我在66岁时开始创业 - Paul Tasner

I'd like to take you back about seven years in my life. Friday afternoon, a few days before Christmas 2009, I was the director of operations at a consumer products company in San Francisco, and I was called into a meeting that was already in progress. That meeting turned out to be my exit interview. I was fired, along with several others. I was 64 years old at the time. It wasn't completely unexpected. I signed a stack of papers, gathered my personal effects, and left to join my wife who was waiting for me at a nearby restaurant, completely unaware. Fast-forward several hours, we both got really silly drunk.
我想让大家先了解一下，7年前我的生活。那是2009年圣诞节前几天一个周五的下午，当时的我是旧金山一家消费品公司的运营总监。我被叫进一个正在进行的会议。我发现这场会议是我的离职面谈。和其他的几个人一样，我被解雇了。那时我64岁。这并不完全出乎我的意料。我签了一堆的文件，收拾了一下自己的东西，就去找我的妻子了，她在附近的一个小饭店里等我，但对此毫不知情。几个小时之后，我们都喝得酩酊大醉。

So, 40 plus years of continuous employment for a variety of companies, large and small, was over. I had a good a network, a good reputation -- I thought I'd be just fine. I was an engineer in manufacturing and packaging, I had a good background. Retirement was, like for so many people, simply not an option for me, so I turned to consulting for the next couple of years without any passion whatsoever.
就这样，40多年在各个公司间颠沛流离的职业生涯结束了。我拥有很好的朋友圈，人缘也不错，我以为这没什么大不了的。我曾经是个工作于制造业和包装业的工程师。我有很好的从业背景，跟很多人一样，退休对我来说，不是我想要的生活。于是在接下来的几年中我一直做着咨询工作，却没有什么激情。
 
And then an idea began to take root, born from my concern for our environment. I wanted to build my own business, designing and manufacturing biodegradable packaging from waste -- paper, agricultural, even textile waste -- replacing the toxic, disposable plastic packaging to which we've all become addicted. This is called clean technology, and it felt really meaningful to me. A venture that could help to reduce the of pounds of single-use plastic packaging dumped each year, and polluting our land, our rivers and our oceans, and left for future generations to resolve -- our grandchildren, my grandchildren.
然而后来因为我对环境的关心，我产生了一个新的想法。我想要建立自己的公司， 从废物中设计并生产能进行生物降解的包装，用以废纸，作物，甚至是纺织废料为原料所制造的包装，取代那些人类越来越依赖的，有毒的一次性塑料包装。这被称作清洁技术。它对我而言意义非凡。这家公司每年能帮助减少数十亿磅污染我们的土地，河流和海洋的 一次性塑料包装，它们也会给我们的子孙后代造成困扰——我们的孙辈，我的孙辈。

And so now at the age of 66, with 40 years of experience, I became an entrepreneur for the very first time.
现在我66岁，有着40年的工作经验，第一次成为了一名企业家。

Thank you. But there's more.
谢谢。但不仅如此。

……

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