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  3. I was afraid. The truth is, I was afraid the day I walked into Stanford. And I was afraid the day I walked out. 【61】 I was

I was afraid. The truth is, I was afraid the day I walked into Stanford. And I was afraid the day I walked out. 【61】 I was

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问题      I was afraid. The truth is, I was afraid the day I walked into Stanford. And I was afraid the day I walked out.
     【61】 I was scared of leaving the protective bubble of this place for places unknown, during uncertain economic times. And I was scared of squandering the incredible gift of my Stanford experience on pursuits that weren’t commensurate with expectation I, and others, had of me. I was scared of not doing it all, of making irrevocable mistakes.
     If you’re scared today, let me ask you this: what will you do with your fear? Will you make it a motivator, or an inhibitor?
     【62】 You are the only one who can answer that. But what I can offer as guidance, and reassurance, is a story: the story of one Stanford graduate’s process of stumbling and searching to find a place in the world, oftentimes in the face of her fears. I’d like to begin my story at the History Corner.
      The most valuable class I took at Stanford was not economics. Each week, we had to read one of the great works of medieval philosophy. It seemed like we were reading 1000 pages every week. And by the end of the week, we had to distill their philosophical discourse into two pages.
      The process went something like this: First you’d shoot for 20 pages. Then you’d edit to 10. Then five. Then finally two—a two-page, single-spaced paper. It rendered all the fat out of a body of ideas, boiling it down to the very essence of its meaning. And then you’d start all over again next week, with a different massive text.
      【63】 The philosophies and ideologies themselves certainly left an impression on me. But the rigor of the distillation process, the exercise of refinement, that’s where the real learning happened.It was an incredible, heady skill to master. Through the years, I’ve used it again and again—the mental exercise of synthesis and distillation and getting to the very heart of things.
      The intellectual process I learned in that class is also life’s process. Because every life is a great work, with all the richness of its gifts and the wealth of its possibilities. 【64】 When you graduate, from here, you exit with thousands of pages of personal text on which are inscribed beliefs and values shaped by years of education, family interactions, relationships, experiences. And buried within those thousands of pages is your personal truth, your essence.
      So, how do you distill your life down to its essence? You can begin by confronting your fears. I understand now, 25 years after that class; it is through a similar, personal distillation process that I have encountered my own fears, and mastered them.
      Each time I encountered fear, each time I had another moment of "ah-hah," I was getting closer to identifying my essence—my true heart, my true self.
      Remember when you entered Stanford as a 17-year-old or 18-year-old kid? You were at the top of the heap. You felt pretty confident in your abilities, right? And then you arrived at your dorm, or attended your first department meeting and after two or three conversations with your peers, you probably felt underserving and totally inadequate.
      But, slowly, you win some baffles. You prove yourself with your work. You fall, and you survive. You learn. Maybe you even lead. And that fear diminishes a little bit. Lo and behold, you’ve knocked a couple hundred pages off your personal great work. You’ve begun the distillation process. You’re beginning to define your life.
      But once you realize that you do have a place among your peers, a new fear starts to creep in. You wake up one morning and think: am I living my own life, or someone else’s?
     The French writer Camus once said, "To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others." 【65】 I had convinced myself that my analytic mind and my Stanford humanities degree were enough to quell the fear. But they were not enough to make me happy. The important thing was I was now in control. The only expectations I had to live up to were my own.
【65】
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答案我已确信我善于分析的头脑和斯坦福大学人文学科的学位足以平息我的恐惧。
解析 be enough to do sth. 意为“足以做某事”；quell意为“制止，结束，镇压”。
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