我正在留下的轨迹。

Now, as you live your arc across the sky, you want to have as few regrets as possible. Remember, regrets are different from mistakes. Mistakes are those things that you did and wish you could do over again. In some you were a fool (usually concerning women). In others you were scared. In others you hurt someone else. Some mistakes are deep, others not. But if your intent was pure, they are almost always enriching in some way. So mistakes are things that you did and wish you could do over again.

现在，当你在天空中生活你的弧线时，你希望尽可能少有遗憾。记住，遗憾与错误是不同的。错误是你做过的事情，想要重做的事情。在某些情况下，你是个傻瓜（通常是关于女人的）。在其他情况下，你感到害怕。在其他情况下，你伤害了别人。有些错误是深刻的，有些则不是。但如果你的意图是纯洁的，它们几乎总是在某种程度上是有益的。因此，错误是你做过的事情，想要重做的事情。

Regrets are most often things you didn’t do, and wish you did. I still regret not kissing Nancy Kinniman in high school. Who knows what might have happened? Maybe she regrets it too …

遗憾通常是你没有做的事情，而希望你做过。我仍然遗憾在高中没有吻南希·金尼曼。谁知道会发生什么呢？也许她也遗憾……

1996-06 Steve Jobs.Speech at Palo Alto High School

1996-06 Steve Jobs.Speech at Palo Alto High School

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