CONNECTING THE DOTS

Steve never graduated from college. He dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months because he couldn't see the value in it. But he stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months. Steve slept on the floor in friends' rooms, he returned coke bottles for the deposits to buy food with, and he walked 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. It was pretty scary, but it turned out to be one of the best decisions he ever made. And much of what he stumbled into by following his curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

The minute Steve dropped out, he could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest him, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting. Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Steve decided to take a calligraphy class. He learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in his life. But ten years later, when they were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer. And they designed it all into the Mac. If Steve had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have had them.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when Steve was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later. We can't connect the dots looking forward; we can only connect them looking backwards. So we have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in our future. Every thing we learn adds a new dimension to our life. And life is best served when we develop new dimensions.

Different things that we do are dots that await connection…
Every new experience does “develop new dimensions”…

Regards
Pravin