【1】

Honorable teachers, principles, dear parents and students:

　　Good morning to you all. On this sunny and unforgettable day, we gladly welcome you to our grade 12’s graduation ceremony.

　　Two years ago, when we first came to this program and began our three years of high school education. It was your enthusiasm that influenced us, giving us the heart to keep moving forward; it was your encouragement that motivated us, encouraging us to persevere. It was your high spirits that encouraged us, and pointed us in the right way. It was your harmony that united us, urging us to stand our ground and charge fearlessly forward.

　　Three years, 36 months(thirty-six), 1095 days(one thousand and ninety-five), 26280 hours(twenty-six thousand two hundred and eighty), 1576800 minutes(1 million five hundred and seventy-six thousand eight hundred), 94608000 seconds(ninety-four million six hundred and eight thousand). Your confidence, patience and determination have grown. Under the guidance of Mrs. Lv, you have achieved success which we celebrate today.

　　We look up to you as role models and you are our heroes. We built a relationship not unlike that of a great, big, family. Working together has made us familiar to each other and know each other from the bottom of our hearts. Seeing you mature every day from morning to night, motivating us, makes us more mature.

　　Yesterday, you were proud of this program, today, this program is proud because of you. With 51 university acceptance letters coming from all directions, people were impressed by your accomplishments. We, the Grade 11’s will shortly turn into grade 12’s already feel the pressure that is soon to be placed upon us, and we thank you for your example, which will give us the perseverance to succeed. In the up-coming year, we will follow your footsteps, and will never give up creating what will be our very own miracle. At the same time, we would like to inform our dear future successors, we hope that you will not be afraid of the future hardships; we also hope that you put your best efforts into your work; to become the pride and future of Sino – Canadian Program here in Jilin City No.1 High School and ChangchunExperimental High School.

　　Today, you will turn over a new chapter of your lives, although there will be numerous obstacles blocking your paths, your determined hearts will be forever strong. You will walk towards the light of the glory of tomorrow, with our best wishes from the bottom of our hearts! Go for it!

　　【2】

　　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 the 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.