[스크랩] 스티브잡스의 스탠포드 졸업식 연설을 보고,
지난주 우연히 스티브잡스의 스탠포드 졸업식 연설을 보고,
며칠이 흘러 감동이 약간 식었지만, 뭔가 아쉬어서 몇자 적어본다.
15분의 짧은 연설이었지만, 그는 나의 지난 5년간을 대변해주고 있다.
이 짧은 연설에는 인생의 길을 선택하는 간단하고도 의미심장한 비법?이 숨어있다.
이 연설의 메세지 즉 좋아하는 일을 하라는 단순한 메세지는,
인생의 갈래길에서 선택을 할때, 즉 의사결정을 할때 이익이다 아니다라는 생각이 아니라,
좋아한다 싫어한다라는 감정에 의해서 선택을 하라는 말이다.
즉 어린 아이들이 무언가를 할때 선택을 하는 메카니즘과 동일하다.
흔히하는 말로, 머리말고 심장을 따르라든지,
내면에 귀를 기울여라는 말과 같은 말이다.
좋아하는 일을 하면서 산다는 것은 현재를 산다는 말이다.
그리고 싫어하는 일을 하면서 산다는 것은 미래를 산다는 말이다.
(그러나 그동안 현재는 없다. 즉 자신의 인생이 없다는 이야기다.)
간단한 비유를 들자면,
마치 약속시간에 늦으면 초조해서,
약속장소에 가는동안의 시간 즉 삶이 사라지는 것과 동일한 이치다.
(왜냐하면 그 시간동안의 초조함이 현재를 산다는 것을 날려버리기 때문이다.)
현재를 산다는 것은 인생을 즐긴다는 이야기고,
미래를 산다는 것은 인생을 낭비한다는 이야기다.
좋아하는 일을 할때는 시간에 쫓기지 않으며,
현재를 즐기고 여유가 있다.
즉 여유가 있기 때문에 현재에 머무를수가 있다.
싫어하는 일을 할때는 일을 하는 이유가 다른 것이기때문에,
즉 스스로의 이유때문이 아니라, 다른 사람의 이유때문에 그 일을 한다는 의미이며,
즉 다른 사람이 자신에게 일을 시킨다는 의미이다.
좋아하는 일은,
좋아하는 감정만큼만 그 일을 추진시키므로,
바쁘고 늦고가 없고 딱 알맞게 진행이 된다.
따라서 감정에 충실하다는 말은 현재에 머무른다는 의미가 된다.
싫어하는 일은,
(대부분 동기가 돈이므로, 즉 다른 사람이 일을 시키게 되므로)
일의 속도나 무엇을 할것인가는 스스로 정할수가 없다.
(왜냐하면 자신의 내부에서 나온 일이 아니기 때문이다.)
즉 아무런 의미도 없는 일을 하면서,
주로 돈과 시간을 바꾸게 된다.
자신의 감정에 직접 마주서는 또는 따르는 훈련을 하다보면,
(조그만 선택부터 시작해서)
싫어하는 일을 하는 가장 강력한 감정인 두려움을 극복하게 된다.
아니 실제로 현재에 머무르면 현재란 곳은 두려움이 지배하는 곳이 아니라,
희열과 벅참 기쁨이 지배하는 곳이다.
스티브잡스는 가장 강력한 두려움인 죽음을 예로 들면서,
이 두려움 앞에서는 다른 조그만 두려움들이 자리를 차지하지 못하며,
또한 그리하여 진정한 현재를 선택하는것과, 죽음이라는 기준을 들이댔을때,
삶을 산다는 것이 무엇인가를 이야기하고 있다.
좋아하는 일을 해라.
이런 말 앞에 보통 두가지 반응이 뒤따른다.
1번 너무 뻔하다.
2번 인생을 새롭게 깨닫게 된다.
나는 예전에 많은 책들을 읽으면서 대가들이 공통적으로 하는 말인 좋아하는 일을 하라는 소리를
여러번 반복적으로 들어왔다.
그리고 이것은 문자적으로 나에게 다가와 너무 뻔하다란 내부 반응을 일으키면서,
단순히 책을 위해서 좋은 게 좋은 거지 식으로 써 놓은 말로 알고 있었다.
대가들이 하는 말들이란,
상황이 개선이 되어서 정말 여유가 생기면 좋아하는 일을 하라는 것인줄 알고 있었다.
(그러나 사실 그렇지 않다. 대가들은 처음부터 좋아하는 일을 해서 그 자리에 있는 것이다.)
나는 계속 너무 뻔하다란 반응을 내보내고 있었다.
또 이 책에서 좋아하는 일을 하라고 말하고 있네.
(그래서 어떻다는 거냐, 나는 좋아하는 일을 할만큼 돈과 시간이 없는데...
돈과 시간이 생기면 좋아하는 일을 하지 뭐)
나의 반응은 이렇게 계속 나오면서,
싫어하는 일을 하면서,
돈과 시간이 생기기를 막연히 바라면서, (방법도 보이지가 않았다.)
하루하루를 죽은듯이 지내고 있었다.
(그리고 이 하루는하루를 잊기위해서 위안삼아 책을 읽었으며
위안삼아 읽는 책에서는 계속 좋아하는 일을 하라고 떠들고 있었다.)
그러다가 내가 현재의 삶에서도 선택을 할 수 있다는 것을 깨닫게 된것은,
내가 처음 다니던 회사의 사장과 대등한 마음을 가지게 되면서 부터다.
(물론 신입사원은 사장과 대등한 생각을 꿈에도 가지지 못한다.
사장님과 강우석씨란 호칭이 말해주듯이 이미 상하관계가 형성되어 있기 때문이다.)
물론 내가 대등한 마음을 가지게 된것은,
회사구조를 잘 알게 되면서 부터이고,
내가 다니던 회사가 개판으로 경영이 되는것을 알게 되면서 부터이고,
그리고 사장이 무슨 생각을 하는지 알게 되면서 부터이고,
또 그 사람이 어느정도의 인격과 어떤 수준의 사람인지 알게 되면서 부터이다.
물론 이 모든것은 단 하나,
주식투자를 하면서 부터 다 깨닫게 되었다.
회사구조에서 나는 더이상 상하관계가 아니라,
대등한 관계에서 사장이나 다른 경영진 또는 상사를 보게 되었다.
(물론 이때도 사장님이나 팀장님으로 불렀지만, 나는 더이상 그들의 밑에 놓여있지 않았으며,
회사란 조직은 동호회 조직이나 나에게는 다를바가 없었다.)
이런 내부적 힘이 생기자,
이런 엉터리 같은 회사에서는 단 하루도 있고 싶은 마음이 들지가 않았다.
마치 동호회에서 마음내키는대로 탈퇴하는것과 비슷한 종류의 일이다.
암튼, 그 이후로 나는 역사상 처음으로 감정에 충실하게 결정을 하는 쪽으로,
인생경로가 수정이 되었다.
(물론 역사상 처음은 아니다. 초등학교때나 그전의 결정들은 대부분 감정에 충실하게 결정을 한것으로
기억이 난다.)
그리고 나는 이제 스스로의 길을 걷고 있다.
그리고 또 대가들이 좋아하는 일을 하라는 이야기를 중간에 간간히 듣게 되었다.
그러나 그때 놀라운 일이 일어났다.
그제서야 나는 대가들이 좋아하는 일을 하라는 것이 무엇을 뜻하는지 알게 되었으며,
완전히 180도 다른 방향에서 이해를 하게 되었다.
그리고 그들의 삶을 보다 더 잘 이해하게 되었다.
어떤 경험을 하고 다시 책을 보면,
같은 책이지만 하고 있는 이야기들이 다르게 들릴것이다.
왜냐하면 모든 정보는 '나'라는 필터를 통해서 흡수가 되고,
'나'라는 필터는 보통 매우 성능이 나빠서,
한번도 경험한적이 없거나, 잘 모르는 이야기들은 문자로 해석이 되고,
좋은게 좋은거식이라는 뻔한 소리라는 의미로 빠져나가버리게 된다.
그러나 이 '나'가 성장을 하게 되면,
필터가 달라지고,
따라서 같은 정보라도 흡수량이 달라진다.
그래서 나는 지금 뻔한 소리다의 반응에서 다른 반응으로 옮겨오게 되었고,
이런 향기가 나는 정보를 계속 흡수하고 있다.
삶의 선택에서 완전히 다른 결정들로 이루어지고 있으며,
매번 결정에서 삶의 진로는 계속 완전히 다른 방향으로 전개되고 있다.
그리고 나 역시도 최초의 방향전환 결정에서,
그 길의 여정이 지금 내가 서있는 이 곳을 전혀 상상도 하지 못했으며,
그리고 내 삶에 충실할때, 나의 삶의 여정이 어디로 이어질지 매우 흥미진진하다.
암튼 매우 흥미진진하며,
새벽이 기다려지는 삶에 이 길이 이어져 있는 것이다.
그리고 그 선택은 최초의 이정표부터 결정이 되는 것이다.
(즉 이정표를 선택하는 메카니즘에 결정이 되는 것이다.)
아래 부록으로 스티브잡스의 2005년 스탠포드 연설을 싣는다.
(발음이 비교적 좋아서 영어공부도 된다. 한글자막판을 원하는 사람은 네이버에서 검색하면 된다.)
Steve Jobs, Apple Computer CEO
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?
My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption, to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me! It started before I was born. 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. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death. When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, 2Awhich is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now. This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades.
Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.
Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.