스티브잡스의 명연설(Connecting the dots)

 

"Connecting the dots"

 

애플의 CEO 스티브 잡스(Steve Jobs)의 연설 중 가장 유명한 것은 Stanford 대학교에서의 연설이다.

Stanford 대학교에서 스티브 잡스는 자신의 인생에 관련된 이야기 3가지를 했는데 그중 가장 유명한 것은

"connecting the dots"라는 이야기이다.

간략히 요약하자면, 해당 연설은 스티브 잡스의 성장과정 및 사회경험을 이야기 하는데

대학 자퇴 후 서체과목을 수강한것이 추후에 다양한 서체의 컴퓨터를 만드는데 도움이 되었고

애플을 설립 후 쫓겨났을때 그 순간에는 매우 괴로웠지만 그 덕분에 NeXT라는 회사를 설립하는 계기가 되었다고 한다.

그 순간에는 관련성에 대해 알 수 없는 일들이 추후에는 이 경험들이 하나의 연장선상에 있는 일들처럼

연결이 된다는 것이다.  우리의 인생도 결국은 관계성을 만들어가는 일련의 과정이 아닐까 라는 생각이 든다.

 

스티브 잡스 연설 영어 원문

 
   
The first story is about connecting the dots.

 

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 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. 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 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 cent 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.

 

가장 인상적인 한 부분이자 내 자신에게도 해 주고 싶은 부분은 아래와 같다.

 

"우리는 지금 당장 현재의 일을 미래와 연결지을 수는 없고 이미 지나간 길에 대해서, 즉 과거와 현재를 연결할 수는 있다.

어느 누구도 미래를 예측할 수는 없지만 지금 현재 각자가 자신의 자리에서 하고 있는 노력이 미래에 어떤 식으로든 연결이 될 거라는 믿음을 가져야만 한다.

배짱, 운명, 업보등 무엇이라도 어떤 이유로든 자신의 미래와 현재가 연결될 것이라는 믿음을 가지고 나아가야 한다."

 

미래에 대한 걱정에 과거를 자책하는 나에게는 이 구절 만큼 도움이 되는 조언은 없는 것 같다.

그가 만약 살아있었다면 또 다른 명 연설이 탄생하지 않았을까 하는 아쉬움도 남는다.