“So you have to trust that the dots will some how connect in your future”

⊙ 연설 배경

애플사의 CEO 스티브 잡스는 연설을 하지 않기로 유명하다.

이 연설은 그가 2005년 스탠퍼드대 졸업식에서 행한 연설이다.

그가 강연한 연설 중 대표적인 연설로 꼽히고 있으며 미국 학생들사이에서 많이 읽히고 있다.

그는 이 연설에서 그의 인생 역정을 자세히 소개하면서 학생들에게 이렇게 살아가라고 주문하고 있다.

⊙ 스티브 잡스 (1955년 2월24일~)

미국의 기업가. 워즈니악과 함께 애플의 공동 창업자이다.

매킨토시를 선보이고 성공을 거두었지만，회사 내부 사정으로 애플을 떠나고 넥스트사를 세웠다.

그러나 애플이 넥스트스톱을 인수하면서 경영 컨설턴트로 복귀하였으며，현재 애플의 회장이다.

⊙ 원문 읽기

[영어로 읽는 세기의 名연설] <30> 스티브 잡스의 스탠퍼드대 2005 졸업식 연설 (上)
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 gra-duation.

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 bilogical mother was a young，unwed college graduate student，and she deci-ded to put me up for ⓐadoption.

She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates，so everything was all s et 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 t ypefaces 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.


▶ Words & Idioms

ⓐ adoption : 채용, 입양

ⓑ stumbled : 실수하다

ⓒ caligraphy : 손글씨 디자인

ⓓ serif : 폰트의 일종, 가는 장식선