连点成线—— connecting the dots
乔布斯最有名的那场在斯坦福大学的演讲看了很多遍，除了最有名的那句 stay hungry, stay foolish, 最喜欢前面的一段“I’m connecting the dots.” 连点成线。
“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 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 something — your god, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made the difference in my life. ”
这段真的打动我。如他所说，当站在当时往未来看的时候，我们并不知道会发生什么，但是也许在某个时刻，回头的时候你会发现，冥冥之中，跟随着内心的那些热情，自己走到了现在。
我想，既然世界是变的，那是不是从自己出发，再去连接世界，会是更稳妥的方式呢？
最近在找工作，很多时候被问到为什么要选择这个工作，为什么这么笃定要做老师，为什么希望在这个行业发展？
所以，我也在想，走到现在这个时刻，我连接的点有哪些？
第一个开始闪亮的点，是一对一教学的时候热情，虽然只是几个月的兼职，但是和学生接触的时候，发现有一些从来没有显示出的热情，我会非常希望自己成长 才能让孩子们有更多成长、会熬夜希望能有更好的课堂。
后来在科研上遇到问题的时候，最想要逃离到的 也是课堂，也是希望能和孩子们的接触 去影响和感染他们。
再后来真的开始尝试，也会察觉到自己真实的热情。
回想起连接起来的那些点，我会发现，我问自己的这些问题 用过的这些“工具”帮助了我，所以你也不妨问问自己这些问题，甚至找一个安静的时候在纸上写下来，或是和最亲近的人聊一聊，哪怕只是闲聊，也许都会对认识自己有所启发。
一、你的高光时刻是什么时候？ 你的低谷时刻是什么时候？?
二、做哪些事情，你会比大多数人做得好，做的快？—— 核心优势
同样来自你做过的事情，自己记忆里的取得的一些成就，基于经历和事实的对自己的认知。
周围人的回应与评价也是重要的参考，你被很多人夸过的事情是什么？有什么事情得过奖，或者被他人认可，或者让你自己很有成就感，从经历里找到这些时刻，点亮它。
热情和能力不同，有时候只有passion是不够的，比如只是非常希望成为篮球运动员但是身体条件并不是和符合，那就是能力和passion并不匹配。
但其实很多时候两者是相辅相成的，因为我们会因为一件事情做得好而喜欢它，对吧？想想自己小时候喜欢的事情就是了，如果我的数学一直都是100分，那我会很喜欢这门课的，如果次次都是59，无论多么有毅力有热情的学生 也会丢失兴趣了。
以下两个问题，我用来挖掘自己的热情，思考内心真正想做的事情是什么，思考什么能激发真实的热情。
三、有什么事情，你在非常疲惫的情况下还是会希望做到最好？在没有外界要求的情况下，你还是希望做到最好？
其实小时候，我们喜欢玩的游戏、喜欢做的事情，是会不由自主主动完成的，比如我自己对于一场演讲 或课程的要求，大概是这样的，可以试着想想自己自发主动做的那些事情，那可能是热情所在。
四、有哪些事情是让你怦然心动，觉得非常想要做的？
最近读马斯库 白金汉的《现在，发现你的职业优势》（职业探索的经典书籍之一，除了《远见》最想推荐的职业规划相关书籍）
我非常认同作者在第一章所说的：每个人都有自己的核心优势，在优势范围内 才最有求知欲，最有创造力，也最乐于学习新事物，在工作中，最理想的状态就是工作可以发挥优势。所以每个人其实都需要探索自己的优势是什么 弱势是什么，不断了解自己。书中给出了更为详细科学的优势弱势探测器，还在慢读和实践中，之后再来分享～?
附 《Stay hungry, Stay foolish》演讲全文
Thank you.
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. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
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. 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. 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?" 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. 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. This was the start in my life.
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 okay. 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 far more 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 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. 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, 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, and that will make all the difference.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky -- I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz1 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 two billion dollar company with over 4000 employees. We'd 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. 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: 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 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 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.
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. Sometime life -- Sometimes life going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. 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 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 haven't found it yet, keep looking -- and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking -- don't settle.
My third story is about death.
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've 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 and 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 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, thankfully, I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's 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's 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's quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma -- which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
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 60s, 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, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
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've always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.