500 Words a Week - Steve Jobs & Connecting the Dots

At a Stanford commencement speech in 2005, Steve Jobs talked about three stories from his life and the lessons he learned from them. One of these was about connecting the dots.

Steve spoke about how after he had dropped out of Reed College, he still kept going to classes. Yet this time he went to the classes that really interested him, ones he wasn’t forced to go to as part of a curriculum. He began going to a calligraphy class, to learn about typefaces, about the varying amount of space between letter combinations and what makes great typography great. 

“None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.”

Fast forward 10 years and Apple were designing their first Macintosh computer, and Steve’s calligraphy classes came back to him. Apple designed the first computer with beautiful typography.

“Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

In the present moment, it’s sometimes impossible to see if what we are doing now will lead to anything in the future. Yet we must have this trust Steve talks about that the dots we are now creating will somehow connect in our future. We have to trust in something. We have to have an unwavering belief that in the future we will be able to look back at the present and join the dots.

What you are doing now, might not be what you will forever and always be doing, yet we never know what it might lead to in the future. Like Steve following his interest and going to a calligraphy class because he found it beautiful, to then co-founding a conglomerate company that put design as one of its key tenets.

Depending on who is reading this, you may be able to look to your past and see in your own journey how a multitude of seemingly unconnected dots at the time added up and joined together to bring you where you are now. Or you may be someone who is currently creating their first dot. Unsure of how it will go anywhere else, or what to do next. You must trust that these dots will somehow connect in your future.