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Archive for 2006年3月

学习方法论

3月 27, 2006 留下评论
曾经,深入理解,扎实掌握是老师们不变的圣条;一个公式要反复练习,反复背牢,务求这一辈子都不会忘记。
 
我很想能有机会告诉这些老师们:你们都错了!那是上个世纪的教条了;现代的学习方法应是:不求甚解,走马观花。
 
处在信息爆炸的时代,知识是不肯能被带在脑子里到处走了,因为实在是太多了;要深入理解,你就在那刹那间落后。唯一的方法是,快速的掌握这些知识的本源,让知识的精髓融入你的血液,然后忘掉所有的细节,好像武侠里的“忘记所有招式,无招胜有招”。就象,如果叫你记住一个网络链接,你是背下来呢,还是记住搜索的关键词?现今时代,不是一个比记忆力的时代。
 
这种的“不求甚解”的快速学习法使我收益匪浅,在快速更新的软件工程领域,轻松的占据先机。平均2-3小时可以“扫过“从来没接触几乎任何知识,理解之后,几乎完全忘记;这种学习的习惯本身,我相信会是巨大的“竞争优势”,而其中的乐趣,也是无法言传。
分类:杂文

类推法

3月 27, 2006 留下评论
由于人的认知局限,许多“知识”是通过类推得出的。比如,如果每次求雷公都最终会下雨,下次干旱时作的第一件事就是求雷公。
 
在复杂情况下要求快速作决定,类推是一个非常有效的方法:从其他类似的情况中找到解决的途径。从动物行为学的角度来说,运用类比,推理的能力是条件反射的高级阶段。
 
更多的情况,类推会使人只看表面,不看本质,最终陷入策略的泥塘。对了,类推法还有个好听的名字, 叫案例法。
分类:杂文

机遇

3月 23, 2006 留下评论

个人或企业的成功的公式,是意志+能力+机遇。三者缺一已不可,不过可以互相补充:能力有限的,如果运气是在好,也可成气候。而且,三者要作用于同一个方向上。

 

意志是原动力,缺乏原动力走不远;能力有天生,也可以通过后天努力弥补;说到机遇,实在有很多话要讲。除了像莫扎特这样的天才,超凡的能力超越了机遇外,绝大多数人还需要机遇相助。

 

人生而平等只是个理想;人一出生起跑线就绝对不同,要负出的努力也绝对不一样。这本身就是机遇的一部分;前一代的努力会成为下一代的机遇,但不能保证成功,因为还有另两个重要因素。机遇本身,是相对能力+意志而言:一个将才在和平时期,或商业头脑在战争时期,都将会比常人痛苦。

分类:杂文

快速进化

3月 23, 2006 留下评论

进化论说的是,在侏罗纪代,要做只恐龙; 白垩纪灭绝发生时,要进化成鳄鱼一类的冷血动物,才有机会躲过其他生物无法适应的低温;到人类出现前,进化到甫乳类的狮子,才能遐意于草原;要么,进化成海里的杀人鲸也是很好的选择。

 

企业也一样。市场成长期,要抢占主要客户,客户是稀缺资源,组织呈复杂型以满足大客户的不同需求;到成熟期,产品向规模化发展,规模经济,降低成本的组织结构更适应。企业不能适应变化,就渐渐被淘汰,比如DELL 淘汰IBM;能转过弯的,像 Cisco。但一次次变化,每次都能进化的恰到好处的,几乎不可能。

 

个人也是如此。年轻时或早期出国,多是求生存,需要去顺从环境;很多人这一步作的如此之好,一旦找到了“存活” 的理想位置,很难很快的改变使自己成功的走到今天的行为和思考模式,发现继续发展几乎不可能;第二步的发展要求的技能和智慧,要求逆向思维和冒险,可能和第一步正好相反。

 

能否快速进化,多在个人的悟性。 环境的变化只会越来越快,暴风雨前的屋檐下,不会有栖息的良地;敏锐的感知变化,快速的适应,进化,或创新,是达尔文理论的新要求。

 

 进化,还是灭亡,这是一个问题。

分类:杂文

Steve Jobs’ Speach

3月 3, 2006 2 条评论

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

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 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. 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, which 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 others’ 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.

 

分类:英语杂文