○  谷歌创始人拉里·佩奇密歇根大学毕业演讲稿  ○

如果看过谷歌的介绍,可能你会不由得想到一个词—神话。这说的不光是拉里·佩奇和谢尔盖·布林两个博士没读完的辍学生在硅谷的车库里创业,最后建成了市值超过ibm(甚至有人预测五年后会超越微软)的it巨擎的传奇故事,说的还是谷歌里面那令无数打工族垂涎万尺的企业文化:牛仔裤、t-shirt衫的随意穿着,美餐、中餐、印度餐等一应俱全的大食堂,免费就医、洗衣、洗车的服务,甚至可以带上狗狗和滑板车一起上班……
　　谷歌的故事,举世瞩目。创始人的生活也为人津津乐道。今年5月,拉里·佩奇获邀在母校密歇根大学的毕业典礼上发表演讲。虽然已是成功典范,但拉里并没有夸夸其谈,他用诚挚的语言讲述自己家庭背景和人生经历,告诉大家人生中最宝贵的两样东西—梦想和亲友。
　　
　　class of xx! first i’d like you to stand up, and wave and cheer your supportive family and friends! i’m sure you can find them out there. show your love!
　　a long time ago, in this cold september of 1962, there was a steven’s  co-op at this very university. that co-op had a kitchen with a ceiling that had been cleaned by student volunteers probably every decade or so. picture a college girl named gloria, climbing up high on a ladder, struggling to clean that  filthy ceiling. standing on the floor, a young  boarder named carl was admiring the view. and that’s how they met. they were my parents, so i suppose you could say i’m a direct result of that kitchen chemistry experiment, right here at michigan.
　　everyone in my family went here to michigan: my brother, my mom, my dad—all of us. my father’s father worked in the chevy plant in flint, michigan. he was an assembly line worker. he drove his two children here to ann arbor, and told them: that is where you’re going to college. i know it sounds funny now. both of his kids actually did graduate from michigan. that was the american dream.
　　what i’m trying to tell you, this is way more than a homecoming for me. i have a story about following dreams. or maybe more accurately, it’s a story about finding a path to make those dreams real.
　　you know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? and you know how, if you don’t have a pencil and 4)pad by the bed, it will be completely gone by the next morning?
　　well, i had one of those dreams when i was 23. when i suddenly woke up, i was thinking: what if we could download the whole web, and just keep the links? and i grabbed a pen and started writing! sometimes it’s important to wake up and stop dreaming. i spent the middle of that night  scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work. soon after, i told my advisor, terry winograd, it would take a couple of weeks for me to download the web—he nodded knowingly, fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough not to tell me. the optimism of youth is often underrated! amazingly, at that time, i have no thoughts building a search engine. the idea wasn’t even on the radar. but, much later we happened upon a better way of ranking and we made a really great search engine, and google was born. when a really great dream shows up, grab it!
　　when i was here at michigan, i had actually been taught how to make dreams real! i know it sounds funny, but that is what i learned in a summer camp converted into a training program called leadershape. their slogan is to have a “healthy disregard for the impossible”. that program encouraged me to pursue a crazy idea at the time: i wanted to build a personal rapid transit system on campus to replace the buses. i still think a lot about transportation—you never loose a dream, it just  incubates as a hobby. many things people labor hard to do now, like cooking, cleaning, and driving will require much less human time in the future. that is, if we “have a healthy disregard for the impossible” and actually build the solutions.
　　i think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. i know that sounds completely nuts. but, since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you’ll have little competition. the best people want to work on the big challenges. that is what happened with google. our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally  accessible and useful. how can that not get you excited? but we almost didn’t start google, actually, because my co-founder sergey and i were too worried about dropping out of the phd program. you are probably on the right track if you feel like a sidewalk worm during a rainstorm! that is about how we felt after we maxed out three credit cards buying hard disks off the back of a truck. that was actually the first hardware for google. parents and friends: more credit cards always help. what is the one sentence summary of how you change the world? always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!