 January 2005 2005 年 1 月 (I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.) （我为一所高中写了这篇演讲。我从来没有真正给过它，因为学校当局否决了邀请我的计划。 When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious. What will you say to high school students? So I asked them, what do you wish someone had told you in high school? Their answers were remarkably similar. So I'm going to tell you what we all wish someone had told us. 当我说我在一所高中演讲时，我的朋友们都很好奇。你会对高中生说什么？所以我问他们，你希望有人在高中时告诉你什么？他们的回答非常相似。所以我要告诉你们，我们都希望有人告诉我们。 I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high school: what you want to do with your life. People are always asking you this, so you think you're supposed to have an answer. But adults ask this mainly as a conversation starter. They want to know what sort of person you are, and this question is just to get you talking. They ask it the way you might poke a hermit crab in a tide pool, to see what it does. 我首先告诉你一些你在高中时不必知道的事情：你想用你的生活做什么。人们总是问你这个问题，所以你认为你应该有一个答案。但成年人问这个问题主要是作为对话的开场白。他们想知道你是什么样的人，这个问题只是为了让你说话。他们问它的方式就像你在潮汐池里戳寄居蟹一样，看看它做了什么。 If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff you like if you want to be good at what you do. 如果我回到高中，有人问我的计划，我会说我的首要任务是了解有哪些选择。你不需要急于选择你一生的工作。你需要做的是发现你喜欢的东西。如果你想擅长你所做的事情，你必须做你喜欢的事情。 It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but it turns out to be hard, partly because it's hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs. Being a doctor is not the way it's portrayed on TV. Fortunately you can also watch real doctors, by volunteering in hospitals. [1] 似乎没有什么比决定自己喜欢什么更容易的了，但事实证明这很难，部分原因是很难准确了解大多数工作。成为一名医生并不是电视上描绘的那样。幸运的是，您还可以通过在医院做志愿者来观看真正的医生。[1] But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them yet. Most of the work I've done in the last ten years didn't exist when I was in high school. The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans. 但是还有其他工作你无法了解，因为还没有人在做这些工作。我在过去十年中所做的大部分工作在我上高中时并不存在。世界瞬息万变，而它变化的速度本身也在加快。在这样的世界里，制定固定的计划并不是一个好主意。 And yet every May, speakers all over the country fire up the Standard Graduation Speech, the theme of which is: don't give up on your dreams. I know what they mean, but this is a bad way to put it, because it implies you're supposed to be bound by some plan you made early on. The computer world has a name for this: premature optimization. And it is synonymous with disaster. These speakers would do better to say simply, don't give up. 然而，每年五月，全国各地的演讲者都会发表标准毕业演讲，其主题是：不要放弃你的梦想。我知道他们的意思，但这是一种不好的说法，因为它意味着你应该受到你早期制定的一些计划的约束。计算机世界对此有一个名字：过早优化。它是灾难的代名词。这些演讲者最好简单地说，不要放弃。 What they really mean is, don't get demoralized. Don't think that you can't do what other people can. And I agree you shouldn't underestimate your potential. People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends. 他们真正的意思是，不要士气低落。不要以为你做不到别人能做到的事情。我同意你不应该低估你的潜力。做过伟大事情的人往往看起来好像是一个不同的种族。大多数传记只是夸大了这种错觉，部分原因是传记作者不可避免地陷入了崇拜的态度，部分原因是，他们知道故事的结局，他们忍不住简化情节，直到主人公的生活似乎是命运的问题，仅仅是某种与生俱来的天才的展开。事实上，我怀疑如果你在学校里有十六岁的莎士比亚或爱因斯坦，他们看起来会令人印象深刻，但与你的其他朋友并不完全不同。 Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good. 这是一个令人不舒服的想法。如果他们像我们一样，那么他们必须非常努力地做他们所做的事情。这就是我们喜欢相信天才的原因之一。它给了我们懒惰的借口。如果这些家伙能够做他们所做的事情只是因为一些神奇的莎士比亚或爱因斯坦，那么如果我们不能做一些好的事情，那不是我们的错。 I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right. 我不是说没有天才这回事。但是，如果你试图在两种理论之间做出选择，而一种理论给了你懒惰的借口，那么另一种理论可能是对的。 So far we've cut the Standard Graduation Speech down from "don't give up on your dreams" to "what someone else can do, you can do." But it needs to be cut still further. There is some variation in natural ability. Most people overestimate its role, but it does exist. If I were talking to a guy four feet tall whose ambition was to play in the NBA, I'd feel pretty stupid saying, you can do anything if you really try. [2] 到目前为止，我们已经将标准的毕业演讲从“不要放弃你的梦想”简化为“别人能做的，你也能做”。但它需要进一步削减。自然能力存在一些差异。大多数人高估了它的作用，但它确实存在。如果我和一个四英尺高的人交谈，他的野心是去NBA打球，我会觉得很愚蠢地说，如果你真的努力，你可以做任何事情。[2] We need to cut the Standard Graduation Speech down to, "what someone else with your abilities can do, you can do; and don't underestimate your abilities." But as so often happens, the closer you get to the truth, the messier your sentence gets. We've taken a nice, neat (but wrong) slogan, and churned it up like a mud puddle. It doesn't make a very good speech anymore. But worse still, it doesn't tell you what to do anymore. Someone with your abilities? What are your abilities? 我们需要将标准的毕业演讲简化为，“像你这样有能力的人能做的，你也能做;不要低估你的能力。但正如经常发生的那样，你越接近真相，你的句子就越混乱。我们选了一个漂亮、整洁（但错误）的口号，然后像泥坑一样搅动它。它不再是一个很好的演讲了。但更糟糕的是，它不再告诉你该怎么做了。有你能力的人？你的能力是什么？ Upwind 迎风 I think the solution is to work in the other direction. Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway. 我认为解决方案是朝另一个方向努力。与其从目标出发，不如从有希望的情况出发。无论如何，这是大多数成功人士实际上所做的。 In the graduation-speech approach, you decide where you want to be in twenty years, and then ask: what should I do now to get there? I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that will give you the most promising range of options afterward. 在毕业演讲的方法中，你决定二十年后你想去哪里，然后问：我现在应该怎么做才能到达那里？相反，我建议你不要在未来做出任何承诺，而只是看看现在可用的选项，并选择那些以后会给你带来最有希望的选择范围的选项。 It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take. 你做什么并不重要，只要你不浪费时间。做你感兴趣的事情，增加你的选择，以后再担心你会选择什么。 Suppose you're a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math. 假设你是一名大学新生，正在决定是主修数学还是经济学。好吧，数学会给你更多的选择：你几乎可以进入数学的任何领域。如果你主修数学，进入经济学研究生院很容易，但如果你主修经济学，就很难进入数学研究生院。 Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn't have an engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for "don't give up on your dreams." Stay upwind. 在这里，驾驶滑翔机是一个很好的比喻。因为滑翔机没有发动机，所以你不能在不损失很多高度的情况下飞到风中。如果你让自己远离好着陆的好地方，你的选择就会不舒服地缩小。通常，您希望保持逆风。因此，我建议将其作为“不要放弃梦想”的替代品。保持逆风。 How do you do that, though? Even if math is upwind of economics, how are you supposed to know that as a high school student? 但是，你是怎么做到的呢？即使数学是经济学的上风，作为一个高中生，你怎么知道呢？ Well, you don't, and that's what you need to find out. Look for smart people and hard problems. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you can find such a clump, it's probably worthwhile to join it. But it's not straightforward to find these, because there is a lot of faking going on. 好吧，你没有，这就是你需要找出的。寻找聪明人和难题。聪明的人往往会聚集在一起，如果你能找到这样的团块，可能值得加入它。但要找到这些并不容易，因为有很多伪造的事情在发生。 To a newly arrived undergraduate, all university departments look much the same. The professors all seem forbiddingly intellectual and publish papers unintelligible to outsiders. But while in some fields the papers are unintelligible because they're full of hard ideas, in others they're deliberately written in an obscure way to seem as if they're saying something important. This may seem a scandalous proposition, but it has been experimentally verified, in the famous Social Text affair. Suspecting that the papers published by literary theorists were often just intellectual-sounding nonsense, a physicist deliberately wrote a paper full of intellectual-sounding nonsense, and submitted it to a literary theory journal, which published it. 对于一个刚到的本科生来说，大学的所有部门看起来都差不多。这些教授似乎都具有令人生畏的知识，并发表了外人无法理解的论文。但是，虽然在某些领域，这些论文是难以理解的，因为它们充满了困难的想法，但在其他领域，它们故意以一种晦涩难懂的方式写成，看起来好像他们在说一些重要的事情。这似乎是一个可耻的命题，但它已经在著名的社会文本事件中得到了实验验证。一位物理学家怀疑文学理论家发表的论文往往只是听起来是知识分子的胡说八道，于是故意写了一篇充满知识分子胡说八道的论文，并将其提交给文学理论期刊，该期刊发表了它。 The best protection is always to be working on hard problems. Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't. Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense. 最好的保护始终是解决棘手的问题。写小说很难。读小说不是。困难意味着担心：如果你不担心你正在做的东西会很糟糕，或者你无法理解你正在学习的东西，那么它就不够难。必须有悬念。 Well, this seems a grim view of the world, you may think. What I'm telling you is that you should worry? Yes, but it's not as bad as it sounds. It's exhilarating to overcome worries. You don't see faces much happier than people winning gold medals. And you know why they're so happy? Relief. 好吧，你可能会想，这似乎是一种严峻的世界观。我要告诉你的是，你应该担心吗？是的，但这并不像听起来那么糟糕。克服后顾之忧是令人振奋的。你看不到比赢得金牌的人更快乐的面孔了。你知道他们为什么这么开心吗？救济。 I'm not saying this is the only way to be happy. Just that some kinds of worry are not as bad as they sound. 我并不是说这是快乐的唯一途径。只是有些担忧并不像听起来那么糟糕。 Ambition 野心 In practice, "stay upwind" reduces to "work on hard problems." And you can start today. I wish I'd grasped that in high school. 在实践中，“保持逆风”简化为“解决难题”。你可以从今天开始。我希望我在高中时就掌握了这一点。 Most people like to be good at what they do. In the so-called real world this need is a powerful force. But high school students rarely benefit from it, because they're given a fake thing to do. When I was in high school, I let myself believe that my job was to be a high school student. And so I let my need to be good at what I did be satisfied by merely doing well in school. 大多数人都喜欢擅长他们所做的事情。在所谓的现实世界中，这种需求是一种强大的力量。但高中生很少从中受益，因为他们被赋予了虚假的事情要做。当我上高中时，我让自己相信我的工作是成为一名高中生。因此，我让自己在学校取得好成绩来满足我所做的事情。 If you'd asked me in high school what the difference was between high school kids and adults, I'd have said it was that adults had to earn a living. Wrong. It's that adults take responsibility for themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it. Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself. 如果你在高中时问我高中生和成年人有什么区别，我会说是成年人必须谋生。错。而是成年人要对自己负责。谋生只是其中的一小部分。更重要的是对自己承担智力责任。 If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job. I don't mean that I'd slack in school. Working at something as a day job doesn't mean doing it badly. It means not being defined by it. I mean I wouldn't think of myself as a high school student, just as a musician with a day job as a waiter doesn't think of himself as a waiter. [3] And when I wasn't working at my day job I'd start trying to do real work. 如果我不得不再读一次高中，我会把它当作一份日常工作。我不是说我会在学校懈怠。作为日常工作工作并不意味着做得不好。这意味着不被它定义。我的意思是，我不会认为自己是一个高中生，就像一个有服务员日常工作的音乐家不认为自己是服务员一样。[3] 当我不从事日常工作时，我会开始尝试做真正的工作。 When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they nearly all say the same thing: that they wasted so much time. If you're wondering what you're doing now that you'll regret most later, that's probably it. [4] 当我问人们他们最后悔高中的什么时，他们几乎都说同样的话：他们浪费了这么多时间。如果你想知道你现在在做什么，你以后会后悔，那可能就是这样。[4] Some people say this is inevitable — that high school students aren't capable of getting anything done yet. But I don't think this is true. And the proof is that you're bored. You probably weren't bored when you were eight. When you're eight it's called "playing" instead of "hanging out," but it's the same thing. And when I was eight, I was rarely bored. Give me a back yard and a few other kids and I could play all day. 有人说这是不可避免的——高中生还没有能力完成任何事情。但我不认为这是真的。证据是你很无聊。你八岁的时候可能并不觉得无聊。当你八岁时，这被称为“玩耍”而不是“闲逛”，但这是一回事。当我八岁的时候，我很少感到无聊。给我一个后院和其他几个孩子，我可以玩一整天。 The reason this got stale in middle school and high school, I now realize, is that I was ready for something else. Childhood was getting old. 我现在意识到，这在初中和高中变得陈旧的原因是我已经准备好做其他事情了。童年渐渐老去。 I'm not saying you shouldn't hang out with your friends — that you should all become humorless little robots who do nothing but work. Hanging out with friends is like chocolate cake. You enjoy it more if you eat it occasionally than if you eat nothing but chocolate cake for every meal. No matter how much you like chocolate cake, you'll be pretty queasy after the third meal of it. And that's what the malaise one feels in high school is: mental queasiness. [5] 我并不是说你不应该和你的朋友一起出去玩——你们都应该成为没有幽默感的小机器人，除了工作什么都不做。和朋友一起出去玩就像巧克力蛋糕。如果你偶尔吃它，你会比每顿饭只吃巧克力蛋糕更享受它。不管你有多喜欢巧克力蛋糕，吃完第三顿饭后你都会很恶心。这就是一个人在高中时感受到的不适：精神上的不适。[5] You may be thinking, we have to do more than get good grades. We have to have extracurricular activities. But you know perfectly well how bogus most of these are. Collecting donations for a charity is an admirable thing to do, but it's not hard. It's not getting something done. What I mean by getting something done is learning how to write well, or how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to draw the human face from life. This sort of thing rarely translates into a line item on a college application. 你可能会想，我们要做的不仅仅是取得好成绩。我们必须有课外活动。但你非常清楚其中大多数是多么虚假。为慈善机构募捐是一件令人钦佩的事情，但并不难。它没有完成某事。我所说的完成某件事的意思是学习如何写得好，或者如何给计算机编程，或者前工业社会的生活到底是什么样子，或者如何从生活中汲取人类的面孔。这种事情很少转化为大学申请中的行项目。 Corruption 腐败 It's dangerous to design your life around getting into college, because the people you have to impress to get into college are not a very discerning audience. At most colleges, it's not the professors who decide whether you get in, but admissions officers, and they are nowhere near as smart. They're the NCOs of the intellectual world. They can't tell how smart you are. The mere existence of prep schools is proof of that. 围绕进入大学来设计你的生活是危险的，因为你必须给人留下深刻印象才能进入大学的人并不是一个非常挑剔的观众。在大多数大学里，决定你是否被录取的不是教授，而是招生官，他们远没有那么聪明。他们是知识界的士官。他们看不出你有多聪明。预科学校的存在就证明了这一点。 Few parents would pay so much for their kids to go to a school that didn't improve their admissions prospects. Prep schools openly say this is one of their aims. But what that means, if you stop to think about it, is that they can hack the admissions process: that they can take the very same kid and make him seem a more appealing candidate than he would if he went to the local public school. [6] 很少有父母会花这么多钱让孩子去一所没有改善他们录取前景的学校。预科学校公开表示这是他们的目标之一。但这意味着，如果你停下来想一想，他们可以破解录取过程：他们可以带走同一个孩子，让他看起来比他去当地公立学校更有吸引力。[6] Right now most of you feel your job in life is to be a promising college applicant. But that means you're designing your life to satisfy a process so mindless that there's a whole industry devoted to subverting it. No wonder you become cynical. The malaise you feel is the same that a producer of reality TV shows or a tobacco industry executive feels. And you don't even get paid a lot. 现在，你们中的大多数人都觉得你的人生工作是成为一名有前途的大学申请者。但这意味着你正在设计你的生活来满足一个如此无意识的过程，以至于整个行业都致力于颠覆它。难怪你变得愤世嫉俗。你所感受到的不适与真人秀节目的制作人或烟草业高管所感受到的一样。而且你甚至没有得到很多报酬。 So what do you do? What you should not do is rebel. That's what I did, and it was a mistake. I didn't realize exactly what was happening to us, but I smelled a major rat. And so I just gave up. Obviously the world sucked, so why bother? 那你该怎么办？你不应该做的是反抗。这就是我所做的，这是一个错误。我没有意识到我们到底发生了什么，但我闻到了一只大老鼠的味道。所以我就放弃了。显然世界很糟糕，那何必呢？ When I discovered that one of our teachers was herself using Cliff's Notes, it seemed par for the course. Surely it meant nothing to get a good grade in such a class. 当我发现我们的一位老师自己也在使用 Cliff's Notes 时，这似乎是一门课程的标准。当然，在这样的班级中取得好成绩毫无意义。 In retrospect this was stupid. It was like someone getting fouled in a soccer game and saying, hey, you fouled me, that's against the rules, and walking off the field in indignation. Fouls happen. The thing to do when you get fouled is not to lose your cool. Just keep playing. 回想起来，这很愚蠢。这就像有人在足球比赛中被犯规，然后说，嘿，你犯规了，这是违反规则的，然后愤愤不平地离开了球场。犯规时有发生。当你被犯规时要做的就是不要失去冷静。继续玩吧。 By putting you in this situation, society has fouled you. Yes, as you suspect, a lot of the stuff you learn in your classes is crap. And yes, as you suspect, the college admissions process is largely a charade. But like many fouls, this one was unintentional. [7] So just keep playing. 把你置于这种境地，社会已经把你弄脏了。是的，正如你所怀疑的那样，你在课堂上学到的很多东西都是废话。是的，正如你所怀疑的那样，大学录取过程在很大程度上是一个骗局。但就像许多犯规一样，这一次是无意的。[7] 所以继续玩吧。 Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do. The best plan, I think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. Don't just do what they tell you, and don't just refuse to. Instead treat school as a day job. As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet. You're done at 3 o'clock, and you can even work on your own stuff while you're there. 叛逆几乎和服从一样愚蠢。无论哪种情况，你都让自己被他们告诉你要做的事情所定义。我认为，最好的计划是踏上正交向量。不要只是按照他们告诉你的去做，也不要只是拒绝。相反，把学校当作一份日常工作。随着日常工作的进行，它非常甜蜜。你在 3 点钟就完成了，你甚至可以在那里做你自己的事情。 Curiosity 好奇心 And what's your real job supposed to be? Unless you're Mozart, your first task is to figure that out. What are the great things to work on? Where are the imaginative people? And most importantly, what are you interested in? The word "aptitude" is misleading, because it implies something innate. The most powerful sort of aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests are often acquired tastes. 你真正的工作应该是什么？除非你是莫扎特，否则你的首要任务就是弄清楚这一点。有哪些伟大的事情要做？富有想象力的人在哪里？最重要的是，你对什么感兴趣？“天赋”这个词具有误导性，因为它暗示了某种与生俱来的东西。最强大的一种能力是对某个问题的消费兴趣，而这种兴趣往往是后天习得的品味。 A distorted version of this idea has filtered into popular culture under the name "passion." I recently saw an ad for waiters saying they wanted people with a "passion for service." The real thing is not something one could have for waiting on tables. And passion is a bad word for it. A better name would be curiosity. 这个想法的一个扭曲版本已经以“激情”的名义渗透到流行文化中。我最近看到一则服务员广告，说他们想要有“服务热情”的人。真正的东西不是人们在桌子上等待的东西。激情对它来说是一个坏词。一个更好的名字是好奇心。 Kids are curious, but the curiosity I mean has a different shape from kid curiosity. Kid curiosity is broad and shallow; they ask why at random about everything. In most adults this curiosity dries up entirely. It has to: you can't get anything done if you're always asking why about everything. But in ambitious adults, instead of drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep. The mud flat morphs into a well. 孩子们是好奇的，但我说的好奇心与孩子的好奇心不同。孩子的好奇心是广而浅的;他们随机询问为什么所有事情。在大多数成年人中，这种好奇心完全枯竭了。它必须：如果你总是问为什么每件事，你就无法完成任何事情。但在雄心勃勃的成年人中，好奇心非但没有枯竭，反而变得狭隘而深刻。泥滩变成了一口井。 Curiosity turns work into play. For Einstein, relativity wasn't a book full of hard stuff he had to learn for an exam. It was a mystery he was trying to solve. So it probably felt like less work to him to invent it than it would seem to someone now to learn it in a class. 好奇心将工作转化为乐趣。对于爱因斯坦来说，相对论不是一本充满他为考试而必须学习的艰辛东西的书。这是他试图解开的一个谜团。因此，对他来说，发明它可能比现在在课堂上学习它的工作量要少。 One of the most dangerous illusions you get from school is the idea that doing great things requires a lot of discipline. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can flog yourself through them. So I was surprised when, early in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything, not even a cup of coffee. 你从学校得到的最危险的幻想之一是，做伟大的事情需要很多纪律。大多数科目的教学方式都非常无聊，只有通过纪律，你才能鞭打自己。因此，当我在大学早期读到维特根斯坦的一句话时，我感到很惊讶，他说他没有自律，从来没有能够否认自己任何事情，甚至连一杯咖啡都没有。 Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in. One still hasn't sent out his half of the thank-you notes from his wedding, four years ago. Another has 26,000 emails in her inbox. 现在我认识很多做得很好的人，他们都是一样的。他们几乎没有纪律。他们都是可怕的拖延症患者，几乎不可能让自己做任何他们不感兴趣的事情。四年前，一个人仍然没有寄出他婚礼上的一半感谢信。另一个人的收件箱里有 26,000 封电子邮件。 I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline. You probably need about the amount you need to go running. I'm often reluctant to go running, but once I do, I enjoy it. And if I don't run for several days, I feel ill. It's the same with people who do great things. They know they'll feel bad if they don't work, and they have enough discipline to get themselves to their desks to start working. But once they get started, interest takes over, and discipline is no longer necessary. 我并不是说你可以摆脱零自律。您可能需要大约跑步所需的数量。我通常不愿意去跑步，但一旦我去跑步，我就会喜欢它。如果我几天不跑步，我会感到不舒服。做大事的人也是如此。他们知道如果他们不工作，他们会感到难过，而且他们有足够的纪律让自己坐在办公桌前开始工作。但是一旦他们开始了，兴趣就会占据上风，纪律就不再需要了。 Do you think Shakespeare was gritting his teeth and diligently trying to write Great Literature? Of course not. He was having fun. That's why he's so good. 你认为莎士比亚是在咬牙切齿地努力写出伟大的文学作品吗？当然不是。他玩得很开心。这就是他如此出色的原因。 If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity about a promising question. The critical moment for Einstein was when he looked at Maxwell's equations and said, what the hell is going on here? 如果你想做好工作，你需要的是对一个有前途的问题有很大的好奇心。爱因斯坦的关键时刻是他看着麦克斯韦方程组说，这到底是怎么回事？ It can take years to zero in on a productive question, because it can take years to figure out what a subject is really about. To take an extreme example, consider math. Most people think they hate math, but the boring stuff you do in school under the name "mathematics" is not at all like what mathematicians do. 可能需要数年时间才能将一个富有成效的问题归零，因为可能需要数年时间才能弄清楚一个主题的真正含义。举一个极端的例子，考虑一下数学。大多数人认为他们讨厌数学，但你在学校以“数学”的名义做的无聊的事情根本不像数学家所做的事情。 The great mathematician G. H. Hardy said he didn't like math in high school either. He only took it up because he was better at it than the other students. Only later did he realize math was interesting — only later did he start to ask questions instead of merely answering them correctly. 伟大的数学家G.H.哈代（G. H. Hardy）说，他在高中时也不喜欢数学。他之所以接受它，只是因为他比其他学生更擅长。直到后来，他才意识到数学很有趣——直到后来他才开始提出问题，而不仅仅是正确回答问题。 When a friend of mine used to grumble because he had to write a paper for school, his mother would tell him: find a way to make it interesting. That's what you need to do: find a question that makes the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's compellingly mysterious. 当我的一个朋友曾经因为必须为学校写一篇论文而抱怨时，他的母亲会告诉他：想办法让它变得有趣。这就是你需要做的：找到一个让世界变得有趣的问题。做大事的人看到的世界和其他人一样，但会注意到一些奇怪的细节，这些细节令人信服地神秘。 And not only in intellectual matters. Henry Ford's great question was, why do cars have to be a luxury item? What would happen if you treated them as a commodity? Franz Beckenbauer's was, in effect, why does everyone have to stay in his position? Why can't defenders score goals too? 不仅在智力问题上。亨利·福特（Henry Ford）提出的一个很好的问题是，为什么汽车必须是奢侈品？如果你把它们当作商品，会发生什么？弗朗茨·贝肯鲍尔（Franz Beckenbauer）实际上是，为什么每个人都必须留在他的位置上？为什么后卫也不能进球？ Now If it takes years to articulate great questions, what do you do now, at sixteen? Work toward finding one. Great questions don't appear suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes them congeal is experience. So the way to find great questions is not to search for them — not to wander about thinking, what great discovery shall I make? You can't answer that; if you could, you'd have made it. 如果说好问题需要好几年的时间，那么十六岁的你现在该怎么办？努力找到一个。伟大的问题不会突然出现。它们逐渐在你的脑海中凝结。而让他们凝结的，是经验。因此，找到伟大问题的方法不是去寻找它们——而不是徘徊在思考中，我应该做出什么伟大的发现？你无法回答这个问题;如果可以的话，你就成功了。 The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you, and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can take roost. Einstein, Ford, and Beckenbauer all used this recipe. They all knew their work like a piano player knows the keys. So when something seemed amiss to them, they had the confidence to notice it. 让一个大想法出现在你脑海中的方法不是寻找大想法，而是把大量时间放在你感兴趣的工作上，并在这个过程中保持你的思想足够开放，让一个大想法可以栖息。爱因斯坦、福特和贝肯鲍尔都使用过这个配方。他们都知道自己的工作，就像钢琴演奏者知道琴键一样。因此，当他们觉得有什么不对劲时，他们有信心注意到它。 Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something, or to answer some question. Choose a project that will take less than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish. Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This could take years.) 及时、如何以及在什么上？只需选择一个看起来有趣的项目：掌握一些材料，或者制作一些东西，或者回答一些问题。选择一个需要不到一个月的项目，并让它成为你有办法完成的项目。做一些足够努力的事情来伸展你，但只是，尤其是一开始。如果您在两个项目之间做出决定，请选择看起来最有趣的项目。如果一个在你的脸上爆炸，就开始另一个。像内燃机一样重复耕作，该过程变得自我维持，每个项目都会产生下一个项目。（这可能需要数年时间。 It may be just as well not to do a project "for school," if that will restrict you or make it seem like work. Involve your friends if you want, but not too many, and only if they're not flakes. Friends offer moral support (few startups are started by one person), but secrecy also has its advantages. There's something pleasing about a secret project. And you can take more risks, because no one will know if you fail. 不做一个“为学校”的项目可能也是一样的，如果这会限制你或让它看起来像工作。如果你愿意，可以让你的朋友参与进来，但不要太多，而且前提是他们不是薄片。朋友提供道义上的支持（很少有创业公司是由一个人创办的），但保密也有其优势。一个秘密项目有一些令人愉快的东西。你可以承担更多的风险，因为没有人会知道你是否失败了。 Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be on the path to some goal you're supposed to have. Paths can bend a lot more than you think. So let the path grow out the project. The most important thing is to be excited about it, because it's by doing that you learn. 如果一个项目似乎没有走上通往你应该有的某个目标的道路上，请不要担心。路径的弯曲程度比您想象的要大得多。因此，让路径从项目中生长出来。最重要的是要对此感到兴奋，因为通过这样做，你才能学习。 Don't disregard unseemly motivations. One of the most powerful is the desire to be better than other people at something. Hardy said that's what got him started, and I think the only unusual thing about him is that he admitted it. Another powerful motivator is the desire to do, or know, things you're not supposed to. Closely related is the desire to do something audacious. Sixteen year olds aren't supposed to write novels. So if you try, anything you achieve is on the plus side of the ledger; if you fail utterly, you're doing no worse than expectations. [8] 不要忽视不合时宜的动机。其中最强大的是渴望在某件事上比其他人更好。哈迪说这就是他开始的原因，我认为他唯一不寻常的地方是他承认了这一点。另一个强大的动力是渴望做或知道你不应该做的事情。与此密切相关的是做一些大胆的事情的愿望。十六岁的孩子不应该写小说。因此，如果你尝试，你所取得的任何成就都是有利的一面;如果你完全失败了，你的表现并不比预期的要差。[8] Beware of bad models. Especially when they excuse laziness. When I was in high school I used to write "existentialist" short stories like ones I'd seen by famous writers. My stories didn't have a lot of plot, but they were very deep. And they were less work to write than entertaining ones would have been. I should have known that was a danger sign. And in fact I found my stories pretty boring; what excited me was the idea of writing serious, intellectual stuff like the famous writers. 谨防不良模型。尤其是当他们为懒惰找借口时。当我上高中的时候，我曾经写过“存在主义”的短篇小说，就像我看过的著名作家的短篇小说一样。我的故事没有太多的情节，但它们非常深刻。而且他们写的工作比娱乐性的工作要少。我应该知道这是一个危险的信号。事实上，我发现我的故事很无聊;让我兴奋的是像著名作家一样写严肃的、知识分子的东西的想法。 Now I have enough experience to realize that those famous writers actually sucked. Plenty of famous people do; in the short term, the quality of one's work is only a small component of fame. I should have been less worried about doing something that seemed cool, and just done something I liked. That's the actual road to coolness anyway. 现在我有足够的经验意识到那些著名的作家实际上很糟糕。很多名人都这样做;在短期内，一个人的工作质量只是名声的一小部分。我应该不那么担心做一些看起来很酷的事情，而只是做一些我喜欢的事情。无论如何，这才是通往酷的真正道路。 A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is to find good books. Most books are bad. Nearly all textbooks are bad. [9] So don't assume a subject is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. You have to search actively for the tiny number of good books. 在许多项目中，几乎本身就是一个项目，一个关键因素是找到好书。大多数书都是坏书。几乎所有的教科书都是坏的。[9] 因此，不要以为一门学科要从任何关于它的书中学习，而这恰好是最接近的。你必须积极寻找为数不多的好书。 The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn. 重要的是走出去做一些事情。与其等待被教导，不如出去学习。 Your life doesn't have to be shaped by admissions officers. It could be shaped by your own curiosity. It is for all ambitious adults. And you don't have to wait to start. In fact, you don't have to wait to be an adult. There's no switch inside you that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age. [10] 你的生活不必由招生官来塑造。它可能是由你自己的好奇心塑造的。它适用于所有雄心勃勃的成年人。而且您不必等待开始。事实上，你不必等到成年。当你达到一定年龄或从某个机构毕业时，你内心的开关不会神奇地翻转。当你决定对自己的生活负责时，你就开始成为一个成年人。你可以在任何年龄这样做。[10] This may sound like bullshit. I'm just a minor, you may think, I have no money, I have to live at home, I have to do what adults tell me all day long. Well, most adults labor under restrictions just as cumbersome, and they manage to get things done. If you think it's restrictive being a kid, imagine having kids. 这听起来像是胡说八道。我只是一个未成年人，你可能会想，我没有钱，我必须住在家里，我必须整天做大人告诉我的事情。好吧，大多数成年人在限制下工作同样繁琐，他们设法完成工作。如果你认为小时候有限制，想象一下生孩子。 The only real difference between adults and high school kids is that adults realize they need to get things done, and high school kids don't. That realization hits most people around 23. But I'm letting you in on the secret early. So get to work. Maybe you can be the first generation whose greatest regret from high school isn't how much time you wasted. 成年人和高中生之间唯一真正的区别是，成年人意识到他们需要把事情做好，而高中生则不然。23岁左右的大多数人都意识到了这一点。但我会让你早点知道这个秘密。所以开始工作吧。也许你可以成为第一代，他们高中最大的遗憾不是你浪费了多少时间。 Notes 笔记 [1] A doctor friend warns that even this can give an inaccurate picture. "Who knew how much time it would take up, how little autonomy one would have for endless years of training, and how unbelievably annoying it is to carry a beeper?" [1] 一位医生朋友警告说，即使这样也可能给出不准确的画面。“谁知道这需要多少时间，无休止的训练会有多少自主权，携带蜂鸣器是多么令人讨厌？” [2] His best bet would probably be to become dictator and intimidate the NBA into letting him play. So far the closest anyone has come is Secretary of Labor. [2]他最好的选择可能是成为独裁者，恐吓NBA让他打球。到目前为止，最接近的人是劳工部长。 [3] A day job is one you take to pay the bills so you can do what you really want, like play in a band, or invent relativity. [3] 日常工作是你用来支付账单的工作，这样你就可以做你真正想做的事，比如在乐队里演奏，或者发明相对论。 Treating high school as a day job might actually make it easier for some students to get good grades. If you treat your classes as a game, you won't be demoralized if they seem pointless. 将高中视为日常工作实际上可能会使一些学生更容易取得好成绩。如果你把你的课程当作一场游戏，即使它们看起来毫无意义，你也不会士气低落。 However bad your classes, you need to get good grades in them to get into a decent college. And that is worth doing, because universities are where a lot of the clumps of smart people are these days. 无论你的课程有多糟糕，你都需要在其中取得好成绩才能进入一所像样的大学。这是值得的，因为现在大学是很多聪明人所在的地方。 [4] The second biggest regret was caring so much about unimportant things. And especially about what other people thought of them. [4]第二大遗憾是太在乎不重要的事情。尤其是关于其他人对他们的看法。 I think what they really mean, in the latter case, is caring what random people thought of them. Adults care just as much what other people think, but they get to be more selective about the other people. 我认为，在后一种情况下，他们真正的意思是关心随机的人对他们的看法。成年人同样关心别人的想法，但他们对其他人更有选择性。 I have about thirty friends whose opinions I care about, and the opinion of the rest of the world barely affects me. The problem in high school is that your peers are chosen for you by accidents of age and geography, rather than by you based on respect for their judgement. 我有大约三十个朋友，我关心他们的意见，而世界其他地方的意见几乎不会影响我。高中的问题在于，你的同龄人是因年龄和地理位置的偶然而为你选择的，而不是你基于对他们判断的尊重。 [5] The key to wasting time is distraction. Without distractions it's too obvious to your brain that you're not doing anything with it, and you start to feel uncomfortable. If you want to measure how dependent you've become on distractions, try this experiment: set aside a chunk of time on a weekend and sit alone and think. You can have a notebook to write your thoughts down in, but nothing else: no friends, TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, books, newspapers, or magazines. Within an hour most people will feel a strong craving for distraction. [5] 浪费时间的关键是分心。没有分心，你的大脑太明显了，你没有用它做任何事情，你开始感到不舒服。如果你想衡量你对分心的依赖程度，试试这个实验：在周末留出一大块时间，独自坐下来思考。你可以有一个笔记本来写下你的想法，但别无他法：没有朋友、电视、音乐、电话、即时消息、电子邮件、网络、游戏、书籍、报纸或杂志。在一个小时内，大多数人会感到强烈的分心欲望。 [6] I don't mean to imply that the only function of prep schools is to trick admissions officers. They also generally provide a better education. But try this thought experiment: suppose prep schools supplied the same superior education but had a tiny (.001) negative effect on college admissions. How many parents would still send their kids to them? [6] 我并不是说预科学校的唯一功能就是欺骗招生官。他们通常也提供更好的教育。但是试试这个思想实验：假设预科学校提供同样的优质教育，但对大学录取的负面影响很小（0.001）。有多少父母还会把孩子送到他们身边？ It might also be argued that kids who went to prep schools, because they've learned more, are better college candidates. But this seems empirically false. What you learn in even the best high school is rounding error compared to what you learn in college. Public school kids arrive at college with a slight disadvantage, but they start to pull ahead in the sophomore year. 也有人认为，上预科学校的孩子，因为他们学到了更多，是更好的大学候选人。但这在经验上似乎是错误的。与你在大学里学到的东西相比，你在最好的高中学到的东西也是四舍五入的误差。公立学校的孩子在进入大学时略有劣势，但他们在大二时开始领先。 (I'm not saying public school kids are smarter than preppies, just that they are within any given college. That follows necessarily if you agree prep schools improve kids' admissions prospects.) （我并不是说公立学校的孩子比预科生更聪明，只是说他们在任何一所大学里。如果您同意预科学校可以改善孩子的录取前景，那么这必然会随之而来。 [7] Why does society foul you? Indifference, mainly. There are simply no outside forces pushing high school to be good. The air traffic control system works because planes would crash otherwise. Businesses have to deliver because otherwise competitors would take their customers. But no planes crash if your school sucks, and it has no competitors. High school isn't evil; it's random; but random is pretty bad. [7] 为什么社会会犯规你？主要是冷漠。根本没有外部力量推动高中变得好。空中交通管制系统之所以有效，是因为否则飞机会坠毁。企业必须交付，否则竞争对手会抢走他们的客户。但是，如果你的学校很糟糕，就不会有飞机坠毁，而且它没有竞争对手。高中不是邪恶的;这是随机的;但是随机是相当糟糕的。 [8] And then of course there is money. It's not a big factor in high school, because you can't do much that anyone wants. But a lot of great things were created mainly to make money. Samuel Johnson said "no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." (Many hope he was exaggerating.) [8]当然还有钱。这在高中并不是一个很大的因素，因为你不能做太多任何人都想做的事情。但是很多伟大的东西主要是为了赚钱而创造的。塞缪尔·约翰逊（Samuel Johnson）说：“除了钱，除了笨蛋之外，没有人写作。（许多人希望他在夸大其词。 [9] Even college textbooks are bad. When you get to college, you'll find that (with a few stellar exceptions) the textbooks are not written by the leading scholars in the field they describe. Writing college textbooks is unpleasant work, done mostly by people who need the money. It's unpleasant because the publishers exert so much control, and there are few things worse than close supervision by someone who doesn't understand what you're doing. This phenomenon is apparently even worse in the production of high school textbooks. [9] 即使是大学教科书也很糟糕。当你上大学时，你会发现（除了少数例外）教科书不是由他们所描述的领域的领先学者撰写的。编写大学教科书是一项令人不快的工作，主要由需要钱的人完成。这很不愉快，因为出版商施加了如此多的控制权，没有什么比不了解你在做什么的人的密切监督更糟糕的了。这种现象在高中教科书的制作中显然更为严重。 [10] Your teachers are always telling you to behave like adults. I wonder if they'd like it if you did. You may be loud and disorganized, but you're very docile compared to adults. If you actually started acting like adults, it would be just as if a bunch of adults had been transposed into your bodies. Imagine the reaction of an FBI agent or taxi driver or reporter to being told they had to ask permission to go the bathroom, and only one person could go at a time. To say nothing of the things you're taught. If a bunch of actual adults suddenly found themselves trapped in high school, the first thing they'd do is form a union and renegotiate all the rules with the administration. [10] 你的老师总是告诉你要像成年人一样行事。我想知道如果你喜欢，他们会不会喜欢。你可能很吵，杂乱无章，但与成年人相比，你非常温顺。如果你真的开始表现得像个大人，那就好像一群大人被转移到你的身体里一样。想象一下，联邦调查局特工、出租车司机或记者被告知他们必须征得许可才能去洗手间，而一次只能有一个人去。更不用说你被教的东西了。如果一群真正的成年人突然发现自己被困在高中，他们要做的第一件事就是组建工会并与行政部门重新谈判所有规则。 Thanks to Ingrid Bassett, Trevor Blackwell, Rich Draves, Dan Giffin, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Mark Nitzberg, Lisa Randall, and Aaron Swartz for reading drafts of this, and to many others for talking to me about high school. 感谢英格丽·巴塞特、特雷弗·布莱克威尔、里奇·德拉维斯、丹·吉芬、莎拉·哈林、杰西卡·利文斯顿、杰基·麦克唐纳、罗伯特·莫里斯、马克·尼茨伯格、丽莎·兰德尔和亚伦·斯沃茨阅读本文的草稿，并感谢许多其他人与我谈论高中。 |
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 | | Why Nerds are Unpopular 为什么书不受欢迎 | | | | Japanese Translation 日语翻译 |
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| | Russian Translation 俄语翻译 | | | | Georgian Translation 格鲁吉亚语翻译 |
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