帕洛阿尔托高中演讲

原文标题: Speech at Palo Alto High School

背景: 1996年6月，史蒂夫在帕洛阿尔托高中毕业典礼上演讲。

主题: "你用心追随的东西确实会回来让你的生活更加丰富"

核心概念

  1. 直觉的力量 (Power of Intuition) - 倾听和培养内心直觉
  2. 彩虹人生 (Rainbow of Life) - 人生如彩虹划过天空
  3. 错误vs后悔 (Mistakes vs Regrets) - 区分行动与遗漏的遗憾
  4. 职业的批判 (Critique of Career) - 不要让职业定义你的人生
  5. 旅程是奖励 (Journey is the Reward) - 跨越彩虹的过程比金罐更有价值
  6. 面对死亡 (Facing Death) - 知道弧线会落下，所以尽情闪耀

内容

中文翻译

我今天被邀请来这里，在你们高中毕业时向你们讲话，在大多数情况下也是你们父母的毕业，独自冒险进入世界。我应该给你们一些智慧和建议，你们可能会在旅途中记住。

我将向你们学生讲话，而不是向你们的父母。我这样做是适当的，因为我唯一的智慧来自我的高龄；你们的父母和我一样大，而且肯定更明智，我确信。

然而，我比你们更明智，也许你们会比听父母更听我的。你们的一些父母可能不同意或完全不同意我今天要说的。这没关系。我将成为你们高中毕业后生活中第一个用他们不同意的想法填满你们脑袋的人。等你们上大学！但是，无论如何，如果他们告诉你们的和你们今天从我这里听到的之间有任何不和谐，放心我是对的。

注意世界的神奇、神秘和艺术面。生活中最重要的事情不是目标导向的、物质主义的东西，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。回想这个春天——过去三四个月——当你们结束高中，知道明年要去哪里，开始真正对你们将遇到的世界有强烈的直觉。也许你看到自己在巴黎，在艺术家的工作室里雕塑，夕阳透过窗格照进来。也许你在印度，为贫困儿童经营医院，你在清晨听到远处户外市场的喧嚣。也许你看到自己在录音室里为你的专辑录制音轨。也许你看到自己在凌晨4:30独自一人在租来的房间里，是唯一活着理解你刚刚发现的新物理定律的人。

无论是什么，我打赌你们很多人都有一些关于你们可以用生活做什么的直觉感受。这些感受非常真实，如果培养可以发展成美好和神奇的东西。记住这些直觉感受的一个好方法是在日落时分独自散步——并花很多时间看天空。我们从未被教导要倾听我们的直觉，去发展和培养我们的直觉。但如果你注意这些微妙的洞察，你可以让它们成真。

人们会带着为什么你不应该做这些事的理由来找你：

你不能靠写歌谋生。（对，问问鲍勃·迪伦。）

在印度帮助儿童很好，但你需要为现实生活做准备。（只是问问特蕾莎修女。）

你可以用你的生命做更多的事。（你可以听到阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦的父母鼓励他找份真正的工作，当他正在瑞士专利局做一份低级工作而不是在大学教书，这样他就可以熬夜工作他的新想法。）

如果你没有这些叫做梦想的感受，那你就有麻烦了。在你"花费"四年或更多年的时间走向你的内心可能想或不想让你去的方向之前，你需要重新捕捉它们。

做一个有创意的人。创意等于连接别人看不到的以前不相关的经历和洞察。

你必须拥有它们才能连接它们。有创意的人感到内疚，他们只是传递他们"看到"的东西。你如何获得更不同的经历？不是走和其他人一样的路……

我给你举个例子。我上的大学是俄勒冈州波特兰的一所小型文理学院，叫里德学院。那时，它是美国书法复兴运动的中心。我离开大学前最终上了一个书法课程，18岁时接触到一个全新的排版、图形布局、字体设计等世界。从这个技能或知识中没有希望赚取任何收入，我的一些朋友嘲笑我浪费时间学习如何用"花哨的字母"写字。

然而，多年后，当我们设计麦金塔时，正是这段经历和这组洞察驱使我要找到一种方法来使用比例间距类型并提供一系列字体——本质上，是给计算机世界带来比以往任何时候都更丰富的排版世界。这也导致了LaserWriter打印机，以便人们可以用它们应得的质量打印这些字形。这为"桌面出版"奠定了基础。我真心告诉你：如果我没有牺牲那个书法课去上更"实质"的经济学或工程学课程，苹果不会发生这一切。

所以要成为一个有创意的人，你需要"喂养"或"投资"自己，通过探索你过去经验领域之外的未知路径。寻找新的自我维度——尤其是那些带有浪漫气息的东西。

但一个人无法提前知道这些路径中哪些会通向任何地方。从某种意义上说，这就是它的美妙之处。一个人唯一能做的就是相信，你用心追随的一些东西确实会回来让你的生活更加丰富。它会的。你会对你的本能和直觉获得越来越坚定的信任。

不要做一个职业。大多数梦想和直觉的敌人，以及人类发明的最危险和最压抑的概念之一，就是"职业"。职业是一个概念，关于一个人应该如何在其工作生活培训和实践中逐步前进。

这里有一些大问题。首先也是最重要的是你的工作与你的其他生活不同和分离的概念。如果你对你的生活和工作充满激情，这不可能是这样。它们会变得或多或少是一体的。这是一种更好的生活方式。

当你遇到现实世界时，风险系数下降。许多人[找到]他们认为是安全的港湾（律师和会计师），只是十年或十五年后醒来发现他们付出的代价。

让你的爱好成为你的职业。让你爱的成为你的。

旅程是奖励。人们认为当你到达彩虹尽头拿到金罐时你就成功了。但他们错了。奖励在跨越彩虹中。这对我来说很容易说——我拿到了金罐（字面上）。但如果你拿到了金罐，你已经知道那不是奖励，你去找另一条彩虹跨越。

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

每个人彩虹的两个端点是出生和死亡。我们都完全独自经历这两者。然而，你们这个年龄段的大多数人都没有想太多这些事件，更不用说在其他人身上看到它们。你们中有多少人见过另一个人类的出生？这是一个奇迹。你们中有多少人见证过一个人的死亡？它是我们无法理解的神秘。活着的人没有一个知道我们死亡时或之后"我们"会发生什么。有些人相信这个，其他人相信那个，但没有人真正完全知道。同样，你们这个年龄段的大多数人都没有想太多这些事件，好像我们庇护你们免受它们的影响，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：知道我的弧线会落下让我在天空中时想要闪耀。不是为了别人，而是为我自己，为了我知道我正在留下的轨迹。

现在，当你在生活中划过天空时，你想尽可能少地后悔。记住，后悔与错误不同。错误是你做了并希望你可以重做的事。有些你曾是傻瓜（通常关于女人）。有些你害怕。有些你伤害了别人。有些错误很深，其他的不。但如果你的意图是纯粹的，它们几乎总是以某种方式丰富。所以错误是你做了并希望你可以重做的事。

后悔通常是你没做的事，希望你做了。我仍然后悔高中时没吻南希·金尼曼。谁知道会发生什么？也许她也后悔……

英文原文

Speech at Palo Alto High School, Make Something Wonderful

Speech at Palo Alto High School

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.)

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.

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

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…

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 too…

思考与洞察

引用此页面的内容
目录
面对死亡
错误vs后悔
职业的批判
直觉的力量
旅程是奖励
彩虹人生