Name: 賈伯斯被Apple開除：身陷低潮，我這樣逆轉命運｜從大學沒唸完到科技巨擘的三個關鍵｜史丹佛演講 × 原聲英聽 × 中英對照
Uploaded: 2026-01-05T21:58:37.000Z
Duration: 14 min 11 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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.

Today I want to tell you three stories from my life.

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 18 months or so before I really quit.

My biological mother was a young unwed 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've got an unexpected baby boy, do you want him?

My biological mother found out later 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 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 the money my parents had saved their entire life.

So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay.

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 far more interesting.

I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends rooms.

I returned Coke bottles for the 5 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.

And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless.

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 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 10 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 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 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.

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 company with over 4,000 employees.

We just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier.

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 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.

The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit.

I'd been rejected, but I was still in love.

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 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.

Sometimes life's gonna hit you in the head with a brick.

I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

賈伯斯被Apple開除：身陷低潮，我這樣逆轉命運｜從大學沒唸完到科技巨擘的三個關鍵｜史丹佛演講 × 原聲英聽 × 中英對照

entire

intuition

failure

issue