스티브 잡스(50) 애플 최고경영자(CEO)는 지난달 12일 미국 스탠퍼드대 졸업식에서 축사를 했다. 그는 축사에서 그의 인생역전과 삶의 교훈, 메세지를 평이하고 간결한 문장으로 전하고 있다.
특히 그는 나이 서른에 '애플'로 억만장자가 되었다가 해직당한 이야기, 이후 재도전과 췌장암 사형선고 및 구사 일생과 새 삶의 과정을 담담히 말하고 있다.
"여러분이 사랑하는 것을 찾아야 합니다." (You've got to find what you love.)
세계에서 가장 훌륭한 대학을 졸업하면서 새 출발을 하는 여러분들과 함께 할 수 있게 되어 영광입니다. 그렇게 대단하지는 않은 내 인생의 세가지 이야기를 드릴까 합니다.
첫째는 점(點)을 잇는 이야기입니다.
사실 나는 대학을 졸업하지 않았습니다. 나는 포틀랜드의 리드 대학에 6개월만 다닌후 그만 두었습니다. 사정은 이렇습니다.
내 생모는 젊은 미혼의 대학생이었고 형편상 입양을 원했는데 대졸자 부부에 입양되기를 바랬습니다.
그래 변호사 부부를 골랐는데 내가 태어나자 딸을 원한다며 나를 포기했습니다. 결국 저는 다른 부부 손에 넘어갔습니다.
생모는 나중에야 그들이 대학을 나오지 않은 사실을 알았습니다. 이 때문에 생모는 몇달간 서류에 사인을 안해주다가 '대학에 꼭 보내겠다'는 약속을 받고서 사인해주었습니다.
그로부터 17년후 정말 나는 대학에 갔습니다. 그러나 스탠포드와 맞먹는 수준의 학비를 대느라 막일을 하는 양부모는 평생 저축한 돈을 써야만 했습니다.
한 학기가 지나자 고민이 시작됐습니다. 나는 내가 뭘 원하는지 몰랐고 대학이 그걸 어떻게 알게 해줄지, 아는데 어떤 도움을 줄 수 있을른지 감이 안 잡혔습니다. 그런 데에 양부모님이 평생 모은 돈을 다 쓴다는 것은 받아들이기 힘들었습니다. 그래 대학을 그만 두기로 한 것입니다.
그때 나는 다소 두렵기도 했지만 모든 것이 잘될 것이라는 믿음을 가졌습니다. 내가 학교를 그만두는 그 순간, 흥미가 없었던 필수과목을 들을 이유가 없어졌습니다.
그로부터 3학기를 비정규 청강생으로 캠퍼스를 전전했습니다. 그리고 내가 나의 호기심과 직관을 따라 가다가 부딪힌 것들중 많은 것들은 나중에 값으로 매길 수 없는 가치들로 나타났습니다.
리드대학 당시 캠퍼스의 모든 포스터와 게시물은 손으로 직접 그린 아름다운 글씨체로 돼있었습니다.
이런 글자체들을 어떻게 만드는지 호기심에 서체과목을 들었고 그 강의에서 세리프나 산세리프 활자체를 배웠고, 무엇이 훌륭한 활자체를 만드는지에 대해 배웠습니다. 미적이고 역사적이고 예술적인 서체에 푹 빠져 지냈습니다.
그로부터 10년후 우리가 매킨토시 컴퓨터를 만들었을 때 우리의 맥 컴퓨터는 아름다운 글자체를 가진 최초의 컴퓨터가 되었습니다.
내가 만일 변호사 부부에 입양됐다면, 대학 정규과목을 포기하지 않았다면, 서체과목을 듣지 않았다면 지금의 맥 컴퓨터는 나타나지 않았을 것입니다.
우리는 미래를 내다보면서 점을 이을 수는 없습니다. 우리는 오직 과거를 돌이켜 보면서 점을 이을 수 있을 뿐입니다. 따라서 여러분들은 지금 잇는 점들이 미래의 어떤 시점에 서로 연결될 것이라는 믿음을 가져야만 합니다.
여러분들은 자신의 내면, 운명, 인생, 그 무엇이든 신념을 가져야 합니다.
나의 두번째 이야기는 사랑과 좌절 대한 것입니다.
우리는 스무살 때 부모님 차고에서 '애플'을 시작했습니다. 10년후 애플은 20억달러에 4000명의 직원을 가진 회사로 컸고 나는 억만장자가 되었습니다. 그러나 곧 나는 해고당했습니다. 이사회에서 미래 경영전략에 관한 의견차이로 나이 서른에 밀려났습니다.
모든 것들이 사라져버리고, 나는 참혹함에 빠졌습니다. 첫 몇달동안 나는 무엇을 할지 정말 몰랐습니다. 실리콘 밸리로부터 도망쳐 떠나버릴까도 생각했습니다.
하지만 나는 여전히 내가 하는 일을 사랑하고 있다는 것을 느꼈습니다. 나는 거부당했지만, 여진히 내 일을 사랑하고 있다는 것입니다. 나는 새롭게 출발하기로 결심했습니다.
성공에 대한 부담은 새롭게 다시 시작할 수 있다는 가벼움으로 대체되었습니다. NeXT와 Pixar라는 회사를 시작했고 5년후 픽사는 세계 최초로 컴퓨터 애니메이션 영화인 토이스토리를 만들었고 애플은 넥스트를 사들였습니다. 나는 애플로 복귀했고 내가 넥스트에서 개발한 기술은 애플의 현재 르네상스의 핵심이 되었습니다.
내가 애플에서 해고되지 않았더라면 이런 일중 어떤 것도 일어나지 않았을 것입니다. 그것은 두려운 시험약이었지만, 환자는 그것을 필요로 하는 것이었습니다. 인생이란 때로 여러분들을 고통스럽게 하지만, 신념을 잃지 말기 바랍니다.
나를 이끈 힘은 내가 하는 일을 사랑했다는 것입니다. 여러분들은 여러분이 사랑하는 것을 찾아야 합니다. 당신이 연인을 구하는 것과 마찬가지로 일에서도 사랑하는 것을 찾아야 합니다.
진정으로 만족하는 유일한 길은 스스로 훌륭하다고 믿는 일을 하는 것입니다. 그리고 훌륭한 일을 하는 유일한 길은 여러분이 하는 일을 사랑하는 것입니다.
세번째 이야기는 죽음에 관한 것입니다.
약 1년 전 나는 췌장암 진단을 받았습니다. 의사들은 길어봐야 3개월에서 6개월밖에 살수 없다며 집으로 가서 주변을 정리하라고 충고했습니다. 하지만 운좋게도 나는 수술을 받았고 지금은 괜찮아 졌습니다. 이것이 내가 죽음에 가장 가까이 간 경우였습니다.
열일곱 살 때 이런 걸 읽은 적이 있습니다. "만일 당신이 매일을 삶의 마지막날처럼 산다면 언젠가 당신은 대부분 옳은 삶을 살았을 것이다." 나는 그것에 강한 인상을 받았고, 이후 33년동안 매일 아침 거울을 보면서 나 자신에게 말했습니다. "만일 오늘이 내 인생의 마지막 날이라면......"
여러분들의 시간은 한정되어 있습니다. 가장 중요한 것은, 당신의 마음과 직관을 따라가는 용기를 가지라는 것입니다. 당신이 진정으로 되고자 하는 것이 무엇인지 그들은 이미 알고 있을 것입니다.
학창시절 '전세계 목록'이라는 책이 있었습니다. 타이프라이터와 가위, 폴라로이드 사진들로 만든 세계 풍물 도서입니다. 말하자면 종이책 형태의 구글 같은 것이었습니다. 구글이 나타나기 35년전의 일입니다.
1970년대 중반, 바로 내가 여러분의 나이 때, 최종판이 나왔고 그 최종판의 뒷표지에는, 이른 아침 시골길, 탐험 여행 길에 나서 자동차를 히치 하이킹하기 위해 손을 들고 있음직한 그런 시골길을 찍은 사진이 인쇄돼 있었습니다.
그 밑에 이런 말이 적혀 있었습니다.
"늘 배고프고, 늘 어리석어라"(Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish)
50평생 나는 나 자신에게 늘 이러기를 바랬습니다. 그리고 지금, 여러분이 새로운 출발을 위해 졸업하는 이 시점에서, 여러분들이 그러기를 바랍니다.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish
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Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
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, 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.
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 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. 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 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.
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 other's 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.
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스티븐 잡스는 독단적이라는 의견이 많다.
뭐 나는 그 사람의 피고용자는 아니니까 그런건 상관없고
정말 멋진 사람인 것 같다.
그리고 presentation 능력과 말빨도 정말 최고다.
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