Steve Jobs
The dots only connect backwards
Collect first, connect later
Stanford commencement address, 2005 (full text and film)
A dropout sat in on a class with no use whatsoever. The famous line about it is usually run in the wrong direction.
What actually happened?
The first of the three Stanford stories is about dropping out: with no required courses left to take, he sat in on the calligraphy class that fascinated him — serifs, the space between letter pairs — with no prospect of any of it being useful. Ten years later, designing the Mac, all of it came back, and the Mac became the first computer with beautiful type. His summary: you cannot connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that they will somehow connect later — because looking forward there is no evidence at all.
Connecting is hindsight, not a forecast
The common misuse runs the line forwards: that you can work out in advance which dots will join up. He is saying the reverse. In the moment he walked into that classroom there was no argument for it. The causality only exists afterwards; beforehand it was a bad use of a term.
Anyone who asks what this will do for my career only ever studies things whose answer is already known — and everyone has those dots, so everyone draws the same line.
Pick dots by obsession, not by usefulness
If forward reasoning cannot justify the choice, the choice needs a different signal, and his was curiosity to the point of absorption. That is not romance, it is odds: you go deeper into what grips you, and only a dot that goes deep is worth connecting to anything. Shallow dots join to nothing.
Rather than spending evenings on a strategically chosen skill, take the thing you actually cannot leave alone as far as being able to teach it. Depth is the entry fee.
Trusting they connect is what lets you commit now
The function of trust here is not comfort, it is solving a problem in the present: without it nobody puts real time into work with an unclear return, so they collect only safe dots. What the trust buys is the nerve to commit; the bill does not come due for a decade.
Taking the sidelined project, or a craft with no market yet — the question at the moment of choosing is not where does this lead, it is would I bet three years on it.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: something has hold of you and you cannot see any use in it.
Ask first: am I judging it by what it leads to, or by how deep I am likely to go?
Where it goes wrong: using the line to excuse a series of three-week enthusiasms. What fails to connect is not the unfashionable dot, it is the shallow one.
Lines to keep
You cannot connect the dots looking forward, only looking backwards.
You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
Same situation, other people are asking
I can't name what I want. I can name what I don't.The thing I can't leave alone has no use I can point to.I genuinely cannot say what I want.Who do I want to be in five years?I don't know what I want · all 6 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.