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今天为大家推荐的是硅谷投资人Ben Horowitz在哥伦比亚大学做的演讲。推荐的原因是这个视频有别于众多明星大佬在毕业季的演讲——Ben Horowitz就像是给毕业生和听众泼了一盆冷水一般，告诉大家“Don’t follow your passion.”不要盲从你的激情。他为什么会这么说？一起来看看视频吧！

So first of all, thank you, Class of 2015, for inviting me to speak. It’s such a great honor and when I got the invitation I started thinking back to when I was in Columbia and I remember getting to Columbia and I was immediately stressed out, because I realized that I now had to figure out, at some point, what I was going to do with my life. That was super scary. Some of you might be going through that now a little bit, (but not to bring that up or anything.)

首先感谢你们的邀请。获邀请那刻，我觉得这是如此伟大的一个荣耀，但很快就觉得压力巨大，因为我马上意识到：这场演讲，某种程度，实际上将指出我人生经历的一些关键“节点”。这种感觉真是超级吓人。

I remember when I got the first clue of what I might do, I was taking a class over in the Mudd Building, which somebody was telling me today is a great building if you like prisons and Catholic school. I was in this class and they were talking about this guy, Alan Turing and they were talking about how he had proven that if you built a machine, that he called a Turing Machine, it was theoretically impossible to build a machine that was computationally more powerful. It just melted my mind when I heard it, because I couldn’t even imagine what he was talking about, because it was 1984 and you have to remember 1984 computers weren’t even really a thing.

我在哥大获得我这一生可能干点什么的第一个“线索”。当时，我在一个课堂，听到他们讨论一个人，这个人叫阿兰.图灵。那时我第一次听到“一台能干任何事的机器”，这是在 1984 年，而 1984 年时计算机甚至都不能称作是一个东西。

So the idea of a machine that could do anything was just so farfetched, because all of our machines were just special-purpose machines, like for doing math. Your parents will remember it’s called a calculator. And then we had one machine for word processing called a typewriter and we even had one for video called a television set. And so the idea of, okay, now you’re gonna have the machine that can do absolutely anything and this guy had figured that out 40 years previously — I didn’t even know it was possible. I had no idea, it was like this secret to the universe in which they were saying, “Oh, here, there is a machine that’s limitless and you can do anything on it.” And I was just thought: “No way.” Translate, español, no way Jose. For the parents, that’s a Kanye West reference.

That point in my life was like, for those of you who are Phineas and Ferb fans, it was like that time when Phineas goes, “I know what I’m gonna do today. ” I’m gonna major in computer science. And so I ran over to (Carmen) and I was just so excited to tell my friends. I was, like, man, they’re gonna be just like so fired up for me, I figured it out. I’m not gonna be stressed anymore: “Guys, I’m gonna major in computer science.” And one of my friends said, “Wow, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” And said: “Why?” He said, “Look, you’re at Columbia University. That’s like a trade. You could learn that at DeVry. They’ll teach you how to build computers, fix them, program them. Here you should major in something real.” And I was just thinking to myself: “I’m talking about a limitless machine. You’re talking about a washing machine.” I was completely frustrated, I couldn’t really explain to him why, but it was at that point, at my height of frustration that I learned the most valuable lesson that I learned at Columbia, which is: Don’t listen to your friends. Think for yourself.

然后，我知道自己要做什么了：选择“计算机科学”作为专业。当时，我高兴地把想法告诉朋友们，但他们全认为我蠢。这让我非常沮丧，而后来我遇到的这个挫折，它形成的高度，事实上成为我在哥大学到的最有价值的一课。我明白了一点，那就是：不要听朋友的，而是要听自己的。

Thinking for yourself sounds both simple and trivial, but in reality it’s extremely difficult and it’s profound and here is why. As human beings, we want to be liked. It’s anthropological. If people didn’t like you in caveman days, they would just eat you. So you really have a natural built in instinct to want to be liked and the easiest way to be liked is to tell people what they want to hear.

我想独立思考这件事之所以这么难，原因在于：作为人类，我们都希望被人喜欢。这几乎是种可以叫做“人类学”的东西：在野人时期，如果别人不喜欢你，他们就能把你吃掉，所以，你几乎是在“本能性”地希望别人喜欢你。

And you know what everybody wants to hear? What they already believe to be true. And so the last thing they want to hear is an original idea that contradicts their belief system. So it’s very hard to even bring that kind of stuff up. But those are the things; those are the only things — things that YOU believe, that everybody around you doesn’t believe — that when you’re right that create real value in the world. Everything else people already know. There is no value created. It’s just business as usual. So it’s so important to think for yourself.

而要让别人喜欢，最简单方法就是：说别人想听的话。那么，你知道每个人都想听什么吗？

我来告诉你，每个人想听的是：他们已相信是“真实/正确”的东西，所以他们最不想听到的，也就是与他们认知系统相违背的独到观点，先不说仅仅是提供这种独到想法，本身就极其困难。

所有任何其他人已相信的东西，这其中，实际上都没有任何价值可以被创造。商业世界中一切都是如此，这也是为什么我说一个人独立思考是如此重要的原因。

I see this in my business every day. My business is that I fund people who have companies. Some of you probably have company ideas and you might come to me and say, “I’ve got an idea.” The biggest thing that I’ll look for when you come to with an idea is, have you thought for yourself? Is it something that you know that nobody else knows? Or is it something that everybody knows?

我几乎每天都能在生意场上看到这种情况。

我的工作是投资，很多人会跑到我身边，和我说：“我有个想法。”这时，通常我最想知道的是：你有从自己角度想过这件事吗？这是个只有你知道、别人都不知道的独特性想法吗？还是人人都知道的东西？

Let me give you an example. Let’s say you come to me and say, “Hey, I’ve got an idea to make batteries and cell phones last longer.” I would react, “Well, that’s a pretty good idea, but I’m not gonna fund it, because everybody thinks that’s a good idea.” And because everybody think that’s a good idea, companies like Google and Apple and Samsung with tons of resources will just build that. So it’s not really a new value creation for a new person.

让我来举个例子。假如你找到我：“嘿，我有办法延长电池和手机使用时间。”我会回答：“嗯，这是个好想法，但我是不会投资的，因为每个人都觉得它是个好想法。”

而正因为每个人都认为这是好想法，所以谷歌、苹果和三星，这种拥有成吨资源的公司，就会在这个领域实现，所以这不算是在为新的人创造的新的价值。

Contrast that with an idea that came to me about five years ago. A young man by the name of Brian Chesky came up to me and had this idea that he was going to have an air mattress in his apartment that he rented to people. It would be an air bed and breakfast and I immediately thought: wow, that’s a horrible, horrible idea. Who would want to rent an air mattress out to somebody’s apartment like probably a serial killer?

而我大约是在五年前，才突然意识到这里的这种对比性的。

五年前，一个叫 Brian Chesky 的年轻人找到我，说他有个在自己公寓把“空气床垫”出租给别人的想法。我当时想：哎呦，真是糟糕透顶，谁会像“连环杀手”一样想在别人公寓租空气床垫啊？

But Brian had a secret and his secret: and that was he had run the experiment. He had actually tried his idea and a whole lot of people wanted to rent that air mattress and they weren’t serial killers. Beyond that, he went and he studied the history of hotel chains and he found out hotel chains were a relatively new concept. That before hotel chains, people stayed at inns and bed and breakfasts. And that the problem with inns and bed and breakfast were, they were like a box of chocolates. You had no idea what you were going to get — one day you might have something good and the other day you might have marzipan cherry or some weird stuff.

但 Brian 有个秘密，这个秘密是：他已做过实验，有非常多人想租那个空气床垫，而且这些人不是什么“连环杀手”。同时超越这些实验之上，Brain 还学习了连锁酒店发展史，他发现：已成功的连锁酒店，有一些与他想法相关性的新概念。

连锁酒店出现前，人们呆在 Inn（美国一种小旅馆）和 Bed andbreadfast（美国为客人提供早餐的一种过夜住宿，由私人房或家庭房提供给商业用途，房间一般不超过10个），而这两者，都有一个问题，即：都像一盒巧克力。

这个意思是说：你永远不知盒子里的巧克力是什么，某一天，你可能得到很好的东西，但另一天，你可能会有杏仁蛋白樱桃或什么奇怪东西。

So, he though, with the internet, we can make every one of those little chocolates in the box transparent and you can know what you’re getting. And then you’d get all the greatness of the bed and breakfast and all the goodness of the hotel chain all in one. And he had figured out that secret and it was an interesting secret, because it wasn’t something everybody knew. Or it was something that probably everybody in the world knew at one point, but they had all forgotten. Everybody had forgot why we had hotels. And today? I think they rent more nights every night in New York than Hilton Hotel. Just five years ago and it was all based on him believing something that nobody else believed.

所以Brian就想：如果利用互联网，就可以把巧克力放在一个“透明”盒子，然后就能知道你会得到什么。而接下来，就可以将 Bed andBreakfast 和连锁酒店优势，都集中一起。

他解决了这个秘密，而这个秘密如此有趣，因为它不是谁都知道，或者说它是世界上每个人都知道，但却都把它忘了的东西，我们都忘了：我们为什么要有一个旅店。

而现在呢？这个年轻人造出Airbnb，人们已开始更多地想住在纽约人的家，而不是希尔顿大酒店，但五年前，这还仅仅是个只建立在Brain 个人信念上的东西，别人都不信。

So in that spirit, what I’d like to give is a few unconventional graduation thoughts and I’m titling them, “Do Not Follow Your Passion and the World is Not Going to Hell in a Handbasket and the Class of 2015 is Not Required to Save it.” I told you it wasn’t going to be conventional. Don’t follow your passion.

Airbnb 是有关独立思考的一个例子，现在来讲一讲个人激情。谈到精神理念，我想在大家毕业典礼上，给出一些非传统性思想，我将其称之为：“不要盲从你的激情，世界没有陷入地狱，也没什么人要求你们这些 2015 毕业生去拯救世界。”

我告诉你们的这个东西可能不会成为常规，但是真的，不要去盲从激情。

Now, you’re probably thinking, “That’s a really dumb idea.” Because if you poll 1,000 people who are successful they’ll all say that they love what they do. And so the broad conclusion of the world is that if you do what you love, then you’ll be successful. But we’re engineers and we know that that might be true. But it also might be the case that if you’re successful, you love what you do. You just love being successful and everybody loves you. It’s awesome.

你可能认为我蠢，因为如果给1000个成功人士做民意测验，几乎所有人都会说：喜欢自己做的事。这样一来，这个结论就成了：如果你做自己喜欢的事，你就会成功。但这个结论也可能是这样的：如果你很成功，你就会喜欢自己做的事，你只是喜欢成功本身，然后每个人都喜欢你。

So which one is it?

所以，这里到底哪个结论是正确的呢？

Well, I think to figure it out, you have to go back in time. You have to back off when you were successful to right now when you’re graduating as the Class of 2015. And the first tricky thing about passions are they’re hard to prioritize. Which passion is it? Are you more passionate about math or engineering? Are you more passionate about history or literature? Are you more passionate about video games or K-pop? These are tough decisions. How do you even know? On the other hand, what are you good at? Are you better at math or writing? That’s a much easier thing to figure out.

我觉得要弄清这点，你们必须回到过去，必须在成功时回到现在你们作为2015 届毕业生毕业站在这里的这个时间。

我觉得有关激情的第一个真正棘手地方在于：我们其实很难把它们进行优先排序。到底最关键的是哪种热情呢？你是对数学还是工程学更有热情？是对历史还是文学更有热情？是对电子游戏还是K-pop 更有热情？

这些都非常难选择。你怎么知道呢？而另一方面，你擅长什么？你更擅长数学，还是写作？这或许更容易弄清。

The second thing that’s tricky if you’re going forward in time with this follow your passion idea is that what you’re passionate about at 21 is not necessarily what you’re gonna be passionate about at 40. Now, this is true for boyfriends as well as career choices.

第二件棘手事是：如果遵从激情并向前迈进，你会发现：你在21岁时很有热情干的事，也许不是你40岁时还有热情干的。这个道理，男朋友和职业选择都适用。

The third issue with following your passion is you’re not necessarily good at your passion. Has anybody ever watched American Idol? You know what I’m talking about. Just because you love singing doesn’t mean you should be a professional singer.

而第三个棘手事：你有热情干的事，可能不是你擅长的。有人看过“美国偶像”吗？你们知道我在说啥，你热爱唱歌，但这不意味你能成为一个职业歌手。

Finally and most importantly, following your passion is a very “me”-centered view of the world. When you go through life, what you’ll find is what you take out of the world over time — be it money, cars, stuff, accolades — is much less important than what you’ve put into the world. So my recommendation would be follow your contribution. Find the thing that you’re great at, put that into the world, contribute to others, help the world be better and that is the thing to follow.

关于激情，最后也是最重要一点：遵从激情，其实也是件非常“以自我为中心”的世界观。而当你经历一生，你会发现：历经时间，你从世间得到的所有东西，无论钱、车子、物质或是赞美，都远远没有你馈赠给这个世界的东西重要。

所以有关个人“激情”，我的建议是：找到你所擅长的东西，然后将其赠与世界，馈赠他人，帮世界变得更好，这才是你应该遵从的激情。

Now, speaking of the world, this is generally the point in a graduation speech where I should say, “The Class of 2015 faces unprecedented challenges. There is ISIS. There is global warming. It sucks.” Don’t get me started on congressional gridlock. And I think all those are true, but what’s remarkable from a historical standpoint about this time in the world, to me, are not the unprecedented challenges; it’s the unprecedented opportunities.

既然说到世界，现在我来说一说我通常在毕业演讲会说到的点。现在到处都是这样的说法：“2015毕业生将面临史无前例的挑战：ISIS、全球变暖。这些让人恶心的东西！”所有这些挑战的确存在，但对于我，从历史的角度看，现今世界更值得注意的，并不是史无前例的挑战，而是史无前例的机遇。

Let me talk quickly about the state of the world.

我来快速说说世界现状：

The number of people living in extreme poverty today is the lowest in the history of the world and one-fifth of what it was in 1900. Child labor is in steep decline and fell one-third between 2000 and 2012. Compared to the late 19th Century, the number of hours that one has to work has fallen roughly in half. The percent of income spent on food has fallen in half since 1960. Life expectancy has increased six years between 1990 and 2012. Child mortality has fallen in half since 1990. People are getting taller, which is a measure of nutrition. People have grown more in the last 100 years than in the previous 2,000. Speaking of ISIS, worldwide battlefield deaths are down twentyfold since the 40s. The homicide rate in the U.S. is down half since the late 70s, violent crime is one-third of what it was in 1976. The global supply of nuclear weapons is down nearly fivefold since 1990 and in 2014 was the first year in 40 that carbon emissions were flat.

世界上极其贫困人口为历史最低，仅为1900年时的 1/5；童工大幅减少，2000-2012年间下降 1/3；与 19世纪后期比，每人必须工作小时数大幅降至一半；从1960年起，食物支出占收入的比例下降至一半；1990-2012 年，平均寿命上涨6年；从1990年起儿童死亡率降至一半；人们变得更高，身高是一种度量营养方式（说明营养摄入更充分）。过去100年，人类成长比之前2000年都多；

说到 ISIS，从40年代开始，世界范围内战争死亡数下降20倍；从70年代后期开始，美国谋杀率降至一半，暴力犯罪是1976年的 1/3；1990年始，全球范围内核武器供应下降5倍，2014年是40年来第一次碳排放量持平“没有增长”的一年。

So it’s not that bad.

所以，情况还不算太坏。

But the biggest opportunity is one that we’ve only begun to measure and to explain this, I’d like to go back to when your parents and I were in college, because when we were in college, and they may have told you this, and it may have scared you, we didn’t have the internet. There was no internet. And so if we had an idea Brian Chesky had an idea, and we wanted to find out about it, we couldn’t Google it.

但有关最大机遇，却是我们现在才开始去测量和解释，我愿把时光倒回到你们父母，和我上大学这段时间，来向你们重申这种机遇。

我们上大学时是没互联网的，你们父母可能告诉过你，而你已经被吓到。是，那时没互联网，所以如果当时我们有个像Brian Chesky 这样的想法，然后想查点什么，我们甚至都没办法谷歌。

But we did have a search engine. It was a different kind of technology. It was called a library and it kind of sucked. There is actually an old search engine behind me; I’m looking at it there. But it kind of sucked because, one, you couldn’t access it from your dorm room, because it wasn’t even in cyberspace. It was in, well, actual space. And you had to walk over there and then, and you had to bring your credentials or they wouldn’t even let you in. There was no logged out user experience.

当时的搜索引擎是种叫“图书馆”的东西，它不能在寝室用，甚至是个物理存在，不存在于网络空间，你必须得走过去，还得带着你的信息材料，否则他们不让你进。而且，你都无法退出用户界面。

And it was based on this really weird tech that was invented a long time ago called the Dewey Decimal System. And this tech was so old, Dewey was named after the guy Dewey who invented it. But to make it seem high tech, they said it’s a decimal system: “This is so high tech, we’re using numbers, dude.” And not just integers, the decimal system! The user interface to it was so bad, it was called a card catalog, they had to train you to use it. You couldn’t just go in and use it. You needed hours and hours of classroom training. The net result of this was that looking stuff up was very discouraging, because you couldn’t look it up in milliseconds, it took hours, and that’s if you were a Columbia student, right? Even if you had a good library like Butler, it would take you hours to look things up, so it was very discouraging.

与此同时，查找东西的过程还让人非常不爽，因为你无法在几秒内就能查到，通常你得化花几小时。对吧？即使你有个像Butler 一样的好图书馆，你还是得花几小时来查。

Maybe if Brian Chesky was born then he would just have said, “Forget this, I’m going to Taco Bell. I’m not figuring out where hotels came from.” But think about it, that’s for a Columbia student. Even worse for like a student who didn’t go to Columbia and didn’t have access to as good a library and, you might not even have that book in the library.

Brian Chesky 如果在那时也许会说：“算了，我不想再搞清连锁旅店是怎么来的了。”但想一想：这还是一个哥大学生情况。事实上，对一个没去过哥伦比亚大学，也没好图书馆的学生，情况可能更糟，可能图书馆里压根都没那本书。

Or even more so, imagine if you grew up in Bangladesh or Sudan and you had all kinds of great ideas, you had no access, no search engine at all, no way to contribute your original ideas to the world.

甚至更糟的情况，想象一下：如果你是在孟加拉或苏丹长大，你有很多很多好想法，但你根本就没途径或搜索引擎，你根本无法将自己独特观点贡献给这个世界。

But then we fast forward to where we are now and everybody who has a smart phone, which is pretty soon going to be everybody in the world has the Library of Congress in their pocket. That means a girl growing up in Bangladesh now has a better library than a student at Columbia or Harvard had 20 years ago.

然后……我们很快地被推进到了：每个人都有一个智能手机，而且很快，手机会变成世上每个人口袋里的美国国会图书馆。这就意味：现在在孟加拉长大的女孩，她拥有的图书馆，比二十年前哥伦比亚或哈佛大学学生所有的还要更好。

What might her idea be? What might she contribute?

那么她可能会有什么想法？可能会贡献什么呢？

Well, I think that’s going be a lot up to you, because the world still isn’t flat. There are issues. There are issues with power and issues with water and issues with food and issues with equal rights. But if you contribute, if you put your contribution into the world, if you think for yourself, then I believe that you will be the greatest generation. Because when we look back 50 years from now, 100 years from now, 500 years from now, you will be the generation that unlocked human potential.

这个答案，我觉得很一大部分将完全取决于你们，因为世界依旧不是“平”的，还有很多问题：能源问题、水资源问题、粮食问题、平等权利问题等等。而如果你对世界有所贡献，如果你独立思考，那么我相信：你们会是最棒的一代，因为如果我们回首过去的50年、100年、500年，你们将是（唯一）人类潜力客观上没有被做任何限制的一代。

So congratulations Columbia Class of 2015 and thank you for inviting me.

感谢邀请，并祝贺所有哥伦比亚2015届的毕业生！

本文来自微信公众号英语环球 NEWSPlus（NEWSPlus）

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