Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Connecting the Dots According to Steve Jobs


By PS Leong
Image by Youtube
Talking about connecting the dots is never complete without a mention of Steve Jobs’ inspiring commencement speech.  In his speech, Steve Jobs told Stanford graduates, “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.”

The above will make more sense if you listen to his address in its entirety. If you haven’t heard it, catch it here and you won’t regret it. Jobs started with an engaging story about how he decided to drop out of college even though it was unconventional. He then took up what seemingly to be a useless class that he was curious about – calligraphy. And the rest is history.

Jobs said, “I decided to take a calligraphy class. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful. None of this had any 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. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would never have multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.”

In short, trust your instinct and follow your heart to do what you are passionate about. And believe it will all make sense at the end, or as Steve Jobs puts it – believe the dots will somehow connect in your future. 

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