Apple CEO Tim Cook’s Virtual Commencement Address to Ohio State University Graduates
May 3, 2020
苹果公司首席执行官蒂姆·库克俄亥俄州立大学网上毕业典礼致辞
2020年5月3日
Thank you, President Drake.
感谢德雷克校长。
Good afternoon, OSU.
俄亥俄州立大学的同学们，下午好！
Before we get to the important work of your future, I want to take a moment to consider our past.
憧憬未来和规划事业之前，咱们一起花点时间回忆些许往事。
As 1918 dawned, a young Assistant Secretary of the Navy, just 36 at the time, was headed overseas, tasked with making sure America’s green and untested troops were ready for action in Europe’s great war.
An iconoclastic poet and academic, barely 30, balanced odd jobs as a high school teacher and banker after the outbreak of war had dashed his hopes of defending his dissertation.
And a young nurse, only 20, began caring for wounded soldiers at a military hospital in Toronto. She worked ever-longer hours as a strange sickness began to appear beside the wounds of war.
By the time the Spanish Flu swept through their countries, their communities, and their bodies, these three would be forever changed.
当西班牙流感横扫他们各自的国家时候，这三个人所生活的社区和他们的身体情况被彻底改变。
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was carried off a military ship on a stretcher. Once he’d recovered back home in New York, he was the nominee for Vice President, beginning a career in national politics that would change the course of history.
While lying in his sick bed, T.S. Eliot began writing what would become “The Waste Land,” his poetic masterpiece. It begins, “April is the cruelest month,” and it began a movement of literary modernism that would win him the Nobel Prize for Literature.
And when Amelia Earhart finally caught the flu from one of her patients, her recovery was more complicated and painful than most. To pass the long and boring hours of quarantine and social distance, she would watch the airplanes coming and going, and she started to wonder whether she might like a change of career.
Graduates, I am sorry that we’re not celebrating together today. Your class is a special one – marked by history like few others in OSU’s 150 years. And while we aren’t shoulder to shoulder in the Horseshoe, filling it to the rafters, I know your parents, your loved ones, your friends and teachers, are no less overwhelmed with pride in you and in what you have achieved.
It can be difficult to see the whole picture when you’re still inside the frame, but I hope you wear these uncommon circumstances as a badge of honor. Those who meet times of historical challenge with their eyes and hearts open – forever restless and forever striving – are also those who leave the greatest impact on the lives of others.
In every age, life has a frustrating way of reminding us that we are not the sole authors of our story. We must share credit, whether we’d like to or not, with a difficult and selfish collaborator called our circumstances.
And when our glittering plans are scrambled, as they often will be, and our dearest hopes are dashed, as will sometimes happen, we’re left with a choice. We can curse the loss of something that was never going to be, or we can see reasons to be grateful for the yank on the scruff of the neck, in having our eyes lifted up from the story we were writing for ourselves and turned instead to a remade world.
When I joined Apple in 1998, I couldn’t believe my luck. I was going to spend the rest of my life working for Steve Jobs. But fate comes like a thief in the night. The loneliness I felt when we lost Steve was proof that there is nothing more eternal, or more powerful, than the impact we have on others.
Those of us who can look back on this time and remember inconveniences and even boredom can count themselves lucky. Many more will know real hardship and fear. Others still will be cut to the bone.
And while we turn to our loved ones and friends for comfort, think hard about those whose impact on your life is more distant, but no less meaningful.
亲人和朋友的安慰固然重要，但是也应该仔细想想那些对于我们的生活影响重大，但确容易被我们忽视的人。
Think about an undocumented father, ignored or scorned by his community, who is putting himself at risk in the fields today to feed his family and yours.
Think about a single mother, who stocks shelves at night and drives a city bus in the morning, without whom so much would fall apart.
想想一位单身母亲，晚上在超市整理货品，白天开公交车。如果没有她，很多事情就没法正常运行。
Think about the hospital orderly, scrubbing down the ward on hands and knees, whose work today is as solitary and sacred as a high priest purifying a temple.
想想医院的勤杂工，跪着用双手擦洗病房。工作如此孤独而神圣，如同一位净化神庙的大祭司。
Most of all, think about how you – blessed with a world-class education – might act and work and be differently when all of this is said and done.
Memorialize in your heart the way in which these times reveal what really matters: the health and wellbeing of our loved ones, the resilience of our communities, and the sacrifices made by those – from doctors to garbage collectors – who give their whole selves to serving others.
Not being able to leave the house leaves you with a lot of odd gaps of time to fill. I’ve been trying to use them to read, and I keep coming back to Abraham Lincoln.
I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to put these times into perspective. You’ll be shocked at how clever and funny and alive his thinking still is, how this reserved and humble man managed, in noisy times, to call others to hope.
And, as we celebrate OSU’s 150th anniversary, it’s worth remembering that the school wouldn’t exist without the land-grant university system that Lincoln signed into law.
It’s also hard to imagine someone more defined by their circumstances. Lincoln found his country on fire and chose to run into the flames. And he gave everything he had to bring his people – chaotic and squabbling, fundamentally flawed yet fundamentally good – along with him.
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present,” he said. “The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
Graduates, your case is new. For you, the old dogmas have never been an option. You don’t have the luxury of being enthralled. You enter a world of difficulty with open eyes, tasked with writing a story that is not necessarily of your choosing but is still entirely yours.
You’re the pride of your parents and grandparents, of aunts, uncles and teachers, of the communities that shaped you in ways seen and unseen. You weren’t promised this day. Many of you had to fight hard to earn it. Now it’s yours. Think anew. Act anew. Build a better future than the one you thought was certain. And, in a fearful time, call us once again to hope.