Dropbox创始人，CEO德鲁·休斯顿(DrewHouston)近期在美国麻省理工学院的毕业典礼上发表演讲。他向大学生提出了3点人生建议：追逐自己感兴趣的事，找到最合适的圈子，以及不要浪费人生的每一天。以下为休斯顿演讲全文：(下面有英文原文)
谢 谢董事会主席里德，也祝贺所有2013届毕业的同学。我很高兴回到麻省理工学院，并很荣幸地与你们在一起。我仍然佩戴着“黄铜鼠”戒指。在毕业当天向所有 人展示这枚戒指仍是我一生中最自豪的时刻之一。这是特殊的一天，而原因则有很多，我认为最令人激动的原因在于，这是人生中第一天你不必再为上课签到担心。
在你们人生最初的几个十年中，成功意味着从一个围城跳入另一个围城：考试获得高分，进入这所大学，修完所有课程，获得这一学位，进入一家有名的研究所，随后进入另一家有名的研究所。今天，这一切都结束了。
人生规划的难点在于，你不知道将走向何处，但会希望尽快实现自己的目标。或许你会建立一家公司，或治愈癌症，或撰写一部美国知名的小说。但谁知道呢？或许，情况会变得很糟糕。我无法判断。
今天，穿着学位服站在这里并对大家演讲并不在我7年前的计划之中。实际上，我从没有过伟大的计划。我现在发现，在刚刚毕业时，几乎不可能提出这种伟大的计划。
我曾思考过，你们从今天开始将会有怎样不同的人生。我也曾思考过，如果重来一次，我会怎样去做。你们能走到今天是因为聪明的大脑和刻苦学习。但没有人会告诉你，过了今天之后，推动成功的元素将会改变。因此我想做的是，给你们一张考试用的小抄，这是我在毕业当天希望拥有的。
如果看看这张小抄，可以发现上面的内容不多：一个网球、一个圆圈，以及数字3万。我知道，目前这些内容没有任何意义，但请听我说完。
21 岁时，我建立了自己的第一家公司，这是我和合伙人安德鲁·可利克(AndrewCrick)此前从未做过的。我们不知道走进市政大厅是否需要穿着正装，也 不知道是否需要刻一枚印章为重要文件盖章。最终我们发现，只需上网填表就可以在两分钟内完成建立公司的步骤。这听起来有些扫兴，但我们开始了自己的生意。 吃着洋葱圈，我们决定这家公司将针对SAT考试提供一种全新的网络课程。当时，大部分孩子仍在使用厚达800页的教材，而网上的其他预备课程也不是很好。 我们将公司称作Accolade，在SAT词汇表中意为“杰出的成就”。实际上，我们的公司名为“TheAccolade Group LLC”，我们认为这听起来容易引起关注。
在回家路上，我前往一家Staples门店去买名片盒。很明显，建立公司的最重要一步是使用Photoshop设计公司标志，并打印一些名片，名片上印有“创始人”的字样。下一步则是在各种会议上分发名片，并告诉女孩们：“理由是，我确实有一家公司。”这挺不错。
不 过，创业最有趣的部分在于学习各种新东西。每年夏天，我都会住在兄弟会的房子里，5楼有一个梯子通往房顶。我会拿上一把绿色的尼龙折叠椅，带着从亚马逊购 买的商业类图书去阅读。每个周末，我都会花时间阅读有关营销、销售、管理，以及其他我不了解领域的图书。我并未打算在PhiDeltaTheta兄弟会的 房顶上拿到MBA学位，但事实就是这样。
几年后，情况开始走下坡路。我感觉，我需要更加努力才能取得进步。一些时候，我觉得思路突然中断，无法解答更多关于平行线或火车开行的数学题。我发现自己出了问题，对这样的低效我感到自责。建立一家公司是我的梦想，但我可能还没有做好万全的准备。
因 此我休息了一段时间。当然，如果你来自6系(麻省理工学院电气工程专业)，那么“休息一会”意味着编写一个扑克机器人程序。如果你们不懂什么是扑克机器 人，可以这样理解：当你在网上打扑克时，你一坐几个小时，点击一些按钮，输掉所有钱，而扑克机器人意味着你可以用计算机帮你输掉这些钱。
这是一项有趣的挑战。我全身心投入。我在洗澡时思考，在午夜也会思考。这就像打开了一个开关，突然之间我就成了一台机器。
期 间，我的父母希望全家人前往新汉普歇尔，共同度过一个周末。但我仍希望开发我的扑克机器人。因此我打开本田雅阁的后备箱，将所有计算机设备和线缆搬进度假 小屋。饭厅的桌子不是很大，因此我将所有锅碗瓢盆搬开，给显示器腾出地方。这一次，我妈妈认为我出了什么问题，肯定要进监狱。
原 本我可以说，去做你喜欢的事，但实际情况并非如此。你可以很容易说服自己，你喜欢自己正在做的事。有谁会承认他们不喜欢呢？在思考这一问题时，我发现，我 所认识的最愉快、最成功的人们不仅喜欢自己做的事，也善于解决一个重要问题，这对他们来说很重要。他们让我联想到小狗追逐网球的例子：它们的眼神有些疯 狂，绳索一松就会立刻扑上去，抓住可以抓的一切东西。我的另一些朋友同样努力工作，获得了很高的薪水，但他们总是抱怨被束缚在办公桌上。
问 题在于，许多人没有找到他们的网球。我不希望走错路。我喜欢良好的标准化考试，但成为SAT备考的领先者并不是我的目标。令我惊讶的是，扑克机器人和 Dropbox开始分散我的注意力。我内心的一个声音告诉我要去哪里，而我则一直告诉它闭嘴，让我好好工作。然而有些时候，这个声音才最了解你。
我花了很长时间才知道这一点：最努力的人并不是由于纪律性才努力工作，而是因为他们正在解决有趣的问题。因此在今天之后，你们不用自己鞭策自己，而是要找到属于自己的网球，让事情去鞭策自己。这可能需要花一段时间，但在你找到网球之前，请倾听内心的声音。
让我们回到我毕业后的那个夏天，你们也将迎来这样的夏天。我兄弟会的伙伴亚当·史密斯(AdamSmith)和他的朋友马特·布雷齐纳(Matt Brezina)创建了一家公司。我们都发现，当所有人都在一间公寓中工作时，将非常有趣。
这 是一个完美的夏天，或者说，接近完美。公寓的空调出了问题，我们所有人都只能在小格子间里编程。史密斯和布雷齐纳日以继夜地工作。一段时间后，许多潜在投 资人找到他们，与他们分享秘密，并带他们乘坐直升机。我感到羡慕。我的公司已有几年时间，而史密斯的公司才只有几个月。我的直升机在哪里？
情 况越来越糟。8月份过去，史密斯带来了坏消息：他们将要搬走。这不仅意味着我失去了小食品来源，他们也将离开前往硅谷，在那里将会有重要的事发生，但我不 参与其中。我经常打电话给史密斯，听听他的进展。他们似乎总是很顺利。他会告诉我：“我们今天下午见了维诺德·科斯拉(VinodKhosla)。”科斯 拉是一名亿万富翁投资人，同时也是Sun的联合创始人。他丢给我一个“重磅炸弹”：“他会给我们500万美元。”
我为他取得的成就感到激动，但对我来说则是一次打击。这是我的酒友，也是我兄弟会中的兄弟，比我年轻两岁。我没有任何借口。他已经在“超级碗”比赛中出场，而我在选秀时就已落选。史密斯当时并不知道，但实际上他给了我很大的触动：是时候做出改变了。
许多人都说，人们通常只与5个人在一起的时间最长。想一想，谁是你圈子中的这5个人？我得出了一些好消息：对建立圈子来说，麻省理工学院是全球最好的场所。如果我没有来到这里，我就不会认识史密斯，不会遇见出色的合作者，也不会有Dropbox。
我学到的一点是，周围人的出色与自己的才能和努力同样重要。如果迈克尔·乔丹(MichaelJordan)没有加入NBA，他周围的5个人都来自意大利，那么将会怎样？你的圈子使你变得更好，正如史密斯对我一样。
你 的圈子中将会加入你的同事和周围所有人。你生活的地方很重要：全世界只有一个麻省理工学院，一个好莱坞，一个硅谷。这不是巧合：无论从事什么工作，通常只 有一个地方能吸引顶尖人才。你需要去那里，而不是其他地方。见到我的偶像并向他们学习，这给了我巨大的优势。你的偶像需要成为你圈子的一部分，请跟随他 们。如果下一件大事将在其他某处发生，请立即前去。
大学中你跌入的另一个陷阱可能是“做好准备”。请不要错误理解：学习是首要任务，但最快的学习方式是实践。如果有一个梦想，你可以花一生的时间去学习、计划和准备。你应当去做的是立即开始。
坦 白地说，我不认为我做好了准备。我还记得，第一名投资人答应我的要求并问我将钱打到哪里的那一天。对一名24岁的年轻人而言，这就是圣诞节。打开礼物后， 你在美国银行的帐户不断刷新，你的支票帐户从60美元增加至120万美元。最初我非常兴奋：数字中出现了两个逗号！我保存了屏幕截图，但后来却受到打击。 未来某一天，他们会把钱要回去，那我自己要怎么办？
你们已经知道这种感受：在麻省理工学院，这叫做“从消防栓里狂饮(drinkingfrom the firehose)”。这听起来很有趣，而我们都有着切身体会。这对你们很有帮助。今天，一个阀门被关上，你们需要找到下一个。
Dropbox属于我。正如你们想象中一样，建立这家公司让我的人生充满了激情、趣味和满足的体验，但我却没有真正分享过创业过程中最令人耻辱、失望和痛苦的经历。我甚至无法计算出曾经犯过多少错误。
幸运的是，这无关紧要，没有人的生活是满分。事实上，当你从学校毕业，学分的概念将不复存在。在你上学时，所有小错误都只是挡风玻璃上的擦伤。但在社会上，如果你没有学会调整，避免撞向护栏，你的发展将会很慢。你最大的风险不是失败，而是过于自满。
比 尔·盖茨(Bill Gates)的第一家公司是做交通灯软件，史蒂夫·乔布斯(Steve Jobs)的第一家公司制造塑料口哨，帮助你免费打电话。两家公司都遭遇了失败，但很难想象他们对此非常失望。这是从今天开始我最希望的改变：你不会再带 着这些数字，表明你曾有过多少失败。从现在开始，失败无关紧要，你只要做对一次就可以。
我 以前常常会为各种事担忧，但我还能记得让我冷静的那个时刻。当时我刚刚搬到旧金山。某天晚上我无法入睡，因此打开了笔记本。我在网上读到一条新闻“人的一 生只有3万天”。一开始我并没有太多的考虑，但随后拿起了计算器。我输入了24乘以365，发现自己已经用掉了9000天！我都在做些什么？(顺便说一 句，你们已经用掉了8000天。)
这 就是这张小抄上3万这个数字的含义。那天晚上，我意识到生活中没有热身，没有练习，也没有重启按钮。每天，我们都会在人生的故事中写上几笔。当你去世时， 墓碑上不会刻着“这里躺着休斯顿，排名第174”。从那时起，我不再尝试让生命完美，而是使其更有趣。我希望自己的故事充满了冒险，这才会带来不同。
我的奶奶今天也在这里，下周我们将庆祝她的95岁生日。在我搬到加州后，我们需要更多地通过电话交流。但令我印象深刻的一点是，每次挂电话时，她总是会说：“精益求精”。这个单词的意思是，永远都要向前看。
今天，在你们的毕业典礼上，你们进入社会的第一天，这是我给你的祝愿。不必尝试让人生完美，给自己自由，使生命成为一场冒险，永远向前。谢谢。
英文原文：
Thank you Chairman Reed, and congratulations to all of you in the class of 2013.
I'm so happy to be back at MIT, and it's an honor to be here with you today. I still wear my Brass Rat, and turning this ring around on graduation day is still one of the proudest moments of my life.
There are a lot of reasons why this is a special day, but the reason I'm so excited for all of you is that today is the first day of your life where you no longer need to check boxes.
For your first couple decades, success in life has meant jumping through one hoop after another: get these test scores, get into this college. Take these classes, get this degree. Get into this prestigious institution so you can get into the next prestigious institution. All of that ends today.
The hard thing about planning your life is you have no idea where you're going, but you want to get there as soon as possible. Maybe you'll start a company, or cure cancer, or write the great American novel. Or who knows? Maybe things will go horribly wrong. I had no idea.
Being up here in robes and speaking to all of you today wasn't exactly part of my plan seven years ago. In fact, I've never really had a grand plan — and what I realize now is that it's probably impossible to have one after graduation, if ever.
I've thought a lot about what's different about the life you're beginning today. I've thought about what I would do if I had to start all over again. What got you here was basically being smart and working hard. But nobody tells you that after today, the recipe for success changes. So what I want to do is give you a little cheat sheet, the one I would have loved to have had on my graduation day.
If you were to look at my cheat sheet, there wouldn't be a lot on it. There would be a tennis ball, a circle, and the number 30,000. I know this doesn't make any sense right now, but bear with me.
I started my first company in a Chili's when I was 21. My co-founder, Andrew Crick, and I had never done this before. We were wondering if you needed to wear a suit to City Hall, or if you needed to make a company seal for stamping important documents. It turns out you can just go online and fill out a form and be done in about two minutes. It was a little anti-climactic, but we were in business. Over onion strings we decided that our company was going to make a new kind of online course for the SAT. Most kids back then were still using these old-school 800-page books, and the other online prep courses weren't very good. We called it Accolade, an SAT vocab word meaning an award of distinction. Well, actually, we called it "The Accolade Group, LLC" which we thought sounded a lot more impressive.
I stopped at Staples on the way home to pick up some card stock. Clearly, the most important order of business was to Photoshop a logo and printout some business cards that said "Founder" on them. The next order of business was to hand them out at conferences, and tell girls "why yes, I do have a company." It was awesome.
But the best part was learning all kinds of new things. I lived in my fraternity house every summer, and up on the fifth floor there's a ladder that goes up to the roof. I had this green nylon folding chair that I'd drag up there along with armfuls of business books I bought off Amazon and I'd spend every weekend reading about marketing, sales, management and all these otherthings I knew nothing about. I wasn't planning to get my MBA on the roof of PhiDelta Theta, but that's what happened.
A couple years later, things started going downhill. I felt like I had to paddle harder and harder to make progress, and at some point I just snapped and couldn't deal with any more math questions about parallel lines or the train leaving Memphis at 3:45. I figured something was wrong with me. I felt guilty for being so unproductive. Starting a company had been my dream, and, well, maybe I didn't have what it takes after all.
So I took a little break. Of course, if you're in course 6, sometimes "taking a break" means writing a poker bot. For those of you who don't know what a poker bot is, what happens when you play poker online is first, you sit for hours and click buttons, and then you lose all your money. A poker bot means you can have your computer lose all your money for you.
But it was a fascinating challenge. I was possessed. I would think about it in the shower. I would think about it in the middle of thenight. It was like a switch went on — suddenly I was a machine.
In the middle of all this, my mom and dad wanted all of us tocome up to New Hampshire to spend a family weekend together. But I really wanted to keep working on my poker bot. So I pull up in my Accord and open the trunk, and next I'm dragging all my computer stuff and all these wires into our little cottage. The dining room table wasn't big enough so I started moving all the pots and pans off the stove to make room for all my monitors. This time it was my mom who thought something was wrong with me. She was convinced I was going to jail.
I was going to say work on what you love, but that's not reallyit. It's so easy to convince yourself that you love what you're doing — who wants to admit that they don't? When I think about it, the happiest and most successful people I know don't just love what they do, they're obsessed with solving an important problem, something that matters to them. They remind me of a dog chasing a tennis ball: their eyes go a little crazy, the leash snaps and they go bounding off, plowing through whatever gets in the way. I have some other friends who also work hard and get paid well in their jobs, but they complain as if they were shackled to a desk.
The problem is a lot of people don’t find their tennis ball right away. Don't get me wrong — I love a good standardized test as much as the next guy, but being king of SAT prep wasn’t going to be mine. What scares me is that both the poker bot and Dropbox started out as distractions. That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to work. Sometimes that little voice knows best.
It took me a while to get it, but the hardest-working people don't work hard because they're disciplined. They work hard because working on an exciting problem is fun. So after today, it's not about pushing yourself; it's about finding your tennis ball, the thing that pulls you. It might take awhile, but until you find it, keep listening for that little voice.
Let's go back to the summer after my graduation, the summer you're about to have. One of my fraternity brothers, Adam Smith, and his friend Matt Brezina were starting a company and we decided it would be fun for all of us to work together out of one apartment.
It was the perfect summer — well, almost perfect. The air conditioner was broken so we were all coding in our boxers. Adam and Matt were working around the clock, but as time went on they kept getting pulled away by potential investors who would share their secrets and take them on helicopter rides. I was a little jealous — I had been working on my company for a couple years and Adam had only been at it for a couple months. Where were my helicopter rides?
Things only got worse. August rolled around and Adam gave me the bad news: they were moving out. Not only was my supply of Hot Pockets cut off, but they were off to Silicon Valley, where the real action was happening, and I wasn't.
Every now and then I'd give Adam a call and hear how things were going. Things were always pretty good. "We met with Vinod this afternoon," he would tell me. Vinod Khosla is the billionaire investor and cofounder of Sun Microsystems. Then Adam dropped the bomb. "He's going to give us five million dollars."
I was thrilled for him, but it was a shock for me. Here was my faithful beer pong partner and my little brother in the fraternity, two years younger than me. I was out of excuses. He was off to the Super Bowl and I wasn't even getting drafted. He had no idea at the time, but Adam had given me just the kick I needed. It was time for a change.
They say that you're the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. Think about that for a minute: who would be in your circle of 5? I have some good news: MIT is one of the best places in the world to start building that circle. If I hadn't come here, I wouldn't have met Adam, I wouldn't have met my amazing cofounder, Arash, and there would be no Dropbox.
One thing I've learned is surrounding yourself with inspiring people is now just as important as being talented or working hard. Can you imagine if Michael Jordan hadn’t been in the NBA, if his circle of 5 had been abunch of guys in Italy? Your circle pushes you to be better, just as Adam pushed me.
And now your circle will grow to include your coworkers andeveryone around you. Where you live matters: there’s only one MIT. And there's only one Hollywood and only one Silicon Valley. This isn't a coincidence: for whatever you're doing, there's usually only one place where the top people go. You should go there. Don’t settle for anywhere else. Meeting my heroes and learning from them gave me a huge advantage. Your heroes are part of your circle too — follow them. If the real action is happening somewhere else, move.
The last trap you might fall into after school is "getting ready." Don't get me wrong: learning is your top priority, but now the fastest way to learn is by doing. If you have a dream, you can spend a lifetime studying and planning and getting ready for it. What you should be doing is getting started.
Honestly, I don't think I've ever been "ready." I remember the day our first investors said yes and asked us where to send the money. For a 24 year old, this is Christmas — and opening your present is hitting refresh over and over on bankofamerica.com and watching your company's checking account go from 60 dollars to 1.2 million dollars. At first I was ecstatic — that number has two commas in it! I took a screenshot — but then I was sick to my stomach.
Someday these guys are going to want this back. What the hell have I gotten myself into?
You already know this feeling: at MIT we call it "drinking from the firehose." It’s about as fun as it sounds, and all of us have the internal bleeding to prove it. But we’ve also learned it's good for you. Today, one valve shuts off. Now you need to go out and find another firehose.
Dropbox has been mine. As you might expect, building this company has been the most exciting, interesting and fulfilling experience of my life. What I haven't really shared is that it's also been the most humiliating, frustrating and painful experience too, and I can't even count the number of things that have gone wrong.
Fortunately, it doesn't matter. No one has a 5.0 in real life. In fact, when you finish school, the whole notion of a GPA just goes away. When you're in school, every little mistake is a permanent crack in your windshield. But in the real world, if you're not swerving around and hitting the guardrails every now and then, you're not going fast enough. Your biggest risk isn't failing, it's getting too comfortable.
Bill Gates's first company made software for traffic lights. Steve Jobs's first company made plastic whistles that let you make free phonecalls. Both failed, but it's hard to imagine they were too upset about it. That's my favorite thing that changes today. You no longer carry around a number indicating the sum of all your mistakes. From now on, failure doesn't matter: you only have to be right once.
I used to worry about all kinds of things, but I can rememberthe moment when I calmed down. I had just moved to San Francisco, and one night I couldn't sleep so I was on my laptop. I read something online that said, "There are 30,000 days in your life." At first I didn't think much of it, but on a whim I tabbed over to the calculator. I type in 24 times 365 and —oh my God, I'm almost 9,000 days down. What the hell have I been doing?
(By the way: you guys are 8,000 days down.)
So that’s how 30,000 ended up on the cheat sheet. That night, I realized there are no warmups, no practice rounds, no reset buttons. Every day we're writing a few more words of a story. And when you die, it's not like, "here lies Drew, he came in 174th place." So from then on, I stopped trying to make my life perfect, and instead tried to make it interesting. I wanted my story to be an adventure — and that's made all the difference.
My grandmother is here today, and next week we'll be celebrating her 95th birthday. We talk more on the phone now that I’ve moved out to California. But one thing that's stuck with me is she always ends our phone calls with one word: "Excelsior," which means "ever upward."
And today on your commencement, your first day of life in thereal world, that's what I wish for you. Instead of trying to make your life perfect, give yourself the freedom to make it an adventure, and go ever upward.Thank you.
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