Liu Meng didn't care what these people said, but repeated the simple sentence again, "Mr. Jobs, you will definitely use it, please put away this piece of paper, this string of numbers is just my chat tool number, you will definitely need it." ”

Jobs didn't burst into laughter with a group of reporters, just quietly looked at Liu Meng with a calm and confident face, Jobs immediately felt that this was not a grandstander, but he really couldn't think of anything to meet this young man, but there was an almost demonic intuition telling him, as if he had to take some time to talk to this young man, at this time the assistant whispered a few words in his ear, Jobs groaned and said to Liu Meng: " Young man, I admire your courage and I would also like to talk to you very much, but I really don't have time today, tomorrow there is a Stanford presentation, if you are determined, you can wait for me at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino. ”

As soon as the reporters heard this, they immediately fried, "Oh, Mr. Jobs, you are simply so merciful that you have given an unknown young man the opportunity to meet alone." ”

"It would be a shame to know that I was holding half of an A4 piece of paper and writing a string of numbers, which was simply Mr. Jobs' exclusive invitation card. ”

Jobs's shriveled face moved, shrugged his shoulders and said indifferently: "The first one to do this is a genius, and the second one to do this, so I don't need to repeat it, goodbye, young man." ”

After saying that, Jobs left under the escort of the bodyguards, Liu Meng ignored the ridicule of such reporters, just expressed a strong jealousy, and left the hotel to fill his belly with chicken. Liu Meng began to wonder whether to go back to Cupertino or follow Jobs to Stanford University.

Undoubtedly, Liu Meng has a kind of admiration for Jobs, and in his previous life, he also saw Jobs' speech at Stanford from the Internet. It was very shocking, Liu Meng, who was confused at the time, saw this article and found solace and disappointment in his heart, and thought about it, since he had the opportunity to witness this moment, why not take a look, he knew that the great Jobs had little time left, and it was a rare experience and happiness to be able to follow in his footsteps.

The next day. Liu Meng followed Steve Jobs all the way to Stanford University, one of the most famous universities in the world and a holy place in the hearts of countless people. The square was crowded with students, and Jobs's fame was very big in the minds of American students, and his maverick, assertiveness, and innovation were all chased by students.

A person without personality. Even if it's rich. It's not charismatic.

Soon Jobs appeared on the stage, none of the students were noisy below, and unanimously expressed their respect for Jobs, Liu Meng stood not far away and looked at Jobs, and there was also a feeling of being separated from the world, which was confirmed by the situation seen on the Internet at the beginning, and his eyes couldn't help but be a little blurred.

Jobs began to speak.

"I am honored to be with you today at the commencement ceremony, Stanford University is one of the best universities in the world. I never graduated from college. To be honest, today is probably the closest day in my life to graduating from college. ”

Jobs paused as he spoke, smiling his usual smile. The students in the audience applauded.

"Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. It's not a big deal, it's not a big reason, it's just three stories. ”

The first story is about how to connect the dots of life.

I dropped out after six months at Reed College, but after about a year and a half. Before I actually made the decision to drop out, I used to go to school to audit. So, why should I drop out?

The story has to start before I was born. My birth mother was a young, unmarried graduate student. She decided to let someone else adopt me, and she really wanted to adopt someone with a college degree. So, she had arranged for me to be adopted by a lawyer and his wife as soon as I was born.

But what she didn't expect was that when I was born, the lawyer couple suddenly decided that they wanted a girl. So my adoptive parents suddenly got a call in the middle of the night: "We have a baby boy here who was accidentally born, do you want him?" and they replied, "Of course!"

But my birth mother then found out that my adoptive mother never went to college, and my adoptive father never even went to high school. So she refused to sign the adoption paper. Within a few months, my birth mother relented because my parents promised her that she would definitely let me go to college.

At the age of seventeen, I really went to college. But I stupidly chose a school that was almost as expensive as your Stanford University, and my parents were still in the blue-collar class, and they spent almost all of their savings on my tuition.

Six months later, I don't see the value in it. I didn't know what I wanted to do in my life, and I didn't know what college would help me find. But here, I spent almost all of my parents' life savings. So I decided to drop out of school, and I think it was the right decision.

Admittedly, I was scared at the time, but looking back now, it was one of the best decisions I've ever made.

Jobs stopped here and smiled habitually, Liu Meng found that he always laughed at himself when he talked about the embarrassing past, this is the consistent expression of a sensitive and strong person, he also has this habit, so he can immediately understand Jobs's heart when he dropped out of school, painful and hesitant, but there is a strong and mysterious force to support him.

The moment I made the decision to drop out, I was finally able to take courses that didn't interest me in the slightest. And then I can also go and audit those classes that are a little bit interesting.

But it's not romantic at all. I didn't have a dorm, so I slept on the floor of a friend's room, I went to pick up a five-cent bottle of Coke just to fill my stomach, and on a Sunday night I had to walk seven kilometers through the city's temples just to have a good meal a week. But I like that. I followed my instincts and curiosity and encountered many things that have since proven to be priceless.

Let me give you an example: Reed College offered perhaps the best lettering program in the United States at the time. Every poster inside this university. The labels of each drawer are full of beautiful lettering. Since I dropped out of school and didn't have to go to normal classes, I decided to take this course to learn how to write beautiful calligraphy. I learned a lot of beautiful fonts. I learned how to change the length of spaces in different letter combinations, and how to make the best typography. It was a beautiful, authentic artistic subtlety that science could never capture, and I found it to be indescribable.

At the time, it seemed that none of these things had any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh, it wasn't like that. I designed all the things I was learning at the time into the Mac. It was the first computer to use fine typographic fonts. If I hadn't dropped out at that time, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to take this art word course that I was interested in. Macs don't have so many rich fonts and pleasing font spacing. If windows hadn't copied MAC, then PCs wouldn't have such wonderful fonts as they do now.

When Jobs said this, he didn't forget to tease his old rival Gates. For Jobs, Gates has no way at all, who let him really borrow Jobs's ideas, the students in the audience burst into laughter and thunderous applause.

Of course I was in college. It is not yet possible to connect the dots of the past. But when I look back on this qiē ten years later, it really dawns on me.

Again, you can't connect the dots when you look forward, you can only connect the dots when you look back. So you have to believe that these pieces will be connected one day in your future. You have to believe in certain things: your courage, your purpose, your life, your karma. Doing so has never disappointed my hopes, it has only made my life more special.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was very lucky because I found something I loved at a very early age. My little friend and I started Apple in our parents' garage when we were 20 years old. We worked so hard that after 10 years, the company had grown from a two-car garage slump to a company worth more than $2 billion with over 4,000 employees. In our ninth year of existence, we have just released our best product, and that is the Macintosh. I'm about to turn 30. In that year. I was fired for squid. How could you be fired by a company you founded yourself?

Jobs laughed and laughed at himself, the expression on his face flashing. Dare to face the pain in the heart is a necessary skill for every strong person.

Jobs continued with a smile: "When Apple was growing rapidly, we hired a very talented guy to run the company with me, and in the first few years, the company worked very well. But then we disagreed on the future, and we ended up arguing. When the argument ensued, the board was on his side. So at the age of thirty, I was fired. I was fired under the noses of so many people. In the year of establishment, all the pillars of my life were far away from me, and it was a devastating blow. ”

For the first few months, I really didn't know what to do. I lost my passion for entrepreneurship and I felt like I was frustrating the people I was working with. I made things so bad that I even wanted to escape Silicon Valley. But I'm starting to see the light of day, and I still love what I do. These things that happened at Apple did not change this in the slightest, not at all. I was banished, but I still love it. So I decided to start all over again.

I didn't realize it at the time, but as it turned out, being fired from Apple was the best thing I ever had in my life. Because, the heaviness of being a successful person is replaced by the sense of ease of being an entrepreneur: not so much about anything. It made me feel so free and entered one of the most creative periods of my life.

Liu Meng couldn't help but sigh when he heard this, this is probably a quality that successful people have, that is, turning adversity into a good situation that motivates them to make progress, and taking every setback as the original driving force for progress.

Over the next five years, I founded a company called NeXT and a company called Pixar, and then met an elegant woman who would later become my wife. Pixar produced the world's first computer-made animated film, Toy Story, and Pixar is now the world's most successful computer-based zuò studio. In a series of later operations. Apple acquired NeXT, and then I went back to Apple. The technology we developed at NeXT has played a key role in Apple's revival.

I'm pretty sure if I'm not fired from Apple. None of that will happen. The taste of this medicine is too bitter, but I think the patient needs this medicine. There are times when life picks up a brick and slaps it on your head. Don't lose faith. I knew very well that the only thing that kept me going was what I did that I loved so much.

You need to find what you love. It's true for work, but it's also true for your lover. Your work will take up a large part of your life. You can only be satisfied if you believe that you are doing great work. If you haven't found what you like right now, keep looking, don't stop, look for it wholeheartedly, and you'll know when you find it. Just like any sincere relationship. Timeless. So keep looking until you find it and don't stop!

My third story is about death.

When I was seventeen. I read a quote: "If you live every day as if it were the last day of your life, then one day you will find yourself right." I was impressed by this statement. Since then, for 33 years, every morning I have looked in the mirror and asked myself, "If today is the last day of my life." Will you do what you wanted to do today?" when the answer is given "no" many times in a row. I knew I needed to change something.

Liu Meng fell into contemplation when he heard this, and seemed to understand why Jobs could still do what he loved when he entered the countdown stage of his life, and his vigorous energy was devoted to innovation. Sometimes he would ask himself what he would like to do if tomorrow was the last day of his life, whether it was the nostalgia for life and the fear of death.

"Remember that you are dying" is the most important motto I have encountered in my life. It helped me point out important choices in my life. Because almost everything, including all the honor, all the pride, all the fear of embarrassment and failure, these will disappear in the face of death. What I see is what is really important that is left behind.

You sometimes think that you are going to lose something. "Remember that you're dying" is the best way I know to avoid these thoughts. You're already naked, and there's no reason why you shouldn't follow your heart beating along.

About a year ago. I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a check-up at 7:30 a.m. and it clearly showed a tumor in my pancreas. I didn't even know what the pancreas was. The doctor told me that it was probably an incurable cancer and that I had three to six months to live in this world. My doctor told me to go home and sorted out my qiē, which was the procedure for the doctor to declare that I was ready to die.

That means you're going to finish what you're going to say to your kids for the next ten years, it's going to take care of everything so that your family's life is as easy as possible, and that's saying "goodbye."

I live with that diagnosis all day. Then one morning I had a biopsy and the doctor put an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach, and then into my intestines, and used a needle to take a few cells from the tumor on my pancreas. I was sedated because I was sedated with a tranquilizer. But my wife was there, and later told me that they started screaming when the doctors looked at the cells under the microscope, because they turned out to be a very rare type of pancreatic cancer that can be cured with surgery. I had this surgery and now I'm cured.

That was the closest I came to death, and I hope it's the closest I'll ever come in decades. When I came back to life from the line of death, death was just a useful but purely intellectual concept for me, and I can say to you with more certainty: no one wants to die, and even if people want to go to heaven, people don't die to go there.

But death is the common end for each of us. No one has ever been able to escape it, and so it should be. Because death is the best invention of life. It will purge the old to make way for the new. You are now new, but from now on you will gradually become old and be removed. I'm sorry it's dramatic, but it's very real.

Your time is limited, so don't waste them repeating other people's lives. Don't be bound by dogma, that means you live with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let other people's noisy opinions overshadow your true inner voice. And most importantly, you have the courage to follow your instincts and your heart.

They know what you want to be in a certain way, and everything else is secondary.

Finally, "If you are hungry for knowledge, you are foolish." "I always wish I could do that, and now, as you are about to graduate and start a new journey, I want you to do the same. (To be continued......)