似水年华。。。

   

     一直很喜欢这个故事，终于有机会找了来，转载在自己的space上面。本想做些评论，后来还是放弃了。一来想到的太多，恐难一一详尽。二来一个没有评论的故事就如同一部没有结局的电影，耐人寻味。毕竟有些事情是只可意会，不可言传的，而这样的故事才是好故事。

 

     在墨西哥海岸边，有一个美国人坐在一个小渔村的码头上， 看着一个墨西哥渔夫划着一艘小船靠岸。小船上有好几尾大黄鳍鲔鱼。这个美国商人对墨西哥渔夫能抓这么高档的鱼恭维了一番，还问要多少时间才能抓这么多？　

     渔夫说，才一会儿功夫就抓到了。美国人再问，你为什么不等久一点多抓一些鱼？渔夫觉得不以为然，“这些鱼已经足够我一家人的生活所需啦！”美国人又问：“那么你天天剩下那么多时间都在干什么？”　　　

     墨西哥渔夫解释：“我呀？我每天睡到自然醒，出海抓几条鱼，回来后跟孩子们玩一玩，再跟老婆睡个午觉，黄昏时就到村子里喝点酒，跟哥儿们玩玩吉他，我的日子可过得充实又忙碌呢！”　

     美国人不以为然，帮他出主意，他说：“我是美国哈佛大学企业硕士，我倒是可以帮你忙！你应该每天多花一些时间去抓鱼，到时候你就有钱再买一个大一点的船。自然你就可以抓更多的鱼，买更多的渔船。然后你就可以拥有一个渔船队。到时候你就不必把鱼卖给鱼贩子，而是直接卖给加工厂。然后你可以开一个罐头工厂。如此你就可以控制生产、加工和销售。然后你可以离开这个小渔村，搬到墨西哥城，再搬到洛杉矶，最后到纽约。在那里经营你不断扩充的企业。”　　

     渔夫问：“这要花多少时间？”

　 “15到20年。”美国人回答。

　　渔夫问：“然后呢？”

　　美国人大笑着说：“然后你就可以在家当皇帝啦！时机一到，你就可以宣布股票上市，把你的公司股份卖给投资者，到那时候你就发啦！你可以几亿几亿地赚！”

　　渔夫问：“然后呢？”

　　美国人说：“到那个时候你就可以退休啦！你可以搬到海边的小渔村去住。每天睡到自然醒，出海随便抓几条鱼，跟孩子们玩一玩，再跟老婆睡个午觉，黄昏时，再到村子里喝点小酒，跟哥们儿玩玩吉他！”

　　渔夫回答：“可是这些我现在已经做到了。”

    

     空下来看了看以前写的文字，以前的照片，回忆起所有的点点滴滴，不禁感概，时光飞逝。看看自己现在的状态，有点已不复当年之勇的感觉。也知道自己还年轻地很，可是心态却渐渐老了。回看两三年前的文章，感觉现在的自己可能已经写不出来了；回想更年轻时的那些经历，恐怕现在的自己已经没有当年的勇气和魄力。时间真是一件奇怪的东西，它让你在不知不觉中给了你很多你想要的，又毫不留情地夺走了原本许多属于你的东西，而你却无能为力。

 

     人的一生是由许多看似不相联系的点组成的，只有当你回头看时，才会发现那些点与点之间的关联，才能明白为什么我成为了今天的我。于是，人无法去预见时间的推移，能做的只有尽全力活好现在，然后让自己在未来的某一时刻叹息时光的流逝，就像我现在做的这样。

 

     逐渐意识到，人有朝一日是要死的，还从来没有人逃脱过。于是才慢慢想开了许多事情，并不是说之前就想不开，只是终究有许多的顾虑、紧张、害怕等等。而每每想到死亡，所有的这一切就都不复存在了。所以我开始提醒自己，你还有大约50年可以活，该干嘛就赶紧去干吧。

     有时候精心准备的一件事情却会被机缘巧合完全打乱。经过无数次的挣扎，绞尽脑汁的思考之后，决定要捡起久违了的心理学，学习心理教练的课程。好不容易搜集了资料，确定了学习计划，上网并找到了悉尼大学的申请网页。可是却发现，因为我还没有拿到PR，所以仍然只能算留学生；因为是留学生，所以只能申请全日制课程（Full-time）；因为只有Full-time，所以要读只有停工。原来的计划是半工半读，这样既不防碍赚钱，也能逐渐转型。现在姑且不论要多交学费（留学生的学费比当地学生多50％左右），即便申请获得通过，也要全脱产去读，代价大了太多太多——看来只能等PR下来再申请了。

 

     已经定好了12月初回国的机票，会在上海呆到月底。本想明年2月回来过年，因为翔的婚礼，所以提前。还有不到两个月的时间，开始计划要见的人，要去的地方，要做的事。结论是：太多了。不知道这次回家又会有哪些不一样的感觉，即便是同样的人，同样的地点，物是人非，恐怕感觉也一定不同了。曾经的好友不知还能不能对酒当歌，曾经的校园是否已经面貌全非，这些都等着我去发现。期待中。。。

I watched Steve Jobs' speech on the graduation ceremony at Stanford Uni in 2005 on Youtube last night. It's one of the most encouraging speech I have ever listened to. So here it is for everyone who is viewing my blog. I hope you find it just as inspiring as I did.

 

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

 

 

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 have 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' savings were being spent on my college tuition. 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 how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved 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 didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

 

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have 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 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 san 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, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal 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 ten years later.

 

 

 

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 billion company 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 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. 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 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 – 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 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 of 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 worlds 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, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

 

 

 

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, 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, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

 

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

 

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

 

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

 

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

 

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

 

 

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notion.

 

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

 

 

Thank you all very much.

    

     看完中国男篮和约旦队的比赛，心里有点堵。虽然比赛是赢了，但是赢得相当难看。场上队员很少有象样的配合，大多靠单打，还有就是传统的站桩式的传球和投篮。幸亏对手的内线太弱，加上三分球乱投，还有裁判的帮忙，我们最后才赢了六分。对方的外援一个人就几乎把中国队的整条后卫线打暴，两人被罚下，还好篮球比赛里没有被出示红牌下场自动停赛的规定，要不然下场中国队就只能让易建联去当后卫了。我要是约旦队主教练，下次肯定多买几个外援，买两个前锋加一个后卫，肯定拿个亚洲冠军。

 

     小时候看男篮的时候还能看到很多配合，球员不断地移动，掩护，转移球，最后上篮或者投篮得分（那时候比较少扣篮），感觉风格很鲜明：快速灵巧的团队篮球。可后来因为有了几个内线的高大球员，于是开始转变战术，形成了一个人打，四个人看的新战术体系。每次我听篮球队教练接受采访说：“最近我们围绕姚明演练的战术效果不错”，我的眼球就浮现出姚明一个人拿球，被对方三个内线包夹，然后其它四个中国球员恨不得每人拿把椅子，坐在场边一边嗑瓜子，一边和拉拉队女郎聊天的情景。

 

     篮球毕竟还是要靠配合的，除非你队里有十二个科比。