The first story: about how the dots in life are connected.
I stayed at Reed College for six months and then dropped out. Before leaving school, I dropped out of school for eighteen months. Then why did I drop out of school?
This has to start before I was born. My biological mother is a graduate student, a young unmarried mother, and she decided to let others adopt me. She felt strongly that I should be adopted by a college graduate, so when I was born, she was going to let me be adopted by a lawyer and his wife. But the couple backed out at the last minute. They want to adopt this girl.
So a couple on the waiting list, my adoptive parents, got a phone call in the middle of the night asking if they had an unexpected boy. Do you want to adopt him? Their answer is of course. Later, my biological mother found out that my current mother didn't graduate from college and my current father didn't even graduate from high school. She refused to sign the adoption papers at last. It was not until a few months later that my adoptive parents agreed that I must go to college in the future that she softened her attitude.
Seventeen years later, I went to college. But at that time, I chose a university with almost as expensive tuition as Stanford, and all the savings of working-class parents were spent on my tuition. After six months, I don't see the value of reading this book. At that time, I didn't know what I was going to do in my life, and I didn't know what the university would do for me, and I spent all my parents' savings in my life to study this book.
So I decided to drop out of school and believe that when we cross the bridge, we will solve it. It looked terrible at the time, but now it seems that this is one of the best decisions I have made in my life. If you drop out of school, you don't have to go to compulsory courses that you are not interested in, but spend your time listening to those courses that you are interested in.
This is not romantic at all. I don't have a dormitory, so I sleep on the floor of my friend's house and buy food with five shillings from recycling empty coke cans. Every Sunday night, I walk seven miles around half the town and go to the Hindu temple HareKrishna to eat delicious food. I like the good materials of Hari Krishna Temple.
Following my curiosity and intuition, most of the things I stopped at turned out to be priceless. For example, Reed College had the best calligraphy teaching in the country at that time. There are beautiful handwriting on every poster and label in every drawer of the whole campus. Because I dropped out of school, I went to learn calligraphy without going through the normal course selection procedure. I learned serif and sanserif fonts, changed the spacing between different letter combinations and learned the greatness of letterpress printing. The sense of beauty, history and art of calligraphy can't be captured by science, and I find it fascinating.
I didn't expect that what I learned would play any practical role in my life, but ten years later, when I was designing the first Macintosh computer, I remembered what I learned at that time, so I designed all these things into the Macintosh computer, which was the first computer that could print beautiful things. If I hadn't indulged in this class, Macintosh might not have multiple fonts and variable spacing fonts. And because Windows copied the way Macintosh was used, if I hadn't done it at that time, probably all the personal computers in the world wouldn't have these things and couldn't print the beautiful words we see now. Of course, when I was still in college, it was impossible to string these points together in advance, but looking back ten years later, it became very clear. I repeat, you can't string the dots in advance; Only when you look back in the future will you understand how those dots are strung together.
So you have to believe that what you are experiencing now will be more or less related in the future. You have to believe in something, whether it's intuition, fate, life or karma. This practice has never let me down. It has changed my life dramatically.
My second story: about love and loss.
I am lucky-I discovered what I like to do when I was young. When I was twenty, Steve Wozniak and I started Apple Computer Company in my parents' garage. We work hard. In ten years, Apple Computer has grown from two boys in a garage to a company with more than 4,000 employees and a market value of $2 billion. A year before that, we released our best work-Macintosh. I just entered the thirtieth year of my life, and then I was fired.
How can I get my company to fire me?
For months, I really didn't know what to do. I feel that I have let down my business predecessors-I lost the baton they gave me. I met david packard, the founder of HP, and bob noyce, the founder of Intel, and told them that I am sorry for making things so bad. I have become a very negative role model for the public, and I even want to leave Silicon Valley. But gradually, I found that I still love what I do, and the events I experienced in my days at Apple have not changed what I love to do at all. I was rejected, but I still love doing those things, so I decided to start from scratch.
Well, when Apple Computer grew up, I hired a guy who I thought was very talented in running the company. He did well in the first few years. However, we have different visions for the future, and finally we have to go our separate ways. The board of directors supported him, fired me and publicly invited me out. What used to be the focus of my whole adult life is gone, which makes me feel at a loss.
I didn't notice it at the time, but now it seems that being fired from Apple Computer is the best thing that has ever happened to me. The heaviness of success has been replaced by the lightness of starting from scratch, and everything is not so certain, so that I can freely enter the most creative era in my life.
In the NeXT five years, I started a company called Next and another company called Pixar, and I also fell in love with my later wife. Pixar went on to make the world's first fully computer-animated film Toy Story, and now it is the most successful animation production company in the world. Then, Apple bought NeXT, and I went back to Apple. The technology we developed at NeXT became the core of Apple's later revival. I also have a wonderful family.
I'm pretty sure that none of this would have happened if Apple hadn't fired me. This medicine has a bitter taste, but I think the patient's Apple computer needs this medicine. Sometimes, life will hit you on the head with a brick. Don't lose heart. I'm sure I love what I do, which is the only reason why I keep on doing it all these years. You have to find out what you love, whether at work or for your lover.
Your job will occupy a large part of your life. The only way to get real satisfaction is to do what you think is great, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found these things, keep looking and don't stop. Do your best, you know you will find it. Moreover, like any great thing, as time goes on, things will only get better and better. So, before you find it, keep looking and don't stop.
My third story: about death
When I was seventeen, I read a proverb, which seemed to say, "Treat every day as if it were your last, and you will relax." . This has had a profound impact on me. 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, what would I do today?" Every time I get the answer "nothing to do" for too many days in a row, I know I'm going to change.
Reminding myself that I am going to die is the most important tool I have used to make important decisions in my life. Because almost everything-all external expectations, all fame, all fear of embarrassment or failure-disappears in the face of death, and only the most important things will remain. Remind myself that I'm dying, which is the best way I know to avoid falling into the trap that I will lose something. Life does not bring, death does not bring, there is no reason not to do what you want to do.
I was diagnosed with cancer a year ago. At 7: 30 in the morning, a CT scan was performed, and a tumor obviously appeared in the pancreas. I don't even know what a pancreas is. The doctor told me that it is almost certainly an incurable disease, and it will probably not live for three to six months. The doctor advised me to go home and get together with my relatives. This is the doctor's standard advice to dying patients. That means you should try to finish what you want to tell your children in the next ten years in a few months. This means that you must do everything well so that your family can relax as much as possible. This means that you must say goodbye to someone.
I've been thinking about the diagnosis all day I made one that night. I inserted an endoscope from my throat, from my stomach to my intestines, inserted a needle in my pancreas and took out some tumor cells. I was sedated and lost consciousness, but my wife was there. She later told me that when the doctor looked at those cells with a microscope, they all cried, because this is a very rare pancreatic cancer that can be cured by surgery. So I had an operation and recovered.
This is the closest I have ever been to death, and I hope it will continue to be the closest in the next few decades. With this experience, I can tell you the following with more certainty than before, when death was only an abstract concept:
Nobody wants to die. Even those who want to go to heaven want to go to heaven alive. But death is our destination, and no one can escape. This is doomed, because death is simply the best invention in life, the medium of life change, sending away the old people and leaving room for the new generation. Now you are a new generation, but in the near future, you will gradually get old and be sent off the stage of life. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's true.
When I was a child, there was a magical magazine called Global Catalog, and we were fascinated by this miscellaneous book. It was published by a Stuart Brand who lives in Menlo Park not far from here. He makes the magazine poetic. That was in the late1960s. Before the invention of personal computers and desktop publishing, everything was made by typewriters, scissors and polaroid cameras. Magazine content is a bit like Google printed on paper, which existed 35 years before Google appeared: idealized, full of novel tools and magical notes.
Stuart and his publishing team published several issues of the Global Catalogue, and then published the issue number. It was1mid-1970s, and I am as old as you now. On the back cover of the closed period, there is a picture of a country road in the morning, which is the kind of country road you will pass when you climb the mountain. There is a small print below the photo: thirst for knowledge, modesty and ignorance. This is their handwritten farewell letter, which I have always promised myself. When you graduate and start a new life, I hope you do the same.
Hungry for knowledge, modest and foolish.
Stay hungry and stay stupid! )