Story about connecting the dots, Steve Jobs

 Linking past events in life!

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

Dear Friends,  today I want to share a story of Steve Jobs………………………

“Success is hopping from failure to failure.” Once Larry Brown said: “You have to do something in your life that is honorable and, not cowardly, if you are to live in peace with yourself.”

I dropped out of College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?  It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife.

Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I simply chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK.

It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.  It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dormitory room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

Let me give you one example:  The 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. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces (fonts, designing documents), about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten 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 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 them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

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 you, 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.

Summary:

By connecting the dots, it means we are grateful of what we have done and we've got in life, it is all from God to lead us to the right way. So, by connecting our experience, it means we accept our life, our good, bad and ourselves now. Connecting the dots is to understand ourselves better, to begin a new journey and to be overall be grateful. It means to put various facts and ideas together in order to see the whole picture or to understand something globally.  Through “Connecting the dots”, Steve Jobs intention is to convince the people to look for such career options and jobs, whatever they like and have passion for the same.

“Do what you love and love what you do!”

 1. Here you add your own personal reflections.

 2. Give Thanks to God and People……………………….

 

Thank you.

Bro. Antony Samy. SG,

Montfort Resource Center (MRC)

Delhi Province, India 

E-mail: tonyindasg@gmail.com

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