英语作文毕业典礼发言

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i am honored to be with you today at your mencement from one of the finest universities in the world. i never graduated from college. truth be told, this is the closest ive ever gotten to a college graduation.

today i want to tell you three stories from my life. thats it. no big deal. just three stories.

the first story is about connecting the dots.

i dropped out of reed college after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before i really quit. so why did i drop out?

it started before i was born. my biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. 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 my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: we he an unexpected baby boy; do you want him? they said: of course. my biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. she refused to sign the final adoption papers. she only relented a few months later when my parents promised that i would someday go to college.

and 17 years later i did go to college. but i naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as stanford, and all of my working-class parents sings were being spent on my college tuition. after six months, i couldnt see the value in it. i had no idea what i wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. and here i was spending all of the money my parents had sed their entire life. 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. the minute i dropped out i could stop taking the required classes that didnt interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

it wasnt all romantic. i didnt he a dorm room, so i slept on the floor in friends rooms, i returned coke bottles for the 5 deposits to buy food with, and i would walk the 7 miles across town every sunday night to get one good meal a week at the hare krishna temple. i loved it. and much of what i stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. 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 didnt he to take the normal classes, i decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. i learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter binations, about what makes great typography great. it was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science cant 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 puter, it all came back to me. and we designed it all into the mac. it was the first puter with beautiful typography. if i had never dropped in on that single course in college, the mac would he never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. and since windows just copied the mac, its likely that no personal puter would he them. if i had never dropped out, i would he never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal puters might not he 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 ten years later.

again, you cant connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. so you he to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. you he to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. this approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

my second story is about love and loss.

i was lucky i found what i loved to do early in life. woz and i started apple in my parents garage when i was 20. we worked hard, and in 10 years apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion pany with over 4000 employees. we had just released our finest creation - the macintosh - a year earlier, and i had just turned 30. and then i got fired. how can you get fired from a pany you started?

well, as apple grew we hired someone who i thought was very talented to run the pany 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. so at 30 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 didnt 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 did 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 i still loved what i did. the turn of events at apple had not changed that one bit. i had been rejected, but i was still in love. and so i decided to start over.

i didnt see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from apple was the best thing that could he ever happened to me. the heiness 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 of my life.

during the next five years, i started a pany named next, another pany named pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would bee my wife.

pixar went on to create the worlds first puter 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, i retuned to apple, and the technology we developed at next is at the heart of apples current renaissance. and laurene and i he a wonderful family together.

im pretty sure none of this would he happened if i hadnt been fired from apple. it was awful tasting medicine, but i guess the patient needed it.

sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. dont lose faith. im convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that i loved what i did.

youve got to find what you love. and that is as true for your 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. if you hent found it yet, keep looking. dont settle. as with all matters of the heart, youll know when you find it. and, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. so keep looking until you find it. dont settle.

英语作文毕业典礼发言