史蒂夫·喬布斯(Steve Jobs)在斯坦福大學的演講中談到了他生活中的三次體驗，這三次體驗不僅在斯坦福大學的畢業生、也在硅谷乃至其他地方的技術同行中引起了巨大反響。尤其The Whole Earth Catalog提到的話，作爲雜誌，這是一種精神，一種氣質。
喬布斯斯坦福大學的畢業典禮演講：求知若渴，大智若愚
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.
謝謝大家。很榮幸能和你們，來自世界最好大學之一的畢業生們，一塊兒參加畢業典禮。老實說，我大學沒有畢業，今天恐怕是我一生中離大學畢業最近的一次了。
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
今天我想告訴大家來自我生活的三個故事。沒什麼大不了的，只是三個故事而已。
The first story is about connecting the dots.
第一個故事，如何串連生命中的點滴。
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.
我在裏得大學讀了六個月就退學了，但是在18個月之後--我真正退學之前，我還常去學校。爲何我要選擇退學呢?這還得從我出生之前說起。我的生母是一個年輕、未婚的大學畢業生，她決定讓別人收養我。她有一個很強烈的信仰，認爲我應該被一個大學畢業生家庭收養。於是，一對律師夫婦說好了要領養我，然而最後一秒鐘，他們改變了主意，決定要個女孩兒。然後我排在收養人名單中的養父母在一個深夜接到電話，“很意外，我們多了一個男嬰，你們要嗎?”“當然要!”但是我的生母后來又發現我的養母沒有大學畢業，養父連高中都沒有畢業。她拒絕在領養書上簽字。幾個月後，我的養父母保證會讓我上大學，她妥協了。
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 of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all 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 far more interesting.
這是我生命的開端。十七年後，我上大學了，但是我很無知地選了一所差不多和斯坦福一樣貴的學校，幾乎花掉我那藍領階層養父母一生的積蓄。六個月後，我覺得不值得。我看不出自己以後要做什麼，也不曉得大學會怎樣幫我指點迷津，而我卻在花銷父母一生的積蓄。所以我決定退學，並且相信沒有做錯。一開始非常嚇人，但回憶起來，這卻是我一生中作的最好的決定之一。從我退學的那一刻起，我可以停止一切不感興趣的必修課，開始旁聽那些有意思得多的課。
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.
事情並不那麼美好。我沒有宿舍可住，睡在朋友房間的地上。爲了吃飯，我收集五分一個的舊可樂瓶，每個星期天晚上步行七英里到哈爾-克里什納廟裏改善一下一週的伙食。我喜歡這種生活方式。能夠遵循自己的好奇和直覺前行後來被證明是多麼的珍貴。讓我來給你們舉個例子吧。
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 sans-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.