Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Monday, October 24, 2011
单曲循环
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Thursday, September 29, 2011
zz再不梦想就真的老了
一个朋友的朋友在港大念精算，他说他打算做这一行做十年，拼命工作，将这辈子的钱给赚够，然后把工作辞掉，带着老婆孩子在世界某个角落安稳地度过剩下的日子，而精算这一行业据他所言，跟同声传译一样，是压力很大且最折寿的一类行当，每年猝死的人不在少数。
学院里的还有一个师姐，今年已经念到博士，我问她，你出来之后干嘛，当老师，搞研究，做家庭主妇？她说，我不喜欢我现在学的这门东西，其实我最想当的是一名漫画家，我现在手头上的作品，几乎快可以出一本画册啦。
2
这两个人说的话对我的触动都挺大的。
我一直很喜欢以一段话，“最重要的事情，是我们活在这个世界上，都不能毫无牵挂地去做喜欢做的事情，我们都要先养活自己，赚一点小钱，在世界上有个小位置。可是，可以把喜欢做的事情贯穿在一点一滴的生活中，很多天后，你的轨迹就跟别人不一样，会更接近自己想要的方式。最后，才会更有可能等自己终于完成了那个重要的基础之后，洒脱地去做自己喜欢的事情，过自己想要的生活。”
这倒有点像港大那个朋友的生活方式，趁着年轻，把该挣的钱都挣完，然后再去过自己爱过的生活，只是我怀疑，在度过高负荷高压力的十年之后，他是否还能有那样一颗年轻的心，以及健康的身体，去追求在这十年中放弃的东西。
我的那位师姐，其实也是殊途同归，念了一个不如意的专业，本科，研究生，博士生，毫无波澜地按照一般人走过的路线到达所有人臆想中的终点，也许到最后她都不会有勇气将八年所学的抛弃，出本书，当漫画家。我突然觉得像这样平稳简单，在所有人眼中理所当然的生活很可悲，人生中悲哀的事情，就是按照别人规划好的线路活着，而另一种悲哀，你分明知道你不愿走这条路，但是又没勇气成为众人眼中的忤逆者，所以只有屈从。
二十岁刚刚出头，却以四十多岁的心态活着，这是我多么害怕的一件事情。
3
今天看了一帖子，你17岁时的梦想是什么？
17岁的时候，我还会做梦，我梦想着去欧洲，我梦想着当一个足球记者，我梦想拉着我的女朋友去老特拉福德看一场比赛，我也梦想着当一回导演，拍一部属于自己的纪录片。
世界太大，生命太短，谁知道折腾几个轮回变成花草树枝还能在这世界走一遭，我看完帖子就开始拼命地回忆，我害怕在我还未衰老之前就已经把17岁的梦想磨灭了。
吴虹飞说，再不相爱就老了；彭胖子说，再不结婚就软了；广大苦逼文艺青年说，再不XX就XX了。
目的奴役了性情，焦躁强奸了美梦。
我担心我去不了想去的地方，我担心我见不了想见的人，我担心我做不了想做的事。我不喜欢学校里循规蹈矩的日子，为什么要这样活着？按时起床，上课，吃饭，锻炼，拿到成绩，拿到学历，过上别人为你限定好的生活？在二十岁时候顺利地把梦想扼杀，然后将以后数十年的日子都规划好？为什么不寻找另一种可能性？
我无时无刻不在这样的焦虑中，所以我决定出行。我蹬着自行车穿行于北京的大小胡同，我不愿意去学校图书馆写作业而更愿意乘645路去国图翻会儿书，我非常乐意逃掉枯燥的区域规划课跑半个城区去听刘瑜老师的讲座，我也会在中关村刚巧赶上GALA现场演唱Young for you而欣喜若狂，我甚至已经开始密谋着国庆期间一次伟大的潜逃。
就像Eminem唱的，我不能在这里变老。我要在变老之前，做一些到了80岁还能为之微笑的事情。
4
我清楚地记得，有个姑娘曾问我，我们的未来会是怎样的？
我说，未来什么样子谁知道呢，把现在的日子过好就行了。
如果有时光机，我多想跳进去把那个傻小子揪出来扇一个耳光，会不会说话啊，哪个姑娘不希望有未来啊。
可是现在的我依旧会觉得这是我跟她说过的最靠谱的一句话，因为后来我和她分手了，未来确实谁都不知道。
后来我又遇见了一个姑娘，很喜欢，非常喜欢，可惜上面的那句话失效了，我清楚地看见了未来，然后我选择了自我了断。
于此，无关未来，无关爱情，我想一个人最好的样子，哪怕孤单，可以平静地走过一个又一个街道，穿过一个又一个城市，遇见一个又一个的人，见证一次又一次的别离，在两鬓霜白之前，可以对着二十岁的自己大喊，嘿，小伙子！也可以对当年喜欢的姑娘说，你那时是那么的漂亮。
5
校内上有一个我很欣赏的写手，他写过这样的一幅画面，“一个30岁左右的男人，面向海坐在大石头上，POLO衫的领子竖起，握着一瓶啤酒，慢慢呷着。身后停着他并不名贵的车，车灯全开，车里放着摇滚乐。他的表情平静而淡然。”“如果30岁时我能拥有这样的生活，那么我很乐意做个无人问津的单身王老五，很庆幸没有受到庸俗成功学的毒害，很骄傲自己依然热爱生活。”
真美。
即使多么疲惫不堪的世界，在日出日落之间，也会有这样令人为之一振的瞬间。
你对未来还有幻想，你对世界还抱有希望，所以，趁着还可以做梦的年龄，去做爱做的事。
再不梦想就真的老了。
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Everyday sentences
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Hello Monday!
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs in Stanford
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.
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 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, it's 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.
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. 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 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 returned 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. Sometimes life hits 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. 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 until you find it. 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 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 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 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.
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 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 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 have 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.