Stay hungry, stay foolish
Es ist mir eine Ehre heute mit euch hier zu sein, zur Eröffnung einer der feinsten Universitäten der Welt. Um bei der Wahrheit zu bleiben, ich habe nie das College absolviert und dies ist das nächste das ich jemals an einem Collegeabschluß war.
I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.
Heute will ich euch drei Geschichten aus meinem Leben erzaehlen. Das ist alles.
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it.
Die erste geschichte geht um das verbinden von Punkten. Ich brach das Reed College nach den ersten 6 Monaten ab aber ich blieb ich als Störenfried weitere 18 Monate oder so da, bevor ich aufhörte.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit.
Weshalb brach ich also ab? Es began bevor ich geboren wurde. Meine biologische Mutter war jung, unverheiratete Aufbaustudentin, und sie entschloß sich mich zur Adoption freizugeben.
So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption.
Meine Mutter war davon überzeugt, daß ich von akademisch gebildeten Personen adoptiert werden sollte. Alles war bereits dafür vorbereitet, daß ich direkt nach meiner Geburt von einem Rechtsanwalt und seiner Ehefrau adoptiert werden sollte. Aber als ich dann auf die Welt kam, änderte das Paar seine Meinung und hätte lieber ein Mädchen adoptiert.
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 erhielten meine Eltern, die auf einer Warteliste standen, eines Nachts einen Anruf: "Wir haben unerwartet einen Jungen erhalten. Wollen Sie ihn?" Meine Eltern sagten "Natürlich!"Später fand meine biologische Mutter heraus, dass meine Mutter niemals ein College besucht hatte, und dass mein Vater nicht einmal die Highschool beendet hatte.
So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school.
Sie verweigerte die Unterschrift unter die Adoptionsfreigabe. Sie gab erst auf, als meine Eltern nach ein paar Monaten versprachen, mir eine Universitätsausbildung zu ermöglichen.
She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.
Das war mein Start ins Leben. Siebzehn Jahre später ging ich tatsächlich aufs College. Ich hatte mich aber naiv für ein College entschieden, das fast so kostspielig war wie Stanford, und die gesamten Ersparnisse meiner Arbeiter-Eltern mussten für meine Studiengebühren herhalten.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely 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.
Nach sechs Monaten konnte ich darin keinen Sinn mehr erkennen. Ich hatte keine Idee, was ich mit meinem Leben anfangen wollte, keine Idee, wie das College mir helfen konnte meinen Weg zu finden, und hier stand ich und gab das Geld aus, für das meine Eltern ein Leben lang gespart hatten.
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 of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life.
Also entschied ich mich dazu auszusteigen und vertraute darin, daß alles in Ordnung sein würde. Es war damals ziemlich angsterregend. Wenn ich aber zurückschaue ist es eine der besten Entscheidungen, die ich je getroffen habe.
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.
Sobald ich ausgestiegen war, brauchte ich die Pflichtkurse, die mich nicht interessierten, nicht mehr zu besuchen, und ich hatte Zeit, in die Kurse hineinzuschnuppern, die mich wirklich interessierten. Es war aber nicht nur romantisch.
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 far more interesting.
It wasn't all romantic.
Ich hatte kein Zimmer, so schlief ich bei Freunden auf dem Fußboden. Ich sammelte Pfandflaschen und brachte sie zurück, um mir von dem Geld zu essen zu kaufen, und jeden Sonntag abend ging ich sieben Meilen quer durch die Stadt, um am Hare Krishna Tempel eine vernünftige Mahlzeit zu bekommen.
I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.
Ich liebte es! Vieles, auf das ich durch meine Neugier und durch meine Intuition aufmerksam wurde stellte sich später als unbeschreiblich wertvoll für mich heraus.
I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.
Lasst mich Euch ein Beispiel nennen:Damals boot das Reed College die besten Kalligraphie-Kurse des Landes an.
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.
Ich habe Schriften mit und ohne Serifen kennengelernt, habe gelernt, den Raum zwischen einzelnen Buchstabenkombinationen zu variieren, habe gelernt, was Typographie so großartig macht.
I learned about serif and sans-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.
Aber zehn Jahr später, als wir den ersten Macintosh-Computer entwarfen, fiel mir dies alles wieder ein, und all das habe ich ich in dem Mac mit eingebracht. Es war der erste Computer mit wundervoller Typographie.
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, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals 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 10 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—because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
Meine zweite Geschichte handelt sich um die Liebe und den Verlust. Ich hatte Glück.
My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky.
Früh im Leben hatte ich gefunden, was ich gerne tue. Als ich zwanzig Jahre alt war, in der Garage meiner Eltern, haben Woz und ich Apple gegründet.
I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was twenty.
Wir haben hart gearbeitet und innerhalb von 10 Jahren ist Apple von zwei Leuten in einer Garage zu einer 2 Millionen schweren Firma mit 4000 Mitarbeitern gewachsen. Wir hatten gerade unsere beste Kreation, den Macintosh, vor einem Jahr auf den Markt gebracht, ich war gerade 30 geworden, da wurde ich gefeuert.
We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired.
Wie kann man denn von einer Firma gefeuert werden, die man selbst gegründet hat? Na gut, als Apple größer wurde, haben wir jemanden angeheuert von dem ich dachte, er wäre talentiert genug, mit mir die Firma zu leiten; und ungefähr ein Jahr lief die Sache auch gut.
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, and so at thirty, 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.
Ich liebte immer noch, was ich getan hatte. Die Wendung der Dinge bei Apple hatten daran kein bisschen geändert.
I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit.
Ich war zwar zurückgestoßen worden, aber ich liebte es immer noch. Und so habe ich mich entschlossen, noch einmal von vorne anzufangen.
I'd 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 in 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 world's 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 and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene 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.
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 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.