Stay hungry, stay foolish
Estou honrado por estar com vocês hoje para a colação de uma das melhores universidades do mundo. Verdade seja dita, eu nunca me graduei e isto é o mais próximo que eu cheguei de uma graduação.
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.
Hoje eu quero contá-los três histórias da minha vida. É só.
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it.
A primeira história é sobre ligar os pontos.Eu larguei o Reed College depois dos primeiros seis meses mas fiquei por lá por mais uns dezoito meses antes de realmente largar.
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.
Por que eu larguei? Isso começou antes de eu nascer. Minha mãe biológica era solteira, jovem e universitária, e decidiu me colocar para adoção.
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.
Ela queria muito que eu fosse adotado por formados, e tudo estava certo para que eu fosse adotado ao nascer por um advogado e sua esposa, exceto que quando eu apareci, eles mudaram de idéia na última hora e decidiram que eles realmente queriam uma menina.
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.
Então meus pais, que estavam em uma lista de espera, receberam uma ligação no meio da noite perguntando, "Nós temos um bebê inesperado. Vocês o querem?" Eles disseram "é claro". Minha mãe biológica descobriu depois que minha mãe nunca se formou na universidade e que meu pai não tinha nem se graduado no colégio.
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.
Ela se recusou a assinar os papéis da adoção. Ela só se convenceu alguns meses depois quando meus pais a prometeram que eu iria para a universidade.
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.
Este foi o início da minha vida. E dezessete anos depois, eu acabei indo pra faculdade, mas inocentemente escolhi uma universidade quase tão cara quanto Stanford, e todas as economias dos meus pais de classe média estavam sendo gastos na minha educação.
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.
Depois de seis meses, eu não conseguia ver o valor da coisa toda. Eu nao tinha idéia do que fazer com a minha vida, e nenhuma idéia de como ir para a faculdade ia me ajudar a descobrir, e aqui eu estava, gastando todo o dinheiro que meus pais tinham economizado a vida toda.
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.
Então eu decidi trancar a matrícula e confiar que tudo estaria bem. Foi bem assustador na época, mas em retrospecto, foi uma das melhores decisões que eu já tomei.
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.
No minuto em que eu saí, eu pude parar de atender as aulas obrigatórias que não me interessavam e começar a aparecer nas que pareciam bem mais interessantes. Não foi algo necessariamente romântico.
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.
Eu não tinha um quarto, então eu dormi no chão do quarto de amigos. Eu devolvia garrafas de Coca-Cola por cinco centavos para comprar comida, e andava sete milhas atravessando a cidade todo domingo para conseguir uma refeição decente no templo Hare Krishna.
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.
Eu adorei. E muito do que eu tinha encontrado meramente seguindo minha curiosidade e intuição acabaram sendo imprescindíveis no futuro.
I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.
Permita-me dá-los um exemplo. O Reed College na época tinha um dos melhores cursos em caligrafia do país.
Let me give you one example.
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.
Pelo campus, todo poster e toda etiqueta em cada gaveta era lindo e caligrafado. Como eu tinha trancado minha matrícula e não tinha que assistir às aulas obrigatórias, eu decidi atender a uma aula sobre caligrafia e aprender a fazer isso.
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 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.
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.
Minha segunda história é sobre amor e perda. Eu tive sorte.
My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky.
Eu achei
I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was twenty.
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.
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.
Eu tinha sido rejeitado mas ainda amava. E então eu decidi começar do zero.
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.
Eu estou bem certo de que nada disso teria acontecido se eu não tivesse sido despedido da Apple. Foi um remédio bem amargo, mas acho que o paciente estava precisando.
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.
Seu trabalho irá preencher uma grande parte de sua vida, e a única maneira de estar verdadeiramente satisfeito é fazendo aquilo que você acredita que seja um trabalho excelente, e única maneira de fazer um trabalho excelente é amando o quê você faz.
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.