精益创业之父明尼苏达理工毕业致辞【高考英语阅读素材】

Engineers like you have the capacity to move the world forward by continually asking “why not?” It’s your special “doing” gene that empowers us to do better. You invent. You imagine. You see things that others don’t. Where others see blank canvases, you’ll see finished paintings. You hear the music that’s not written, you see the bridges that have yet to be built. You envision the products and companies that don’t exist yet.

University of Minnesota Science and Engineering alumni like you have founded more than 4,000 active companies, employing over half million people and generating annual revenues of $90 billion. These alums chose not to take the safe road but instead to push beyond their boundaries and DO.At some time you might decide that you want to become the master of your own destiny that you want to take an idea, and start your own company.And all of you sitting here just earned a degree that gives you choices that very few other professions have.

Entrepreneurship is not something foreign it’s built into the DNA of this country. America was built by those who left the old behind.Not too many generations ago your family packed up what they had, got on boat and came to America. They struck out across the country and ended up here in Minnesota.And what’s great about the United States is that no other country embraces innovation and entrepreneurship quite like we do. You don’t have to stay in one job, and it’s really, really hard to starve to death.Now I predict that this season 78% of all commencement speeches are gonna have advice about “pursuing your passion and doing stuff you love.” But no one actually tell you why. Well here’s the secret – if you’re going to spend your career in a company, doing stuff you enjoy will help you keep showing up. But if you want to do something, something entrepreneurial, just loving what you do is isn’t enough. You’re pursuing ideas you can’t get out of your head.Ideas that you obsess about. That you work on in your spare time.Because that fearless vision and relentless passion are what it takes to sustain an entrepreneur through the inevitable bad times.The times your co-founder quits, or when no one buys, or the product doesn’t work. The time when everyone you know thinks that what your doing is wrong and a waste of time. The time when people tell you that you ought to get a “real” job.By the way, every year I remind my students that great grades and successful entrepreneurs have at best a zero correlationn and anecdotal evidence suggests that the correlation may actually be negative.

Now we tell the truth.There’s a big difference between being an employee at a great company and having the guts to start one.You don’t get grades for resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition and tenacity. But you do get successful.The downside of starting something new is that it’s tough,because unlike the movies – you fail a lot. For every Facebook and Google, thousands never make it.Like Rocket Science Games, which was my biggest failure. 90 days after showing up on the cover of Wired Magazine I knew the game company where I raised 35 million dollars was going out business.We’d believed our own press, inhaled our own fumes and built lousy games. Customers voted with their wallets and didn’t buy our products. The company went out of business. Given the press we had, it was a very public failure.We let our customers, our investors, and our employees down. I thought my career and my life were over.But I learned something important, that in Silicon Valley, honest failure is a badge of experience.All of you will fail at some time in your career…or in love, or in life. No one ever sets out to fail. But being afraid to fail means you’ll be afraid to try. Playing it safe will get you nowhere.As it turns out, rather than run me out of town, the two venture capitalists that had lost $12 million in my failed startup actually asked me to work with them again.And during the next couple years…and much humbler… I raised more money and started another company that we were ultimately able to take public, and those patient investors more than made up for their earlier loss – about billion times more.

As scientists and engineers, you know about failure. You know that virtually no experiment works the first time. And here is the news, a new company all you have is a series of untested hypotheses. You learned something vital in school,to test your hypotheses by designing experiments, getting accurate data, analyzing the results, and then modifying those hypotheses based on those results. This is the scientific method, and surprisingly we just discovered the exact same method works for startups.Because failure is a part of the startup process. In Silicon Valley, we have a special word for a failed entrepreneur – it’s called experienced. Our country and our entrepreneurial culture is one of second and third chances.It’s what makes us great. You don’t have to change your name or leave town. Entrepreneurs in America know that they get multiple shots at the goal.Now someday several of you in this graduating class will be worth a $100 million dollars. And a few of you might change the way the world works.

I want you to look around. Seriously …Go ahead. Take a few seconds and take a look… Go ahead, I’ll wait.While most of you were looking around wondering who were the three people was going to be worth 100 million dollars, I hope a few of you were feeling sorry for the rest of your classmates, knowing that the most successful person in the audience is going to be you.These days I write a blog about entrepreneurship. At the end of each post, I conclude with “lessons learned”a kind of Cliff Notes of my key takeaways.

So that’s how I’ll finish up today.Here are the two lessons that I’d like to pass on to you.Your science or engineering degree gives you tremendous choices you, and no one else gets to decide two things:

And Congratulations — you’ve earned it!

Thank you very much.