Ted
How "Stay hungry. Stay foolish“ is being comprehended in English-speaking world?

The serious Chinese translations can be divided into two groups
1. Hungry for knowledge. Be curious.
    Be modest/humble. Keep considering yourself foolish, then you can keep learning more.
2. Hungry for success. Never be satisfied. Be ambitious/aspiring.
    Do whatever you believe is right, even if everyone but yourself think you are a fool to do so. Be adventurous.

There is also a funny way to understand it. Be a foodie. Be a idiot.

Feb 17, 2016 6:15 PM
Comments · 6
1

Well, Ted, in the English-speaking world this quote has also been hijacked.  It has been hijacked by a lot of business school kids (and business school kids grown old), life coaches and other aspiring types to mean what you reported. These are the Western handbags with an unauthorised label.

The important fact is that The Whole Earth Catalog was a counterculture publication.  It was not interested in cementing the dominance and the values of the Establishment.

The magazine featured essays and articles, but was primarily focused on product reviews. The editorial focus was on self-sufficiency, ecology, alternative education, "do it yourself" (DIY), and holism, and featured the slogan "access to tools". While WEC listed and reviewed a wide range of products (clothing, books, tools, machines, seeds, etc.), it did not sell any of the products directly.  

It was not about money, ambition and greed.  

Jobs was talking about idealism, heart and intuition.



February 17, 2016
1
"Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

“And I have always wished that for myself.

“And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”
9
 - END OF QUOTE (from his Stanford commencement speech 2005) -

He probably meant: "Stay idealistic - stay hungry for dreams.  Be bold to follow your own heart and intuition."  You can verify this against the context.

It is true that most people forget to read it in context.

The "serious" interpretations you reported are just Chinese parental advice written in English, and people just sell them as a Jobs quote.  Alternatively speaking, they are just a Chinese handbag with a Gucci label grafted onto it.




February 17, 2016

"Stay hungry" also has the connotation of "Don't always judge something by whether it will make enough money to feed yourself and the family."

In the same speech, Jobs tells the story  of how he decided to join a calligraphy course after he had dropped out from college.  This  is what he says, "None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me."

He means it as an example of not judging something by whether it has any practical application to you, and of following your heart to do things which may appear to you and others to be completely useless.

He was at the time of the story always hungry, and he needed a job, food and money more than calligraphy!

So in Chinese, you can also interpret it as "随心而为,不怕贫穷饥饿。"

The key is to read the whole speech and interpret "Stay Hungry.  Stay foolish" in context.

To impute any thoughts about ambition, success and money to the quote is as intellectually sloppy and dishonest as it is to impute any Confucian thoughts about the pursuit of knowledge and humility to it.  




February 17, 2016

In Chinese, perhaps it can be interpreted thus:

勇于追梦,若饥若渴; 敢于相信直觉,不要随波逐流。

注释:  生命苦短,不要被困在别人的剧本里,不要随波逐流,要勇于编织梦想,要敢于追求理想,要勇于相信自己的直觉,要敢于聆听自己心灵深处的呼唤!

(别忘了这是一个癌症病患者对年轻大学生的讲演。)

February 17, 2016
Let's look at  the context.  He said:

"Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

“When I was young, there was an amazing publication called 'The Whole Earth Catalog,' which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

(to be continued in the next frame)

February 17, 2016
Show more