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这是乔布斯在1994年时所做的一个采访，地点是在NeXT电脑公司。这段来自Santa Clara Valley Historical Association所做的采访，在国内并不流行，也找不到中文版的字幕和讲稿，甚至连完整的视频（30分钟）都找不到。你现在看到的这个，是我刚刚从Youtube搬运过来的。网上可以找到这个视频的一些零星片段和零星语录，但完整版的英文讲稿也是只有这唯一的一份，来自glose.com。

在这里，感谢Santa Clara Valley Historical Association制作了这个视频，也感谢glose.com制作了讲稿。

需要说明的是，视频的标题是：Secrets of Life，讲稿的标题是：Life Lessons From Steve Jobs

这段采访非常棒，也是我专门发在这里的原因。

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写到这，顺便想聊聊最近的一个想法：

现在越来越强烈地意识到，那个广为流传的观点是经不起推敲的：“当你想到要做某个事情的时候，世界上已经有很多人在做了”。

这句话经常会在各种场合看到。

比如，我的博士导师，就很喜欢讲这句话。他在评价一个技术的时候会说，“当你想做这个事情的时候，别的组已经在做了，比如MIT”。但实际上，你会发现，如果你真的做了的话（比如你没去调研就闷着头做），你会发现，任何时候（这么讲有些夸大）都不算晚。你永远不会是最后一个，只要你的智力水平是一般人的标准，你想成为最后的接盘侠也是很难的一件事情。很多时候，机会就在犹豫中浪费掉了。退一万步讲，即便是MIT做了，你依然有的是机会。因为如果你去仔细算一下，每个博士生只有一个研究方向，那么跟你做着同一件事情且水平在你之上的，全世界都屈指可数。

当然，事情要分两面看，我导师的观点毕竟是从科研的角度来讲的，因为奖励（credits）永远只给第一个做的人。这么说也不对，准确地讲，应该是，我的导师所在乎的奖励是“第一个做出来，然后让别人来跟随”。

事情没那么简单。

一方面是，科研和艺术以外的地方，先行者未必就有优势，很多事情是系统工程，需要集合各个领域很多人的力量，不是简单一个想法取胜的；另一方面是，我现在发现，这个世界上不会存在很多人“跟你同一个想法”“看过同一本书”“发现同一个秘密”“有着同样的计划”“或是已经行动了”。如果真的存在这样的人，那简直就是世界上的另一个你了，这样的人你要珍惜，你要结识成朋友。。。

所以，如果level up一下那个观点：你需要重新审视一下你在做的事情和你计划做的事情了，不要随随便便或是模模糊糊地用“别人也在做”这个思维定式来轻易地否定。

嗯，如果你完整地看完这两篇文章（因为字数限制，分成两次发），那你就是华语世界里看过乔布斯这个访谈的前500-600个人。。。因为这个公众号，三个月前开通，到现在也不过500多人。

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Life Lessons From Steve Jobs.

视频地址：http://v.qq.com/page/g/n/1/g01707nxwn1.html

文字来源：https://glose.com/book/inspiration-from-steve-jobs/life-lessons-from-steve-jobs/8e27c#1134

Excerpts from a Santa Clara Valley Historical Association/Silicon Valley Historical Association interview and the documentary Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance

NeXT Computer, Redwood City, CA

1994

Steve Jobs (founder of Apple Computer): There’s no risk. That’s why you need to do it young. That’s why when we started Apple, we said we have absolutely nothing to lose. I was 20 years old at the time, Woz was 24 or 25. We have nothing to lose. We have no families, no children, no houses. Woz had an old car. I had a Volkswagen van. All we were going to lose is our cars and the shirts off our back. We had nothing to lose, and we had everything to gain. We figured even if we crash and burn and lose everything, the experience will have been worth 10 times the cost. So what did we have to lose? There was no risk.

Apple was a very classic Silicon Valley startup in the sense that Steve Wozniak and my partner both worked for Hewlett Packard. In fact, Woz was still working there when we started Apple. Hewlett Packard was the genesis of not just the concept of starting your own company – and, of course, it was the primary role model of the Valley – but it was also the ethics or the ethical basis of how you wanted to build your company, a company that was based on values, not just based on making money.

HP had the HP way, and they had a list of their values. The first one was we need to make a profit or else we can’t keep this company going. But after that, they got into how they wanted to treat individuals and conduct their corporate life, and it’s very idealistic in my opinion. We were very much influenced by that.

The second thing that made us very typical in a way was that we were building a product that we ourselves were the customer for. We were building something we wanted ourselves, just like Hewlett and Packard started building test equipment for engineers. Well, they were engineers, so they in essence could do the marketing. They could figure out what an engineer might want in a product as well as design it. We wanted a computer, and we knew exactly what we wanted in a computer, so we could do the marketing as well as the engineering of that product. This changed later as we started selling to people that were different than us, but certainly in the first several years of Apple, we were selling to people that were just like us. A lot of Silicon Valley companies have started that way.

Silicon Valley, if you had to say what was the seminal bud, it was Stanford University, Fred Terman encouraging Hewlett Packard, the Varian brothers to not go back east, but to stay here. That was the germ.

The second big growth phase, and the real modern day shot in the arm, was when William Shockley, the racist, returned home to his hometown of Palo Alto to start a semiconductor company. He was one of the three co-discoverers of the transistor at Bell Labs. He returned home to Palo Alto, and he started Shockley Semiconductor, and he brought with him about half a dozen of the brightest young people in the country on this. In a way, it was very lucky that he turned out to be a terrible manager and businessman. Several of these people defected, headed by Bob Noyce, who raised money from a big company out east called Fairchild Camera and Instrument, to start Fairchild Semiconductor. And the rest was history. Fairchild was the second seminal company in the Valley after Hewlett Packard and really was the launching pad for every semiconductor company and the whole semiconductor industry, which built the Valley.

So it’s an incredible place. When you look back at the end of this century, I’m sure that people will feel that of the 10 greatest inventions and discoveries of the century, five of them happened within 10 miles of here or 20 miles of here. Genetic engineering, the integrated circuit, the microprocessor, the personal computer, it’s just amazing what this Valley has done.

I think that’s a very healthy way to look at it. Some people say, “Well, you could have gone to college and been a lawyer.” Well, you’re right, but you can go to college and be a lawyer when you’re 25. There’s nothing that stops you from doing that. The only thing you really have in your life is time. If you invest that time in yourself to have great experiences that are going to enrich you, then you can’t possibly lose. So I always advise people don’t wait. Do something when you’re young when you have nothing to lose and keep that in mind. I think that’s the best way. Not that people can’t start companies when they’re 50. I’ve seen that. Very successful companies. But it’s a lot easier when you’re young and have nothing to lose and don’t have the responsibilities to other people that you will acquire later on in your life.

Nolan Bushnell (founder of Atari): So over the years, we developed some very, very sophisticated ways of tracking human factors before we knew the name human factors. We called it gameplay interface. But in fact, it was human factors pushed to an extreme. I think that it’s not by accident that Steve Jobs worked at Atari because he understood some of the human factors that was part of it, that ultimately turned into the Macintosh, which has been the human factors winner. Even though an awful lot of it was developed at PARC, Steve knew it when he saw it.

Jobs: You know, I’ve actually always found something to be very true, which is most people don’t get those experiences because they never ask. I’ve never found anybody that didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help. I always call them up. I called up – this will date me – but I called up Bill Hewlett when I was 8 years old, and he lived in Palo Alto. His number was still in the phonebook. He answered the phone himself, “Yes?” “Hi, I’m Steve Jobs. I’m 12 years old. I’m a student at a high school, and I want to build a frequency counter. I was wondering if you had any spare parts I could have.” And he laughed. He gave me the spare parts to give me a frequency counter, and he gave me a job that summer at Hewlett Packard working on the assembly line putting nuts and bolts together on frequency counters. He got me a job at the place that built them. I was in heaven.

I’ve never found anyone who’s said no or hung up the phone when I called. I just asked. When people ask me, I try to be as responsive, to pay that debt of gratitude back. Most people never pick up the phone and call. Most people never ask, and that’s what separates sometimes the people who do things from the people who just dream about them. You’ve got to act, and you’ve got to be willing to fail. You’ve got to be willing to crash and burn with people on the phone, with starting a company, whatever. If you’re afraid of failing, you won’t get very far.

One of the things that Woz and I did was we built blue boxes. These are obsolete now, but they were devices you could build. When you make a long distance phone call and in the background, you hear doo doo doo, those are the telephone computers actually signalling each other, actually sending information to each other to set up your call. The signaling they use is a lot like touchtone phones, only it’s different frequencies. Well, you can make a box that emits those frequencies, that can make those tones. There used to be a way to fool the entire telephone system into thinking that you were a telephone computer and to open up itself and let you call anywhere in the world for free. As a matter of fact, you could call from a payphone, go to White Plains, New York, take a satellite to Europe, take a cable to Turkey, come back to Los Angeles, you go around the world three or four times and call the payphone next door, shout in the phone, and it would be about 30 seconds and come out the other end of the phone. These were illegal, I have to add, but in spite of that, we were so fascinated by them that Woz and I actually figured out how to build one. We built the best one in the world. It was the first digital blue box in the world. We would give them to our friends and use them ourselves. You rapidly run out of people you want to call.

But it was the magic of the fact that two teenagers could build this box for $100 worth of parts and control hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure in the entire telephone network in the whole world from Los Altos in Cupertino, California. That was magical. Experiences like that taught us the power of ideas, the power of understanding that if you could build this box, you could control hundreds of millions of dollars of telephone infrastructure around the world. That’s a powerful thing.

If we hadn’t have made blue boxes, there would have been no Apple because we wouldn’t have had not only the confidence that we could build something and make it work – because it took us six months of discovery to figure out how to build this. It was a tremendous process in itself – but we also had the sense of magic that we could influence the world, control in the case of blue boxes, but something much more powerful than control, influencing, in the case of Apple. They are very closely related. I really do to this day feel like if we hadn’t have had those blue box experiences, there never would have been an Apple Computer.

Now if you want to know what’s going to happen in five years, you don’t look in the mainstream, you look in the fringe, and the fringe back in 1975 was the Homebrew Computer Club. It was a bunch of people that were in this area that were into building their own computers because they couldn’t afford to buy them. Computers were $100,000, $50,000. Who could afford that?

Steve “Woz” Wozniak (founder of Apple Computer): Every two weeks, we had a meeting at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center on Wednesday nights, and boy, that was the most important day of my life. The rest of the two weeks was almost all my spare time was spent planning and writing some software to show off and planning for this event, the Homebrew Computer Club. Go down there, and as shy as I was – I’d never raise my hand and say anything – there was a period where we could show off what we had. I’d set up my computer with me Sears color TV, and people would come up and ask questions and I could answer them.

Jobs: Everybody that was interested in building computers was at that meeting. There were a few hundred people at that meeting. It got up to that big. Initially it was maybe 50. But it grew to 200-300 people eventually. We started going when it was literally 30 or 40 people. Woz and I always had the coolest stuff there. We built a reputation for having the neatest stuff.

Bushnell: I remember Steve Jobs asking me whether I wanted to help him fund Apple Computer, offering me a third for $50,000, and I turned him down. So that’s one that got away. I can remember Steve and Steve, Steve Wozniak, working on a product breakout and doing a design that was so clever, because in those days it was heavily hardware, that they essentially broke the bank. I think we felt that 70 chips was about a normal thing and if you could get it down to 60, you were really doing good. I think they got it down to 38. They only problem was it used so many feedback loops you couldn’t really test it, so we had to escalate it back up again. But they got their bonus, and everybody was happy.

Jobs: It’s interesting. You look at something and you say, “Wow, that’s neat.” But if you look before it by several years, you’ll find the precursors to it. All the things that you learned along the way that added up to take a bigger step. I met Woz when I was maybe 12 years old, 13 years old. Woz was the first person I met who knew more electronics that I did so we became fast friends.

Woz: A couple of guys with no money didn’t really have the capital to build the sort of computer that was going to sell zillions into all the homes, a thousand a month. We didn’t have the money either. But Steve again went out and started looking for people who would put money into something that could go.

Mike Markkula (founder of Apple Computer): Steve Jobs and Woz decided they might be able to build a business out of what they had. They didn’t’ know anyone to call except Nolan Bushnell’s friend on Valentine. So Steve called Don, and Don went over to the garage in Los Altos and came out shaking his head. Called me up and said there are these two fellas, and boy do they really need some help.

Jobs: We went and talked to the venture capitalists, and none of them would give us any money. One of them referred to be as a renegade from the human race because I had longer hair then. None of them would give us any money. Thank God because then they would have ended up owning most of our company, so I think that Apple and a few other companies were good examples for venture capitalists that great ideas are not the exclusive products of people with great hair.

We had the Apple I, which we sold about 200 of. The key thing about that product was we learned. We had it 50% right, but we cut our teeth, we figured out how to make the next big jump, we learned a lot from the market about what they wanted, and that really was what made the Apple II such a giant success. That was our first real success, and we launched that in 1977 at the West Coast Computer Faire in April. That went on to sell, I don’t know, 10 million units over its lifetime. It was the first really successful personal computer by a mile.

It wasn’t until later on – actually after we launched the Apple II in April, probably in the fall of that year, I realized we needed to do some advertising. So I was looking in technical journals and a company’s advertising caught my eye, which was Intel’s. So I called up Intel and asked them who did their advertising. They said, “Regis McKenna.” I said, “What is a Regis McKenna?” They said, “It’s a person.” So I went over to Regis’. The first time I went in there, he almost kicked us out, but he eventually took us on as a client. He was involved very early on. Fred Hoar came on maybe two years later.

Regis McKenna (CEO of Regis McKenna, Inc. and early Apple PR): The personal computer industry was really quite different from Intel in that the personal computer industry really began as a countercultural movement. The first people were the long hair software developers or hobbyists in the computer industry, and they really distinguished themselves from being part of the mainframe world that was dominating the computer industry. In the mainframe world, the Big Brother world, the centralized computing world, the personal computer represented the individual, the freedom of the individual, so the design and the development of Apple was lightweight personal computing. It came out of this counter distinction to the mainframe, which was impersonal. The Apple colorful logo was distinguished between sort of the stark black and white IBM logo, so everything that was in the computing world prior to the personal computing industry was big and massive centralized control of an organization, control of the individual. The personal computer industry was this kind of counter cultural movement that came out of the ‘60s.

Fred Hoar (President of Miller/Shandwick Technologies and early Apple marketing): Youngsters, many of them with two years experience, but that’s better than somebody with two years experience 10 times. You didn’t have any of those impediments to growth that happen with large bureaucratic organizations. It was the startup. It was the primordial stereotypical startup in every respect, and more importantly, it was informed with true evangelism, a true sense of mission, in other words, changing the world. There was a true sense of changing the world. So the atmosphere was one of youth. It was one of passion. It was one of creativity. It was one of very little structure. But a process that everybody understood. They might not codify that process, but you knew it was there. That process was to get something done and make a difference. Steve kept using the phrase, “Give something back.” There was that really sense of not being part of company, but being part of a cause or a crusade, whatever you like to call it.

Scott McNealy (founder of Sun Microsystems): I think Steve Jobs did something for us all. He broke the age ceiling, the glass age ceiling if you will, on kids going off and doing things that they shouldn’t be doing. People didn’t look at us as so young when we were 27 because he at a very young age created a very successful company.

Secondly, you had Stanford and Berkeley and all of the other technology companies here. The geography is such that everybody is forced down to the lowlands by the bay. It’s a great infrastructure. We were able to start the company in nanoseconds literally. Get it up and running. Nobody batted an eye that we were barely shaving.

Larry Ellison (founder of Oracle Corporation): I think Steve Jobs is perhaps the most gifted person in our business in terms of vision and leadership. He really is the father of the personal computer. He really did popularize graphical user interfaces. He really has a passion for great technology.

Jobs: There is an entrepreneurial risk culture in the Valley that is as key a reason to why Silicon Valley exists as any other reason. The primary reasons are the entrepreneurial risk culture, of which role models are a very big part. Second are the universities, Stanford and Berkeley. There wouldn’t be a Silicon Valley if there weren’t Stanford and Berkeley constantly bringing in human capital which decides to stay here because it’s so nice. And third, certainly for the number of companies that start is the financial infrastructure as well. Fourth is the beehive effect. You’ve got a lot of extraordinarily talented people. The beehive effect says that it’s a lot more efficient to have that talent and all those companies together.

Let me give you an example. When you want to start a company, you need to hire some experienced people. You can’t just hire people out of school most of the time. So you have to hire some experienced talent. You’re going to ask somebody to leave a job, maybe they have a family, and come to your place to work. Well, if your company is in Montana, and they move their family and your company fails, there’s not another company in Montana that they can go to work for most likely, so they’ll have to go move again. As where if all you need to do is convince them to turn left instead of right to go to work in the morning, but they keep their same house, their kids don’t have to change school, etc., and if your company fails, well, they just go get a job in a week at some other company. You’re going to have a much higher probability of recruiting. So that’s the beehive effect.

Those four things together are why I think Silicon Valley today is what it is. The entrepreneurial risk culture has a lot to do with role models, starting off with Hewlett Packard, and models of engineers that started companies, models of marketing people that started companies, and even some spectacular failures. Some of the failures are as widely discussed as the successes. Even the failures, people are admired for trying. I think they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and go get a job. Maybe they don’t own the company, maybe they’re not a founder of the next company, but they’ve got a really good job. There’s no real chance that they’ll end up destitute.

Kevin Surace (founder of Serious Energy): Like Steve Jobs at Apple, we don’t anticipate that customers are going to tell us the product they want. They’re going to tell us the slew of problems that they have, and then we can come up with the products that they want. Obviously, from a disruption innovation standpoint, Steve Jobs is the epitome of it. Steve is the epitome of it because he got fired for being too innovative, and they brought him back, and he was still too innovative, and it just turned out he was right. He was right all along. They should have listened to him. But it was so innovative that it was disruptive actually to the organization. Finally, he came back with a nearly bankrupt company. Now it didn’t matter how disruptive you were to the organization. He might not be the gentlest, kindest manager, but it just doesn’t matter. He’s just right 75-80% of the time, and when he’s right, he’s right big. The iPad is an amazing – 22 million sold or whatever it is already. So you have to think that’s a once in a lifetime find of a person that is so disruptive that got to be back in a place where they let him be that disruptive regardless of what was going on in the organization.

John Warnock (founder of Adobe Systems): Steve has been a friend since May of 1983. He called one day and said, “Gee, I understand you guys have done something neat. I’d like to come by and see it.” So we showed him the early stuff in postscript. He immediately loved the technology, and was a great supporter. He sort of saw the vision for the technology and drove it through Apple even though almost everyone at Apple disagreed with him. He drove it through and got the laserwriter to be produced in 1985. He made calls that everybody said, “No, Steve, you can never sell a printer for more than the computer. Steve, you can’t do this. Steve, you can’t do that.” And he did it anyway. He was right. He actually was proven to be correct.

We were friends with Steve through his founding of NeXT Computers. We supported NeXT with display postscript. Steve has called many times when he was thinking about helping out Apple, and Apple called us and asked, “Well, gee, should we let Steve back?” You know, the whole thing. Both Chuck and I have been friends with Steve since the beginning. Steve’s coming back has been the best thing that could have happened to Apple. He has a sense of design taste and a sense of perfection and a sense of the customer like no one I’ve ever seen.

Charles Geschke (founder of Adobe Systems): The fact that Steve is back, they’re getting great machines, they’re very delighted about that. Steve has always had excellent taste in technology in terms of thinking of what people will buy, and frankly I think in terms of companies because he tried to buy us right after he saw the technology. He said, “Why don’t you just become part of Apple?” We said, “Thank you very much, but we’d like to stay independent.” To his credit, he eventually stopped asking and said it was fine. He made an investment, which made Apple a lot of money.

Jobs: I don’t think it will be like that because I’ll take myself. All the work that I have done – this is a very strange business and a very strange endeavor of life. All the work that I have done in my life will be obsolete by the time I’m 50. Apple II is obsolete now. Apple Is were obsolete many years ago. The Macintosh is on the verge of becoming obsolete in the next few years.

This is a field where one does not write a principia which holds up for 200 years. This is not a field where one paints a painting that will be looked at for centuries or builds a church that will be admired and looked at in astonishment for centuries. No. This is a field where one does one’s work, and in 10 years, it’s obsolete and really will not be useable within 10 or 20 years. You can’t go back and use an Apple I because there’s no software for it. In another 10 years or so, you won’t be able to use an Apple II. You won’t even be able to fire it up to see what it was like.

So it’s sort of like sediment of rocks. You’re building up a mountain, and you get to contribute your little layer of sedimentary rock to make the mountain that much higher. But no one on the surface, unless they have x-ray vision, will see your sediment. They’ll stand on it. It’ll be appreciated by that rare geologist, but no. It’s not like the Renaissance at all. It’s very different.

Lisa Jardine (Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London): As soon as we look at the tight relationship between an individual’s being at the pulse point of inventiveness and progress in his community and the flowering of art and culture and so on around them, we realize that Galileo could be Damien Hirst, that Cosimo de’ Medici could be Steve Jobs, that mankind has stayed pretty consistent over the ages, that ambition, a sharp mind, an eye for where the market is, a stronghold on who the people are that can make the key bits of technological equipment that you need to move the enterprise forward, plus a love of the consumer goods and a sense of taste in your community, what people like to buy and sell, all of that together makes a major entrepreneurial figure. It doesn’t matter whether they were born in 1450 or in 1970. They’re fundamentally the same person.

Jobs: So, the thing I would say is when you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. But that’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. You can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. The minute that you understand that you can poke life, and if you push in, something will pop out the other side, you can change, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing, is to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there, and you’re just going to live in it versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it. I think that’s very important, and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better because it’s kind of messed up in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.